Lack of time is the number one reason people give when struggling to create consistent, quality content for their blogs or articles.
Certainly coming up with ideas, writing and editing all take a lot more time than chucking another ad in the paper does – but, it doesn’t have to take hours either.
Here are nine simple ideas for quickfire blog posts and articles:
- Be the curator. There’s a lot of information out there that may be of interest to your readers and prospects. Find the best, add your comments and point your readers in the right direction.
- Do an email interview. Spend a few minutes writing up some short questions that would interest your readers then send them out to key suppliers, customers and names within your industry. In a bigger business, you might even try it with staff from other departments or the CEO. Post the answers in an interview style.
- Guest Posts. You can also get those same people to pen a few words for you in the form of a guest post. No writing for you at all.
- Rework existing content. I’m a big fan of getting the most from the content you create. Sometimes that simply means repurposing that content for other media. If you write an article for the local paper or your monthly newsletter, rework it for a blog post.
- Ask questions. What questions would your readers like to see answered? If you have an active blog with lots of people leaving comments, throw a question out there and see what comes back. If not try asking it in LinkedIn Answers or on a forum.
- Respond to comments. In most cases you’ll respond to comments in the comments section, but every now and again a comment might spark a new idea or raise a valid point worthy of further discussion. Use these as a jumping off point for your next article or blog post.
- Create a list – then split it. List posts, like this one, are a great way to cover big topics simply. Start with a topic and then list your top five or top ten points. Instead of running through the whole list in one post, split up the list into separate blog posts. One top five list could be a week’s worth of posts. Even quicker, take someone else’s list and dissect it on your blog.
- Answer a question from a forum. Industry forums are great places to take the pulse of your prospective customers. Check out the kinds of questions that are being asked and then answer them in your blog or in an article. Once you’re done, make sure to add a post to the thread pointing readers to your article.
- Pull your own comments into a blog post. If you read a good post on another blog, there’s a good chance that’ll you’ll have a point or two to add. Use the comment in your head as a simple response post. For example, this post is in response to one on HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Blog.
What kind of time saving formulas do you use to create quick blog posts or articles?
