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If you are using Social Media to grow your business then content creation should be a big part of your strategy. Content marketing is important with Social Media because it helps you establish yourself as someone people can get to know, like, and trust. Soon they will start spreading the word about all your great ideas. Without content marketing you don’t really have a platform to build your audience with.
The problem we all struggle with is how to keep turning out good articles for our audience regularly. Here are 4 tips you can start using today to avoid this problem once and for all.
1. Create a simple content calendar
The first (and most important) thing you can do is create a simple content calendar for yourself. It doesn’t need to be fancy. In fact I just have a note called “Content Calendar” in Evernote. If you don’t know what Evernote is go check it out. It basically just lets you store your notes and ideas. Then you can find them later. Very Simple and Easy. I just love it.
What is a content calendar? It is just a way for you to plan out in advance what you will be writing about in the future.
I block some time and sit down to brainstorm on new articles ideas for 1 or 2 months in advance. I put a date with the article title next to it. That’s it!
In fact this is how I came up for the idea of this very article you are reading. I actually had it on my content calendar for over a month now.
Here is what my content calendar looked like for March 2015:
3/11/2015 – Facebook Ads Case Study – Lead Generation for Businesses Part 1
3/18/2015 – Facebook Ads Case Study – Part 2
3/25/2015 – Facebook ads part 3
4/1/2015 – Facebook ads part 4
I didn’t have to sit and think “What do I want to write about this week”… no no no.. I already knew it well in advance.
Creating a content calendar is the simplest thing you can do to avoid getting writers block when you sit down to create your next content marketing masterpiece.
2. Choose a Monthly “Theme”
Picking a monthly Theme for your content can make things easier too. You will find you probably have a lot to say on a particular topic. You can probably break those ideas into 3 or 4 different articles. So do that!
Right now my monthly theme is content creation for social media. I have a lot to say about it (since I actually do it). You can see an earlier post here where I talk about using tools to keep your social media streams updated with fresh interesting content for your audience. My next article will be about repurposing your content to get more mileage out of it. All these articles follow the same theme of content creation.
3. Tie Articles Together with teasers
One nice thing about having a content calendar and following “themes” is that you can finally start tying articles together. Since you already know what you will be writing about next week (from your content calendar) you can add a teaser to this week’s article. It gives your audience a taste of what’s to come. They know what to expect from you in advance. Plus it will flow a lot more naturally because the articles are following a consistent theme.
4. Create a Simple System for yourself
Now that you already know what to write about in advance you shouldn’t be suffering from writer’s block anymore. The final step is to just develop a simple content creation system for yourself. Mine looks like this:
Monday – Create a rough-draft of your article. No proofreading. Just get your thoughts on paper. Start with a basic outline
Tuesday – Proof read it
Wednesday – Final proof read and post to blog. Add Pictures.
Now you know that every Monday you need to create a ruff draft of the next article on your content calendar. You don’t need to proof read it. Just brain dump your ideas. It just requires a lot less thinking. You will produce higher quality content.
As a bonus you can work ahead. Got a vacation coming up? no problem. You should already know (from your content calendar) what you will be writing. Just double up the work one week and you can take a week off. Preschedule your articles to go out in advance and you are all set.
Hopefully I sold you on using a content calendar, picking a theme, and creating a simple content system for yourself. It will make a huge difference in the amount of thinking and stress you go through when trying to think up that next killer article that will get lots of shares and retweets across social media landscape.
Stay tuned for my next article where I show you a sneaky trick for tripling the effectiveness of every article you write. You are going to love it.