Content creation needs to be a part of your ongoing marketing efforts, as it brings a plethora of benefits for your business. No matter if it’s a blog post, white paper, or a website, the steps each piece takes to create, promote, distribute and analyze content can be a long, daunting process that seems to last longer than it should.
By optimizing your content creation process, you can not only improve your pieces, but get results quicker. Here’s how to save time on creating content for your business.
Streamline Your Research Process
This step in the process always seems to be the most time consuming if you let yourself get carried away. The perfectionist in all of us wants to make sure we’ve covered every detail before writing, but the worker in us wants to complete our pieces as quickly as possible. Consider streamlining this process by honing in on your top resources for research.
Start by looking at your Google Analytics and see if there was any page with notable views or if a search query was typed in your search bar frequently. You can also see what your competitors are writing about and discover what their followers are engaging with. If organic SEO is important, you can gain ideas from your keyword research. Every person will have a different process, so find out what works best for you and stick with it.
Create a Content Calendar with Ideas
Once you’ve sourced enough ideas for your content creation efforts, place them all in a content calendar. This will save you time from coming up with a topic every time you need to start writing. It’s smart to plan for the next month ahead, and you can prepare everything from the topic to your distribution details (such as hashtags to use when posting to social). You’ll instantly see how much time you save when your ideas are ready for you!
Repurpose Old Content
Sure, producing new, insightful content is always essential, but the other original content you created can be repurposed and updated for use too. Don’t reinvent the wheel; turn your great pieces into a new format or give it a facelift with updated information! Turn that blog post into a white paper or update the “Top Marketing Trends of 2014” white paper to be relevant for this year. Ultimately, your revised version will perform better than the first version if you promote it correctly.
Schedule Writing Time and Tasks
Sometimes, it’s easier to say you will start making more time for writing than it is to write. Block out a time slot on your calendar to focus solely on content creation. For us, we use our project management tool to schedule content creation tasks and assign due dates to keep in mind during our daily duties. If you take this time to write thoughtfully, you will be able to produce more high-quality content.
Build Out a Distribution Process
Once you’ve completed your pieces, now is the time to distribute it to your network. Many times, people wing it and post it to whatever they think will stick (which is usually social media), but you need a plan of attack for this too. Determine where it should be distributed, when content should be promoted, what hashtags should be used, what time it needs to be distributed, and more. When this process is laid out, it will be seen by the right people faster.
When All Else Fails, Outsource to Professionals
We get it; this all sounds like a lot and you have no time to add this to your schedule. There is no shame if you need to outsource your content creation needs to professionals while you manage your other tasks. The writers you hire more than likely have a sound research process and will create high-quality content for your blog, website, and anything in between.
If you have any questions about content creation or would like to learn how we can create content on your business’s behalf, get ahold of us today!
