Regardless of industry, every content marketer faces a similar challenge: keeping up a regular output of excellent quality stuff.
Successful social media marketing requires an abundant flow of content. If it isn’t fresh, your audience isn’t going to stick around and engage with your brand.
The trouble is that coming up with original, good quality content does take a certain amount of time. That said, there are certain practical tactics every content creator can use to increase their productivity. Try assimilating some or all of the following strategies into your daily practice and you’ll find the content starts to flow, freeing up invaluable time and resources:
1. Start at the end
Before even approaching WordPress, you should have a clear and confident idea of what you want your intended audience to take away from your blog. How do you want them to feel? What information do you want them to absorb? What action do you now want them to take? Be clear about your content’s ultimate objective, then work backwards to establish how you will achieve this – always with your intended outcome in mind.
2. Be concise
It might sound like a no-brainer, but one of the greatest ways to accelerate content creation is to keep it short and sweet. We writers have a tendency to be, well, wordy…but lengthy copy doesn’t work online. People searching out information online generally want it served up in a quick and easily digestible format.
3. Keep an ideas diary
Idea generation is often the most time consuming element of content creation. Experience suggests that with a killer idea in place, the words come easily. Keep your eyes and ears open at all time, attuned to anything and everything that might offer inspiration on your niche. Scour trade publications, newspapers, blogs, forums and keep one ear to the ground at industry events for ideas for blogs, podcasts and so on. Importantly, be sure to record every potential idea on a voice recorder or notepad (most smartphones offer some means of recording notes) – it’s amazing how quickly an inspirational gem can get lost amid the daily grind.
4. Create an editorial plan
Just as with any project, writing (or any other form of content creation) requires a degree of planning. Yes, it means investing some time initially, but drawing up a calendar of content topics will absolutely save you time in the coming weeks and months. An editorial plan doesn’t have to be set in stone – in fact, a degree of flexibility is essential to remain topical – but schedule in some evergreen content ideas, guest blogs,interviews and so on. Then when it comes to working on content, you can simply sit at your desk, pull out your schedule and get cracking, bidding a fond farewell to writer’s block.
5. Set yourself deadlines
Regardless of whether you are producing podcasts, shooting corporate video or writing a daily blog – deadlines are critical. Without deadlines, work can meander uninvited from one hour into the next. Bear in mind Parkinson’s Law: ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’. Nobody knows your overall workload better than you, so give yourself a precise deadline and do everything possible to hit it.
Over to you
Do you struggle with creating enough quality content, fast enough? We’d love to hear your strategies for speeding up productivity. If your company just hasn’t got the resources to devote to content creation, another option is to outsource to a professional content marketing agency. To discuss how BlogStar could help you meet your content needs, call us on 020 7395 1522
Photo: Sébastien Wiertz
