Are you taking your Content Management System’s word for it that content has been published?  Sooner or later it’s likely you’ll find that you’ve been lied to.  It’s always a good idea to check the actual page to ensure that the CMS has actually pushed the content, rather than relying on the CMS’s confirmation.

Publishing new or updated content on your website or social pages can often happen in a rush or on the fly.  In those instances, it’s tempting to hit publish and move on to the next task, especially when the CMS has marked the content as live.  Those situations are inevitably when your CMS will lie to you and you’ll have to circle back to correct content that has not published.

This problem can happen on any CMS platform because any platform can fail to move the new content through to the server or service that it’s hosted on. It can often be a delay or time out issue that prevents an update from publishing correctly. Obviously, more robust website CMS platforms run more of a risk of publishing failures because they have more functions that might fail. This risk is even higher on modular CMS templates where pages, segments, components, assets, or widgets all need to be published separately to make a unified whole.

The good news is that there is a simple solution that works on all platforms.  Check the page or post on your live site.  If you find that updates are not appearing, be sure to get the newest version of your page or post by holding down the shift key and refreshing your page (this makes sure you’re not loading an old version from your browser cache). Checking the live site rather than trusting the CMS’s confirmation, verifies the publishing process and the timing of the published content before using it in your digital marketing.

Digital marketing is often a complicated mix of communication, technology, marketing, and administration in a rapidly shifting landscape. Add changing personnel and a wide variety of tools and it can become chaotic. As digital marketing initiatives evolve and change course, it’s important that the professional(s) driving that initiative can quickly and accurately execute on the new plan. Nothing slows that process down as quickly as being disorganized about who owns a particular resource.

Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches rely on external providers for some or all of their digital marketing needs. It’s important to have a well-organized list of all those resources and who to contact for each element.

We recently encountered a situation where an SSL certificate needed to be added to a client’s website for a new application. The digital digital marketing campaign was poised for launch but acquiring the SSL certificate proved to be a hold up. Contacting the website host was the natural assumption but it turned out that the host was not the site registrar. No one at the client office seemed to know where the site was registered. After some wild goose chases, the administrator at the client office discovered that the original site creator, who had moved on to a different job, had registered the site. Thankfully we were able to contact the original site creator who hunted down the registrar information so that we could purchase the SSL certificate.

Unfortunately, the delay caused the digital marketing campaign to launch about two weeks later than anticipated. That shortened schedule reduced pre-launch registration lead times and results were not as high as they otherwise could have been.

This was not a disaster but serves well as a cautionary tale on how missing information on even an infrequently used resource can cause a noticeable setback. Had there been an accurate list of digital marketing resources then the registrar records would have been on file which would have eliminated the need to contact the original creator. Even having the original creator listed as the contact for the site could have trimmed down the delay.

It’s important to be organized and up to date with your digital marketing resources, both people and tools. If you don’t currently have an accurate record, it’s best to create one now when there isn’t an urgent need rather than waiting until that need arises and suffering delays because of it.