No Time to Create Content? No Way! 13 Tips for Quick and Easy Content
Think you don’t have time for content? Think again.
Think you don’t have time for content? Think again.
You’re already late. You have a meeting in five minutes, a conference call after that, and a report due by the end of the day. You don’t have time for content – not today, not any day. Or do you?
While it’s generally true that great content takes time, there are some exceptions to this rule. The truth is that you DO have time for the right kind of content. What you don’t have time for is the shotgun method favored by content farms, churning out articles and peppering the Web with lackluster posts while simply hoping for the best.
Don’t worry, there’s a better way. Here are 13 tips to help you produce quality content at lightning-fast speeds. You better buckle up – you might get whiplash.
If you’re not going to be creating mountains of content, ensure sure that what you do make matters. Focus on blog posts with key SEO keyword topics in mind (while still providing a good user experience). Make sure you prioritize your content at the top of the funnel, as that’s where your content efforts have the largest impact.
You don’t have to write the next War and Peace to have content that gets noticed. In fact, the vast majority of online readers prefer short, concise content anyway.
Readers dig lists. They’re easy to scan, easy to digest information from, and the numbered headline stands out against other text titles. Lucky for you, lists are also much quicker and easier to write than longer form content.
Targeting a narrow, specific niche gives you less to discuss, but with less research required, you can become an expert on an ultra-specific topic in just a few hours. For example – how to cook the perfect poached egg.
If you’re too short on staff to have members of your own team blog, consider hiring a freelancer. There are plenty of skilled and cheap freelance writers online that you can hire out.
Maybe you hosted a webinar a couple months back. It might have gone well. You might have even recorded it and posted the video on YouTube. Well guess what? You can get even more value out of that webinar by getting it transcribed into text. While many users adore video content, some would much rather read text rather than listen or watch.
Transcribing podcasts or webinars and even infographics can help resurrect dead and buried content. Best of all, it’s easy and won’t cost much – there are many services and software options online that can transcribe your content on the cheap.
Maybe you’re doing an A/B test on your website testing button colors or email opt-in placements. You conduct the experiment, gather data, and decide where to go from there. Since you already have all that research data, why not make further use of it by publishing it into a study? You’re definitely killing two velociraptors with one stone.
Breathe new life into your dusty collection of past published blog posts by organizing them into e-books based on topics. For example, you might take your five best blog posts relating to Pinterest and form them into “The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest” e-book. Update the series for relevancy, add some new content to make it a bit more fresh, and you’ve got yourself a brand new e-book! Creating an e-book from recycled blog posts is tons easier than crafting one from scratch. Hurrah for recycling and going green (which of course you shouldn’t be doing just online)!
Bullet points break up your content into more scannable, user-friendly sections. This also means less writing for you, so go ahead and try to use bullet points whenever applicable.
There’s a ton of great content on the Web, and a lot of it gets lost in the shuffle. Scour the Web for infographics and quality video content that’s relevant to your niche (posts with videos attract three times more links!).
Post that great content on your blog, and link to the original creator. They’ll appreciate your hat tip (and link), while your readers get to see great content they might have missed the first time around.
You might even want a shot at creating your own infographic – if you’ve got some data handy, there are several free apps online that can help you create an infographic with just a few clicks. Try infogram and piktochart to get started.
If you’ve got captivating photos in your blog post, you can get away with cutting way down on text. Many explanatory posts these days are more image than text. Let your visuals speak for you (but make sure they’re not mumbling – use clear, quality pics).
Interviews are a quick and easy form of content that can be very valuable to your readers. Ask an industry expert to join you for an interview via podcast or email. If you choose to take the email route, simply send your subjects a list of questions. When they send back their responses, it’s simply a matter of cut and paste (plus a bit of formatting).
Link posts are speedy and simple. Just write a post offering a list of the best resources on any given topic (related to your industry) from the Web. An example might be “15 Awesome Backyard Farming Resources.” It’s best to write up a quick sentence or two explaining each resource, but that’s not mandatory. If you only have time for a simple link list, that’ll do just fine.
So that’s it! The excuse of not having time for content creation is null and void. Fast and fantastic content is within your grasp, so have at it.