Content creation is a tough process to scale. Your team always needs to come up with unique and searchable angles and it’s too easy to lose inspiration. So how do you create content regularly for your corporate blog?
Here are my own tips:
Update Existing Content Now Needing New Information
What about old content that is based around a subject that has changed? This is common as your blog gets older. Let’s say you are writing about a marketing tactic that is popular in email engagement. But it has been three years and that information is no longer entirely relevant, even though the main topic (email marketing) is.
When you create content, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. You could take that post and write an update that talks about how things have changed and what can be done now. This has two benefits: first is getting a fresh post out of something that doesn’t need to be restarted from scratch; second is being able to link to the original piece and perhaps get some traffic on an old post that would have remained dormant otherwise.
Browse your blog archive and check out popular posts that have gained a lot of attention in the past. Then think of ways you could potentially update those posts in order to once more spark the interest of your audience. This should be a regular maintenance task on your website.
Come up with More Angles
A personal favorite tactic of mind is the branch topic list. What is this? It is a brainstorming technique that gets you dozens of potential content ideas that you can draw from. As we all know, it is often thinking of ideas that hold us back. So having these lists are a lifesaver, and will ensure you are never coming up with half-formed concepts just because nothing else is available.
Start with one headline. Then come up with a few angles from that headline and create content and other headlines that could cover other aspects or angles from the original. So, it may look something like this:
How To Make Money Online:
- How Affiliate Marketing Takes Passive Income To A Whole New Level
- PPC: Is It Right For You?
- Self Publishing Can Actually Make You Money – Really
- Is Google AdSense Worth It?
You can do this with a handful of starter headlines and end up with a full list of alternating topics that will vary content. Just go from list to list so things don’t get too stale.
Text Optimizer works great for this type of content brainstorming, and the nice bonus is that it also helps optimize content for it to rank better. When you create content from scratch, just type in your core topic and the tool will use semantic analysis to extract related concepts and questions from Google search snippets. The tool will also break your topic into subcategories allowing you to come up with more angles and sections:
TextOptimizer will also generate related questions for you to better structure your content and come up with more ideas:
Here’s my video on how the tool helps direct and streamline your content writing process and help you write a great article.
You may even find other headlines coming from the subheadings, branching out even more until you have an entire tree of potential pieces waiting for you to write.
Get Quotes From Others To Use
I consider this the laziest good idea you can use when you want to create content, quickly and effectively. Quotes are an amazing tool for getting information out to people from experts who know best, and also connecting to that person’s audience. Influencers are some of the best people to get quotes from, and they are usually happy to get them.
You can do full interviews if you can get them, but those require a lot of preparation and work. They may not be great for boosting your post frequency. Which is why trying a platform like MyBlogU, where you can get quotes from multiple sources quickly, is an effective alternative.
Here’s a more detailed article on how to use influencer marketing to create better content. Influencer-powered content can then be easily turned into effective lead magnets including ebooks and whitepapers.
Consider Live Content
This is another one that takes a lot of preparation and time, but the return is much higher than a single interview. Live content is generated through audience participation events. Webinars, Tweetchats, LIVE interviews with multiple people, AMAs, etc. These are some of the ways you can pull it off.
From there you can get recorded videos, podcasts, transcripts, question and answer master lists, and other post possibilities that make live content really productive. You can promote these through your website using podcast plugins, Q&A sections and more.
Another great idea is to engage your whole team into producing live content. Encourage them to participate in your live events, feature them, introduce them and give them spotlight. This will boost your company’s morale and help your employees reach personal development goals. Being a good leader means foster your team’s self-improvement and being social media philanthropy.
Create Your Routine for Covering Trends and Hot News
Covering hot trends is one of the most efficient ways to build traffic. However it’s almost the most time-consuming, and often stressful, of content marketing tactics.
You need to be always monitoring the news. And you need to develop your own, productive way to cover them.
- Tweetdeck is my own not-so-secret productivity tool that tracks important events happening in my industry. I have a few columns set up for monitoring important hashtags and key Twitter accounts which I check on a daily basis.
- Twitter lists are also great for monitoring global and niche news and trends. Depending on the niche, you can choose to subscribe to prominent news delivery Twitter accounts like CNN, DailyMail, etc.
- Feed Informer helps me monitor and archive more context from industry. It can aggregate content from multiple RSS feeds to create one unified digest which I can use to keep track of industry news and updates
- For marketing niche specifically, Zest is a great way to keep track of great content and trends. It’s human-powered digest of digital marketing content that keeps you informed of the best content in the industry
Embrace Productive Visual Marketing
A funny thing is that most time you spend crafting a good article is not actually writing: you spend an enormous amount of time on research, editing and beautifying.
The latter can actually be much faster and efficient than you can imagine. I spend one second per visual just because I have my carefully selected tools and I know how to use them fast:
- I use lots of screenshots and I use Snagit to take and edit them: Minimal but awesome tool!
- Here are a few more tools to easily create beautiful images for your content. And here’s a great guide on how to find copyright-free images using Google
Embrace Productive Editing Apps
Editing is another tedious part. While there’s no way around re-reading your piece at least twice, you can make your editing higher-quality and more productive with these two apps:
- ProWriting Aid: This is pure editing gold. You can improve your writing by eliminating errors, finding plagiarism possibilities, and improving readability. You simply paste in your text, and let it do all the work for you. It will make suggestions for changes that will genuinely boost your piece, and make it more accessible for readers. The Premium version allows you to integrate with MS Word and Google Docs, and has interactive editing.
- GetPrompts: Everyone, no matter how experienced or prolific a writer, gets creatively tapped from time to time. Or they need a break from major projects, but still want to keep their skills sharp. GetPrompts is a great way to find inspiration right on your iPhone or iPad, every day. Don’t have an apple device? Use email instead, with Daily Page! Any writer will tell you that writing every single day, at least a little, is crucial for success. Let these two tools help you do that.
You do want to create lots of archives of content and visuals you are creating: Don’t throw anything away!
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
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