Content Marketing. You hear a lot about how you need to have good, relevant content on your website. You need to make sure that it’s up to date and that you are continually adding new content in a timely way. You hear that you need to write 500 words a day and have a regular posting schedule, because “content is king!” It just wouldn’t do for someone to visit your website and see that you haven’t had time to add content for a few weeks because you’ve been working on your business. Customers expect it and search engines expect it.
So, where do you get all of this great, relevant content that you are going to consistently add to your website for your content marketing campaign? Typically, you hear people recommend to write down customer questions or keep a running journal of topics that you write down as you think of them. Those are great ideas, but if you’re like me, keeping track of those types of things usually lasts a couple of days and then I get busy with other things.
Copyblogger has a great article entitled “How to Find More Content Ideas than You’ll Ever be Able to Create“, which has three great questions you should ask yourself to help you write great content. Check these out and see how they could apply to you and your industry.
- What questions is no one in your industry willing to answer?
- What does nearly everyone disagree with you about?
- What do you believe will happen in the future that other people consider impossible or unlikely?
Those are great questions to ponder that will help you come up with great content. However, with big issues and ideas, writing about these types of topics might be a struggle and take a long period of time for you to flesh out your thoughts in written form. What if you need something now and quick? Where is the low-hanging fruit that will help you post good, relevant content in a way that isn’t too time consuming?
There are many places to see what is current in your industry and give you ideas for quick content marketing. Here are my recommendations.
Find Other Blogs
First, you need to find other blogs and websites that deal with what is going on in your industry. Subscribe to them using a service like feedly, that will allow you to see at a glance what content is being churned out from those sites. You can write reactions to posts on other sites or create a post with your take on a similar topic. The idea is to get the thought process started and find something that you know well, so that writing about it won’t take a huge effort on your part. Another place to go for ideas is alltop, where you can find the latest articles and posts on a number of topics.
Another strategy is to look at the comments on other sites and see which posts are popular and get a lot of user interaction. Take a look at what questions are being asked or what topics are being discussed and write articles that answer those questions or deal with the same topics.
Go Social
There are several tools that will help you examine social media activity on a certain topic. Two of those are bottlenose and topsy. Both sites allow you to search a topic and see what is trending on social media. Seeing what people are talking about can get those creative juices flowing and help you create targeted content. Another place to look for content and participate is Google+ communities. Joining or creating a Google+ Community on a specific topic related to your industry can help you find out what people are looking for and what content is available.
Questions?
There are many question and answer sites around and some are better than others. While Yahoo! Answers has been the leader for a long time, Quora has emerged as a true contender that contains much better quality content. You can look for questions on a topic and participate by answering questions on the site or writing an article answering the question on your own site.
There are many ways to create quick content for your website, even if you have limited time. Do you have any other tried and true methods to help you quickly create quality content for your website?
