You may know that creating quality content for your website can have a big positive impact on the amount of traffic coming to your site. As a result, you may be convinced of the need to continually create good content for your website. Knowing you need good content is one thing. Making sure you get it is quite another story. Writing and posting blogs, special reports, and Twitter posts can be a real juggling act when you’ve got other responsibilities vying for your attention.
Believe it or not, most companies actually have plenty of content—plenty of tips and ideas and helpful information to pass on to their customers. Where most companies fail is in getting that information out on a regular basis. Here are two tips that can make the process a little easier.
Create an Editorial Calendar. It’s really hard to come up with a fresh new idea every time you want to post something to your website. And when you’re on a deadline, it can be downright miserable. But have you ever noticed that when you get a small group of motivated people together, they tend to come up with all kinds of cool ideas? Take advantage of that for your social media. Schedule a brainstorming session and get colleagues to suggest topics. Capture those ideas on paper (or on your computer). Then create an editorial calendar. Start with blogging. Say you’ve decided that your company should post four blogs a month (one a week). Go back to your list of ideas from the brainstorming session and assign dates to each idea—one idea per week. Then do the research and write all of the blogs for one month at a time. That way you don’t have to come up with an idea on your own every single week. You may want to schedule regular brainstorm meetings every quarter to come up with new topics.
Share the Load. Ask a couple of your colleagues to contribute a post occasionally. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but it will take a bit of a load off of the person who normally does all the writing. Plus, it will bring in a different perspective—and it helps give others a sense of ownership in the message you’re putting out to your audience. And if you have a colleague outside of the company who can contribute a guest post, ask for that now and then. Again, it reduces your workload a bit and it allows you to bring in an “outside expert”—something that can actually enhance your credibility.
Don’t let writer’s block keep you from creating the great content you need to keep visitors coming to your website. Plan ahead and take some pressure off yourself. It’s the only way you’ll be able to keep all those balls in the air!