22 tips for creating content

I’m always telling clients how generating great content is so much easier than it looks. Yet I go weeks without adding a new post to our website. Perhaps a bad case of the cobblers kids or whatever – but in my case I need to drink my own Kool Aid. The fact is the content won’t produce itself. Every post doesn’t have to be some epic manifesto either. Every so often you may be so inspired to create the most amazing article full of original insights and stories. In between there’s all kinds of quickie content that can entertain, inform and if not anything else make it look like your entire company didn’t take the summer off. Before getting into the 22 tips for creating content here’s some ideas for keeping on schedule.

1. Decide the minimum acceptable frequency to update your blog.
2. Pick some basic topics that will be useful and interesting to your audience.
3. Consider who on your team (maybe you are the team) can create content.
4. Create a Google spreadsheet and name the column headers something like publish dates, title, owner, keywords, notes, links, whatever will help you get it done.
5. Review the following infographic and start brainstorming ideas. Creating lists of blog posts or republishing an infographic may only take 30 minutes. An original article could take a few hours. Consider maybe four quickie posts for every long format article – depending on how much you like writing and how much extra time you have.
6. Important! Create a column and call it “time” and put in there a the number of hours you think it will take to write the content and get it ready to publish including keywords, graphics, links etc. As you go you will get more accurate with estimating.
7. Once you’d determined which items you are the owner of add up the hours and plug in that amount of time as meetings on your calendar. Best bet is to find a good time to create a recurring meeting, like a two hour slot every Tuesday at 3PM or whatever.
8. Now when that time comes along you can review this awesome infographic and start generating content.

This infographic comes to us from Copyblogger. It gives us 22 tips for creating content when we don’t have any idea what to write. If you’re ever stuck, come back to the infographic, find an idea that appeals to you and go forward creating. Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.