How Important is Continuous Content Output
It's been over a decade since content marketing kicked off. You would expect that creating content would now be more manageable, and businesses are figuring out marketing. Yet stats tell us otherwise:
- In a Content Marketing Institute survey, 56% of B2B content marketers reported an increase in spending on "content creation" in the last 12 months.
- In its State of Inbound report, HubSpot found that 55% of marketers claim blog content creation as their top inbound marketing priority.
Do you also want to ramp up your content production, but fail to find the time? Then I have got you covered today. I'll share strategies, tips, tactics, and examples to accelerate your creative process. Let's get started!
Get The Basics Of Creation Right
Here are the essentials for building a strong foundation for creation.
Increase And Diversify Your Input
Writing articles for your business (or scripts for your videos/podcasts) is a creative endeavor. If you expose yourself to limited ideas as your readers, then you might end up rehashing the same advice already shared by your competitors.
I occasionally include psychology and music (both are my interests) in my marketing articles, where relevant. It gives a different texture to my writing. You can also mix up your sources of information and explore different disciplines through books.
Are you not a huge fan of reading? Naval Ravikant, Founder of Angelist, recommends starting with reading books on the subjects you love until you begin "loving to read."
Besides reading, also record your ideas that spring up while watching Netflix shows, listening to music, and the like in a notebook. It's crucial to expose your brain to high-quality ideas consistently for creative inspiration. In turn, you'll start sharing original advice that's not available on other websites.
Schedule Articles Regularly On Your Editorial Calendar
A key reason why most brands fail to publish content regularly is that they don't have a publishing schedule. Are you also a maverick creator that can start cranking content "once you start?"
Then you've to build discipline by creating an editorial calendar and committing to a publishing schedule.
What if you are not ready to push out an article on a specific date?
Then take a bite from the book of habit building expert, James Clear. He started his website with a writing schedule of two new articles a week. When he was unable to publish a good quality article as per his calendar, he reduced the scope of his output to stick to his schedule. It meant releasing a "This post is coming" when his circumstances weren't ideal.
Regularly creating content will train your creativity muscles and lead to quicker turnarounds. So put dates on your calendar and stop treating deadlines as suggestions.
Pro Tip: If you're struggling with finding subjects, then begin with answering the frequently asked questions of your customers. Later you can also optimize these articles for keywords and ensure such blog posts get traffic.
Improve Your Writing Speed
Do you know that an average person types between 38 to 40 words per minute (WPM)? Professional typists, though, can crank up their speed upwards of 65 WPM.
Take a typing test here to find your current speed. If you find you're slow, then dedicate some time to touch typing tutorials. While working on your typing speed might seem like a tedious task, it can become highly rewarding. You'll find that your hands instantly match the speed of your thoughts.
Pro Tip: Does speaking come more naturally to you than writing your thoughts on paper? Then consider voice typing. It will lend your writing a conversational tone besides increasing your output.
Get started by learning a few voice commands here.
Onboard External Help
Here are three ways to produce more content by getting paid and unpaid assistance from other experts:
Interview Experts
Want to scale your content production along with improving the credibility of your brand? Then interviewing experts and sharing their advice with your audience is a quick hack to do the same.
If you're starting a content channel and don't have an audience, then prospect rising influencers that don't have a considerable following. For conducting influencer research, you can take help from a tool like Buzzsumo. Go after peeps that have high engagement and have subject matter expertise on a subject rather than a huge following.
During the interview, ask specific questions from your experts. Don't shy away from saying, "Tell me more about this," as that might unveil new insights. The final format of your articles can include audio and video nuggets, but overall try weaving the answers of your interviewee in a narrative.
Curate Content
Let's face it:
You're not an expert on every sub-subject of a topic. Someone else has done a better job of explaining a concept that you want to present to your readers. For example, you might know a lot about content marketing and SEO. However, you may lack the expertise to write on conversion rate optimization.
In such a scenario, you can curate advice by practitioners and direct your readers to their articles. Here's Brian Dean linking to a video tutorial on content gap analysis that's sitting on the Ahrefs YouTube channel.
Curating content from others allows you to attack more subjects broadly. You always have the option to edit these subjects later, cover them comprehensively yourself, and delete the links to such external sources.
The strategy was used by Nat Eliason to grow the Sumo blog. He created a cornerstone post on the subject of "getting more website traffic" and curated articles from other websites on specific promotion strategies.
