How Often Should I Write? Continuous Content Is Not A Solution

Producing content for your business should never be about frequency, but how the information is shared within your community.

The best example is the world of blogging or to have a news page on your website with the intention to be informative (no, we’re not interested in reading about a new member of staff!).

The new way of working is encouraging content to engage audiences and to maintain a dialogue (and also the search engines to be on your side).  The daunting aspect is to think that producing continuous content is the only way forward.

What happens when the pen runs dry and those flashes of content inspiration become even more sporadic? It is easy to give up, where the initial focus is to stand behind a topic related to your industry, then see little positive results and bring things to a gradual halt because no one signed up to your blog, the week got busy or you just ran out of steam. So, you may ask yourself how often should I write?

Remember, the problem doesn’t lie on the shoulders of continuous content, but the marketing of the content. To get results, you need to be in for the long term.

A guaranteed route to failure is making more noise in a marketplace that is already crowded. This includes content that is primarily aimed at shouting loudly that your product is better than everyone else ie. how to get the most out of your business card/exhibition stand/website/logo/recruitment company….insert service offering here!

Always ask yourself, ‘how am I marketing my content?’ Before you dust yourself down and get back in the saddle to produce more information, understand how you are going to market it and share.

Here’s some routes to consider:

•  Search Engine Optimisation. Content and SEO go hand in hand, but the aim is to now write for our audiences, not the search engines and cram every keyword related to your business in one article.
• Social Media Marketing. Share your content on the various platforms and link to your articles, but always remember to write differently for each platform ie. the 140 characters on Twitter that cuts off because it was from a paragraph cut and pasted from Facebook is just lazy.
• Guest Blogging. There are a host of sites that accept well written guest blogs and if you build a relationship and your style of writing is accepted, it becomes easy to build an audience on another platform.
• News Stories. The world of PR still has a key role to play. The local press are relying on businesses to effectively become journalists and produce interesting content. If you have a topic that is worthy of representing your industry, then share it.
•  Webmails. Mailchimp provides a great way to structure content and share what is going on within your world. For those articles that you forgot about from a month or so ago, there is an audience that are ready to interact.
•  E-books. Articles that you have produced over a number of months and relate to a specific topic can be collated and then shared to your audience as a ‘best practice guide.’ Also remember to place on slideshare.net or even if it has a creative element to it, Pinterest.
• Newsletters. Similar to ebooks, if you have a collection of articles that provide a platform to build a dialogue, use it. Content needs to be 80% related to your industry and 20% related to your business. We now have the ability to become the publishers, creators and distributors of our own information.

Marketing your content is key, if you stand for something within your industry, then even better, become a champion of it. The worse thing you can do, is produce information that no one sees or engages with. Content is not the problem, it’s how the world sees what you believe in.