Create and Maintain an Effective Digest
A digest is a periodically published blog post that summarizes main events in a your industry. This is an effective type of blog post which offers the following advantages:
- Consistent publishing: Delivering content consistently helps to grow your content strategy in a predictable way.
- Engaging content format: Alongside lists, digests are the most engaging types of content online.
- SEO growth: Digests aren’t duplicate content and perform well in search results when structured correctly.
- Easy to create: Digests require little writing experience to get right.
The Digest section in inboundli provides all the tools you need to author effective digests quickly.
What Does a Digest Look Like?
A digest consists of links to third-party websites followed by your annotations. The annotations are original content that set digests apart from duplicate content. Check out this digest from our blog to get a better idea about what digests look like.
Configuring Digest Settings
To configure your digest, go to Digest > Settings.
In this tab you can adjust a number of default behaviors that make it easy to customize and create future digests.
Default Digest Title
This will be the title of every new digest you start. In addition to what you write here, inboundli will append the ongoing digest number to the title.
For example: inboundli Marketing Picks #15. inboundli Marketing Picks is the default name and #15 is the ongoing digest number which is automatically appended.
You can edit the title after creating a new digest if you want to customize it.
Here are a few popular digest title ideas:
- This Week in [Your Industry] – e.g. This Week in Content Curation
- [Your Industry] News – e.g. Content Curation News
- [Your company Name] [Time Period] – e.g. inboundli Weekly
To get more ideas, check these B2B newsletter names.
Enable Quotes
When you add an article to a digest, inboundli can extract text from the article and automatically create a quote. Enable this feature if you’d like to include quotes from the sources you curate.
Number of Sentences to Quote
This setting defines how many sentences inboundli will extract from the beginning of the article. 2-4 sentences are optimal and the default is set at 3.
Default Intro Paragraph
This will be the introduction text to every new digest.
Search engines analyze content from top to bottom and left to right, so it’s vital to customize the intro paragraph. In this setting you can create a guiding template for your introductions.
You can leave this field empty if you want to write introductions from scratch every time.
Category Header Size
This is the header size that will be used for category titles in the generated HTML. You don’t have to use categories, in which case you can leave any value in this setting.
Article Header Size
This is the header size that will be used for article titles in the generated HTML. It should be the next size after your category header size. For example, if your category header is h2, your article header should be h3.
Creating Categories
Categories are useful to group articles under one topic. They help your readers to skim through your digest and find areas of interest faster. Categories are optional.
Categories are edited in the same tab as the Digest settings (Digest > Settings).
To create a new category, click Add category and type a name in the text field that appears. You can add, remove, or edit existing categories at any time.
Adding Content to a New Digest
Content in the Suggestions, My content, Saved and Stats menus has an Add to digest button. Clicking the button will bring up a pop-up where you can annotate the content before adding it to a digest. You can also save the content to a digest and annotate it later.
Editing Digest Annotations
You can edit content when adding it to your digest or later from the Digest menu.
Headline
By default, this field is populated with a title from the original article. In most cases, it’s best to keep it as is. You might want to change it for consistency, e.g. you want all titles in a digest to have sentence capitalization but the original title comes with word capitalization.
Annotation
This is the most important part of your digest. Good annotations will determine whether your digests are engaging and if they perform well in search results. Luckily writing annotations is an easy skill to acquire.
To write a good annotation, you need to succinctly describe the article being curated. Since your annotation is a summary, it will be naturally full of relevant keywords from your industry, which will positively reflect on SEO.
To maximize SEO benefits and engagement, try making your annotations 2-4 sentences long.
In addition to your annotation, you will see a quote from the original article. The quote length is determined by what you set up in the Digest settings. It’s best to edit the quote to be equal in length to your annotation or shorter.
Select a Digest
In this drop-down menu you can choose to add the content to an existing digest or to create a new digest.
Category
Select a category to group articles by topic. This can help your readers to quickly navigate through your digest.
How to Edit a Digest
After collecting all the articles you want to include in your digest, go to Digest > Digests.
You can click the up and down arrows to the right of each article title to change its position in the digest.
You can also change the digest’s title and introductory text. To do that, click the Edit intro and title button.
To edit an article and its category, click the Edit section button.
Finally, to remove a section, click the Delete section button.
While editing, make sure to have enough original content. Look at the Original words vs. Total word count indicators. 300 original words or 30-50 % of original-to-total-text ratio are good bottom limits for SEO purposes.
Pasting the HTML in Your CMS
Once you’re happy with your digest, click on Get HTML and copy the generated HTML to your clipboard.
Now you can go to your content management system and paste the HTML by clicking a button titled Source code. Often, the button won’t have a text label and will only be marked by angle brackets (<>).
Here’s an example of what pasting the HTML code looks like in HubSpot:
To Archive or to Delete?
We recommend archiving finished digests for your records. The Delete button is useful if you accidentally created a digest.
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