I was asked to provide three content marketing tips by Beacon for a roundup post. Here is my response. Check out the whole article with advice from 17 other experts such as Neil Patel and Kristi Hines.
Getting started in content marketing can be a daunting prospect when you are first getting started. But it’s not optional. Whether it’s the content on your regular web pages or a company blog, content is absolutely essential for effective digital marketing today.
Starting a blog seems to be the scariest part of content marketing for many people. Trust me, I get it. It’s time-consuming and frustrating, especially when you can’t figure out what to write about. Writer’s block is no joke!
A couple years ago, we increased our blog posting to one a day. Now I’m in a particularly content-hungry industry, so I’m not suggesting that you do the same. Do what makes sense for your business. But the great thing about it for me is that it helped me find ways to avoid the dreaded writer’s block and make content creation less time-consuming.
Here are my favorite content marketing tips to help you do the same:
- Re-purpose. This is my favorite tip! I’m never one for letting something good go to waste, and if there is a way to take something I’ve done on one platform and re-use or re-purpose it on another, I’m going to take it. This article is a good example. Instead of just sending my answer off to Beacon and being done with it, I re-purposed it here as my own blog post. I like to call that working smarter! I recently wrote a post outlining 75 content ideas that outlines the five primary content formats and shows you how different types of content can be re-used in one or more ways. If I may, here is a link to a downloadable content planner spreadsheet that accompanied the post.
- Be consistent. I set aside two days per week for developing content. On these days, content planning and creation is my primary goal, and all other tasks are secondary.
- Stay two or three weeks (or months) ahead. Depending on how often you publish content, it’s a good idea to get ahead and have content ready to go long before it gets published. This allows you some freedom to miss some content creation days for emergencies, vacations or whatever else comes your way. If you have the content ready to go, it can still go out on schedule even though you didn’t get your creation time in this week.
I’d love to hear some of your favorite content creation tips, too, so please leave them in the comments!