In content marketing, there’s never enough time.
It’s like a grandfather clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
In content marketing, there’s never enough time.
Before you know it, time’s running out.
If you’ve got a bit of extra budget, and the right ideas on board, you can make plenty of content in a lot less time.
Using Other People’s Expertise
1. Freelance Copywriters
If you’ve got the budget, you could hire a freelance copywriter who specializes in your industry.
They can come up with article ideas, and will have the time to put great articles together.
2. Dictaphones and Freelance Transcribers
Get your top staff to record themselves talking about an issue.
And then hire a freelance transcriber to put those words on paper.
3. Ask People to Contribute
There are likely people in your company who love what they’re doing, so they can write articles.
4. Hire Freelance Editors
If you’ve got people to contribute (with speaking or writing), you may want to knead their thoughts into shape.
You could hire a freelance editor to tidy up their work.
5. Ask Your Designers for Amazing Imagery
If you’re in a larger company you may already have a designer who’s putting things together.
You could ask them to illustrate images to add a bit of sparkle to your content (if they’ve got spare time).
Coming up With Ideas for Content
6. Find Trending Topics
Use websites like Reddit to find the topics that everyone is talking about.
7. Talk to People in Your Company
Even if you can’t get them to contribute – just drop an idea with them, and ask them what they think.
Their opinions can be transformed into articles quickly.
8. Go to Events
If you go Meetup.com you’ll be able to find relevant industry meetups, and get their ideas and perspectives.
Speakers are typically at the cutting edge of the industry.
So they generally set the tone of what everyone’s talking about. Diffuse those ideas.
9. Create Case Studies
In a B2B business, look at how your company helped a client through their problems.
People don’t like hearing that “you should do this.”
They like to hear “company X did this, now their sales have risen 20%.”
Now that’s an easy sell to their boss.
Making the Most of Your Old Content
10. Re-Headline Your Content
If it had an unsexy headline, it’s probably better that you relaunch it than let it become stale on your website.
Text Optimizer is a great way to discover more ways to write a headline by suggesting you related terms and concepts:
11. Repurpose Your Existing Content
Maybe you write about a certain topic.
Think about angles which you can develop it along.
If you’ve written an article about ladders for tradesmen, why not write the same article but around DIY builders. And adapt it for that purpose.
Only Making Content People Want (Embrace Lean Content Marketing)
12. Look at What Performed Well in the Past
Was it a certain topic? A certain theme? A certain idea?
Create more of the same of what worked.
13. Use Keyword Research to Understand What Your Audience Is Interested In
This is my favorite multi-channel keyword research tool that pulls keywords from multiple sources (Keyword Planner, Google’s Autocomplete, People Also Ask boxes, etc.) and lets them pick and choose those that spark inspiration:
14. Ask Your Friends and Audience
Tweet headlines to your friends or customers. Ask them what they think would be the most interesting article.
Or set up a web form on your site inviting readers to send you questions they want answered on your site.
15. Use Your Content As a Way to Qualify Leads
Marcus Sheridan, the poster-boy of inbound marketing, said that if people hadn’t read 30 pages on his blog, they weren’t ready to speak to a salesman.
They didn’t know enough.
This separated the curious people, from the serious buyers, and freed up his sales team a lot more.
Getting More Productive
16. Read Rework
In his book, Jason Fried talks about how you can get a lot more done with a lot less time.
It’ll change the way you think about doing work.
It’ll only take a couple of hours to read and you’ll manage to get much more done afterwards.
17. Understand the 80/20 Principle
20% of your effort creates 80% of the work, this is the writing.
The rest is editing, finding relevant links etc. etc.
You can make more content quickly if you focus on the core. And worry about spelling mistakes, typos & adding every link possible at the end.
18. Take Advantage of Free-Flow Writing
Staring at a blank page is the toughest thing to do in writing.
So you should just write.
Don’t go and correct typos while you’re writing. Just flow. Don’t stop writing. Just start.
And keep going.
Even if you can’t think of anything to say, just write. Then at the end you can cut out the dross.
19. Put a Time Limit on How Long It Takes to Write Your Article
For example, I’ve said that I would put this article together in an hour.
After an hour, I’m going to cut myself off – and ship it.
There are many productivity tools that help you plan your time blocks better.
20. Flesh Out a Skeleton of Your Main Points
Start with a topic direction for your article. Write the headlines for the main points of your stuff. Then flesh them out.
21. Check How You’re Doing Every 15 Minutes
When you keep putting harsh time limits on yourself, you just have to empty your brain onto a page as quickly as possible.
Am I excited about that topic? Do I have enough to say on that to keep blogging?
There’s one fundamental question to ask yourself when starting a blog. Make sure you answer “Yes!”
And yet, writer’s blocks will still happen, trust me.
Creating more content is a requirement when this is how you make money.
I hope the above tools will help!
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