Get Freelance Help
HubSpot found the following correlation between traffic and the number of website pages.
So in the early days of a blog, having more quality content on your site can drastically speed up your results. The easiest way to shoot up the quantity (without compromising the quality) is by hiring freelance writers with subject matter expertise in your niche.
If you're worried about preserving the tone of your brand, then create a style guide (take cues from Mailchimp). It ensures consistency in formatting, presentation, and the language of your content.
Many companies want all of their written communication to come from their C-suite, but they have a LOT on their plates already. So a quick way to make your thoughts and ideas accessible to a large audience is onboarding experienced ghostwriters. They will adapt your writing tone and deliver quality work quickly.
Extract More Value From Your Existing Content
Your goal with content marketing should be creating a library of evergreen resources that are useful for your prospects. So if your articles published a few years ago are still relevant, it's a great idea to refresh them in a new format or expose them to newer audiences.
Here are a few ways to rehash your old content assets and increase your net output:
Turn Into Infographics, Videos, And Other Formats
Visuals are easier to consume and are the most shared content type on social media. You can create scripts for assets like infographics, videos, and podcasts from scratch. However, repurposing existing pieces into these formats is faster.
Once created, you can publish the infographic/video on the same page where your original piece sits. This way, your newly published content will get an initial bump in traffic. The multimedia will also improve the user experience of your readers.
Emma Wiltshire, Community Manager at Social Media Today, shares that infographics are a massive hit with their audience.
"An article with an infographic in it is almost guaranteed to receive more traffic than a regular article – and it's clear to us why. As branded content continues to overloading the internet, people are more selective in what they consume."
Here are a couple of tips by Emma for making infographics work for you:
- Present the information in a visually appealing and entertaining way.
- Make sure it's clean and simple to read but still offers valuable information that the reader could not find somewhere else.
You can also publish an audio version of blog posts like Mark Manson. It's a great addition as people that don't want to read can also listen to him.
You can hire freelance designers and voiceover artists (depending on the content format you go after) from Upwork.
Pro Tip: You can also create video scripts on subjects related to your top-performing content. It's a great way to promote your YouTube channel while improving the engagement on your site as people love watching videos.
Syndicate Content
LinkedIn and Medium are among the most visited websites in the world, and they allow you to self-publish content.
Instead of writing new articles from scratch for these platforms, you can refresh your existing top-performing content. Just modify your headline, introduction, subheadlines, and publish. It's a great way to expand your readership by putting minimal effort.
To chart your syndication journey, you can take inspiration from Buffer's path to republishing. Here are 46 top publications that allow republishing content (courtesy of Sumo) to get started quickly.
Pro Tip: If you're worried about cutting down the performance of your original piece by republishing content in the above manner, then here are two tips:
1. You can use a rel=canonical tag in your republished articles to ensure Google can identify the original piece.
2. Dharmesh Shah, co-founder HubSpot, used to syndicate his content religiously. He shares sound advice on why you need not worry about a loss of your original article's search engine ranking or reduction in its social media performance (hint: it lets your brand reach more people!)
Update Your Existing Content
Most brands approach content from a publisher's mindset. They feel the need to push out content regularly and don't care a lot about their old articles becoming outdated.
It's better to approach content marketing from the mindset of creating timeless knowledge to help your customers and prospects. It means publishing dates aren't as important, but the advice in your articles should stay relevant.
In its survey, Orbit Media found that 35% of bloggers who update content regularly report "strong results."
To make the shift from solely cranking new content to updating content, you should put refreshing content on your editorial calendar. It might result in a reduction of your publishing frequency of new articles. But in the long run, it will result in better traffic and conversion numbers.
Pro Tip: If you have an existing audience and open to co-marketing, then you can approach other brands for collaborations using your existing content assets. For example, HubSpot and Venngage joined hands to release a brand style guide kit, and it acts as a lead generator for both companies.
Concluding Thoughts
Increasing your content output is a lethal skill, especially when you're starting a new blog for your business.
In this article, I shared a few simple ways to increase your content production by reading more, improving your writing speed, and the like. If the budget allows you, then you can also onboard skilled contractors. Or try snagging interviews with experts and curating content. Lastly, you can also extract more value from your existing content by repurposing and syndicating your content.
Chintan Zalani is a writer and an ROI-focused content marketer. Get in touch with him at Elite Content Marketer to discuss how to grow your business through content.
Source: https://www.addthis.com/academy/the-ultimate-guide-to-increasing-your-content-output/
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