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by Gordon Graham, That White Paper Guy
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There is no "best-before" date on a white paper, no set time when it must be withdrawn from circulation.
If a white paper is still generating traffic and pulling leads... if it still captures
an essential message from the sponsor, it's perfectly valid to keep distributing it.
For instance, I've written white papers that some clients are still using happily three years later.
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But once a year, maybe in the spring, it's a great idea to "refresh" every white paper published by any company.
Here are four suggested steps for doing a quick refresh.
This won't take long, but it will help extend the effective life span of any white paper.
Note: Of course, it's vital to review the white paper carefully
to make sure the content is still timely and relevant and does not require updating.
This article makes a distinction between a major "update" that requires effort from an experienced writer,
and a minor "refresh" that can be done by any marketing person.
Don't reissue an older white paper with a new title; this could annoy prospects who downloaded it earlier.
But if the cover says "Special Report 2009," change that to "Special Report, updated for 2010" or
simply "Special Report 2010."
And change "© 2009" to "© 2010" or even "© 2009-2010."
Consider the following footnote:
1: Jim Button, "10 Best Practices of Highly Successful Restaurants," Restaurant Startup and Growth, retrieved April 15, 2009 from www.restaurantowner.com/10_best_practices.html
Sometime in the spring of 2010, test the link to make sure the source document is still there.
If so, refresh the download date as in, "retrieved April 12, 2010."
If the source document is no longer there, you have four choices:
1. Leave the footnote as is and live with it.
2. Find the same document somewhere else and update the footnote.
3. Drop that footnote and cut the quoted text.
But if that undermines the effectiveness of your argument, try the next option.
4. Look for an equivalent report and rewrite that text.
This fourth option is clearly the most work.
But it's better for you to discover and fix this discrepancy, than for a reader to look for
a source, be disappointed and lose trust in the company that published that white paper.
Any phrase that points to a specific year or number of years can easily go out of date.
So you're well advised to search and refresh all these phrases.
For example, with Word you can search for:
• "20^#^#" to find any year from 2000 on
• "19^#^#" to find any year in the 1900s
• "year" to find any phrase such as "last year" or "the next three years".
Scrutinize the context for each date and then update anything that makes the white paper sound stale.
Of course, you can't rewrite history, but you can make your wording more precise.
For example, instead of "last year," write "2009." Instead of "for the next three years," write "until 2012."
Over time, people come and go. Companies are sold and merged. Systems are replaced.
And on a positive note, clients sometimes collect more metrics on the benefits of the products they use.
So make a quick call to any customer mentioned in a white paper to confirm the details.
If necessary, add fresh statistics, revise titles for anyone who's moved on (change "CIO" to "then-CIO")
and update company names (change "EDS" to "EDS (now HP)").
In most cases, you can complete all four steps in less than an hour and
either do text touch ups to the PDF or mark up the PDF for the designer to fix.
If you can, it's ideal to copy fit your updates into the same number of lines,
so the whole layout doesn't have to shift.
After that, you can consider the white paper "good to go" for another year.
Written by Gordon Graham, this article appeared in the March 2009 edition
of the WhitePaperSource Newsletter.
To repost this article on your Web site, e-mail a request to
Gordon@ThatWhitePaperGuy.com.
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