4 Ways to Streamline Your Content Marketing Process and Save Time
Do you run an online business? Then you understand the importance of creating engaging content that captivates the attention and imagination of your target market.
Content marketing requires a daily commitment of your time and energy, and when you’re a business owner trying to make it in the digital marketplace, time and energy are in very short supply.
Trying to balance the time to plan and execute a content marketing strategy while running a business is no easy task. That’s the reason why most blogs fail; people don’t have the time to create posts and engage with their readership or followers.
Don’t despair if you can’t find a spare minute of the day to curate content and post it. Here are 4 strategies you can use to streamline your content marketing and increase engagement, while still managing your business.
Table of Contents
1. Hire Freelance Writers
The best tool available to any business owner is delegation. If you can’t find the time to write, or if you don’t have the ability or skill to write well, consider hiring a freelance writer to take care of your blog and social posts.
Hiring a professional writer is an excellent way to delegate your content marketing responsibilities. Sites like Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer have thousands of freelance writers competing for your business.
Unfortunately, it’s challenging to find quality writers using these platforms. Many of the writers registered on freelance sites do not speak English as their home language.
Therefore, you might receive posts with poor grammar, weak vocabulary, and plagiarized material.
Fortunately, freelance sites protect their clients, and if you receive sub-standard submissions, you have the option to request a re-write or cancel the order altogether.
It’s possible to find good quality writers on freelance platforms, but most of them charge more than your standard $5 per 500 words. It’s important to note that you get what you pay for with freelance writers. If you want top-level content, expect to pay a premium price.
2. Recycle Old Content and Share Other Peoples Content
Did you know that the entire written history of the human race is replicated on the web every 48-hours? Think about that for a minute; the internet reproduces each document, piece of artwork, image, and article ever produced every two days. That’s an incredible statistic.
With so much content floating around in cyberspace, why not use it for your own purposes? Sharing other peoples content is vastly different from plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the practice of intentionally stealing other peoples work and claiming it as your own. Search engines heavily penalize this practice and if you publish plagiarized work on your site, expect your search ranking to plummet.
However, there’s no issue with sharing other peoples content, as long as you give them credit for their work.
Using tools like Repost for Instagram allow you to share content and ride the viral wave. Studies show that Reposts of videos and images have almost the same effect on readers and viewers of your content, as an original post.
If you chose to share other peoples content, do it sparingly. Too many reposts or retweets detract from your user experience, and your followers will abandon you if they feel you aren’t adding anything to their feed.
What are your competitors doing? Visit their websites and analyze their content, you may even find some SEO tips for your blog during your research.
Remember that post you published two years ago?
No-one else does either. Revamp your old blogs and release them as new content. This strategy saves time and resources, allowing you to benefit from previous information that’s still relevant to your target market.
3. Promote Guest Posts
Writer’s block affects every content marketer from time to time. Unfortunately, as a business owner, you don’t have time to procrastinate.
If your struggling to develop new ideas for content, consider opening your blog to guest posts.
Depending on the ranking of your site, other online companies will pay you for the opportunity to post on your blog. Some authority blogs charge thousands of Dollars to publish a guest post.
If you’re starting out on your online escapades, your site won’t have the credibility or authority that lets you charge for guest posts. However, there are still thousands of guest bloggers that will be willing to send you content for free.
In exchange for the content, you’ll have to provide them with a link in the article that points back to their site, known as a backlink. This link won’t affect your site with the Google search bots and, in some cases, it may improve your search ranking.
If you receive a poor guest post, you have the option to turn it down, or rewrite it. Always run a grammar tool on the article before you publish it and make sure that you check the hyperlink for spam sites.
4. Experiment with Software Tools
Why write when you can talk? Take advantage of the technology available to you and consider using text to speech tools for creating your posts.
Dragon naturally speaking is an example of top-tier text to speech software. If you are working with a shoe-string budget, free tools like Google text to speech do an excellent job of transferring your voice into words.
These programs make light work of writing with surprising accuracy.
Take the hassle out of your publishing with convenient tools like HootSuite. These apps allow you to set up a publishing schedule for your content across all of your social platforms. The “set-and-forget” schedule will enable you to schedule your posts for up to a year in advance.
HootSuite offers a free version of their tool with limited functionality, but it still allows you to post to 3 different social accounts. The premium version provides scheduling services to unlimited accounts.
Wrapping Up
Creating engaging content is the backbone of your online marketing strategy. If you can’t find the time to do it yourself, hire someone else to get it done for you.
Follow these 4 tips to plan and execute a content strategy that delivers results.
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