7 Tips for Creating Content With a Busy Schedule
As a busy marketing professional, your time is precious. When you spend most of your day creating digital campaigns, overseeing social strategy, and connecting with influencers, it’s tough to find time to create content. Fortunately, not all content creation is time-consuming. Take a look at these seven tips for creating content when you have a busy schedule.
Source Content for Summaries
Image via Flickr by efradera
If you have a small marketing team or if you’re a department of one, you know that finding the time to write original content every day of the week isn’t easy. That’s why your first priority is sourcing content from other experts in your industry.
One of the most natural ways to curate content from experts is to produce summaries of industry happenings at regular intervals. Start a weekly or a monthly series highlighting what’s new in your field and demonstrate how much you know about the industry without having to produce new content.
Be sure to link to the original content creators in your blog posts and social media shares. In doing so, you connect with important influencers while creating a valuable resource for your community.
Create Lists
Curating content from throughout your industry is a great way to produce material in a short amount of time, but don’t forget that you can also repurpose your own content. This is a smart way to give your existing content new life while extracting even more value out of the material you’ve already spent time and energy to create.
One of the most effective ways to curate your own content is to create lists with a variety of themes. Not only does creating lists help to resurface great content without a significant time investment, but it also helps your readers view your content in an entirely new context.
Want to show your expertise on a particular topic? Make a blog post that groups your top 10 relevant pieces and highlights why they’re still relevant. Need a quick piece of content for a seasonal event or an annual happening? Create a post that links to your top 12 earlier contributions so readers can easily find them in one place.
Update Existing Content
Put your content to work by updating both evergreen articles and timely pieces. If you published a reference-level evergreen article months or even years ago, there’s a good chance it would benefit from more recent data, current insights, or even fresh case studies. Doing this adds value to your evergreen content while helping establish you as a key voice in your field.
You can also benefit from updating non-evergreen content, especially if you identify your best performing posts. Make a list of the posts that have generated the most traffic over the past year, and brainstorm ways to turn that high-performing content into a series of posts.
If you’ve written expert-level content, consider turning key parts of it into a blog series. Break down some of the most complex topics into individual posts to engage your readers and generate more interest in your comprehensive, expert-level content.
Outsource Content Creation
If you want to increase or keep up your current pace of content creation but can’t find the time to produce well-written blog posts or articles, consider outsourcing it. Outsourcing is a smart choice for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies because it enables you to step back from content creation and instead prioritize strategy and outreach. This technique also helps you scale production quickly when necessary.
While you’re working on the bigger picture, hire a content creation company to handle the legwork for you. To get the most out of outsourcing, make sure the agency you choose has a pool of skilled writers with experience in your industry’s subject matter. This is a great way to save time and money while you produce great content.
Seek Out Guest Contributors
If you want to step back from content creation but you aren’t ready to outsource yet, try finding a middle ground. Seek out guest contributors who are willing to provide blog posts. Since building relationships takes time, it’s in your best interest to partner with recurring contributors who will produce posts regularly in exchange for exposure on your blog and social channels.
Depending on your blog’s readership and your social channels’ popularity, you might only be able to partner with new faces in your field at first. If your blog is long-established and well-respected, however, big industry names might be willing to contribute to reach a new audience. Connecting with influencers in this way adds even more value to your blog.
Test Out New Content Types
Writing daily or weekly posts is time-consuming, and this content type doesn’t always work well for your audience. Try something new by testing out different types.
Source great images for your articles, create quizzes to engage readers, or produce short videos to increase the time that visitors spend on your website. You can also build infographics to make data-heavy articles easier to understand. Since infographics combine images and text, they tend to resonate with visual audiences. They’re also highly shareable, which makes them ideal for social media.
Reshare High-Quality Content
When you put time and effort into creating high-quality content for your website, there’s no reason it should only get a fleeting moment in the spotlight. Instead, make it the centerpiece of a fresh conversation by resharing it on your social channels.
Remember that content might be king, but that doesn’t mean you should always prioritize quantity over quality. Give each piece of content the attention it deserves, and make every blog post, article, or expert-level piece of content part of your long-term social strategy. Doing this ensures that you get value out of every piece of content you create and that you make the most of your busy schedule.
Stop wasting time creating content with a low return on investment (ROI). Keep these tips handy, and start getting the value you want from the content you need.
Anna Sonnenberg is a digital marketer who specializes in paid social strategy, social media management, content strategy, and email marketing. For over five years, she has run Sonnenberg Media, a digital micro agency that works with small businesses in the natural food and beverage industry, health and sustainability market, and travel space.
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