Now that you have your blog up and running (if not, you might be interested in the previous post: Get Your Business Blogging (Successfully)), you may be experiencing the common struggle of content generation. A lack of content makes maintaining regularity in your posts quite challenging. This is a hurdle for so many business bloggers, leaving them asking the key question: Where do we get the content?
It can really be quite simple and here are a few suggestions:
Repurpose stuff you already have
As a business, you very likely have an abundance of content, it just may not be written in a suitable style for a blog. But tailoring it to appeal to your online audience will be the easy part. Do a thorough audit of existing content and internal communications, and choose things that you may be able to adjust for a blog post. For example, disclosing the inner workings of your business can be a very successful approach that attracts great interest, because it’s not something expected or common. The story of your company, business or industry may be familiar and perhaps even boring to you – but to someone on the outside, it could be new and highly intriguing. Invite contributors from different parts of the organization to post from their own perspective and see what kind of feedback you get.
Watch for current news and trends
If you post items that are trending in social media and search spaces, you will attract interest from your readers. Try to provide something fresh, new or cool that people will want to share. And do it with personality. If you are flexible in your content creation process (writing posts quickly as news or trends arise), you will be rewarded by search engines and see an increase in traffic.
Use a variety of bloggers
As mentioned, generating content is a major struggle for so many business blogs, however if you enlist the help of multiple people in the organization, you may be surprised by the ideas that emerge. You will not only have more contributors, but also more diversity. And diverse voices mean you can attract more types of audiences.
I came across a post by Social Media Examiner, ‘11 Ways to Find New Content for Your Social Strategy’. It shares some great tactics to ensure you never run out of content:
#1: RSS Reader: Scan It Daily
#2: Make Every Employee a Marketer (get employees in all areas blogging)
#3: LinkedIn Groups (join based on the most active, listen and participate)
#4: Forums (check out discussions to see what people are talking about)
#5: Make a Tag Cloud (find relevant online content – ie/ tweets about your product or industry and drop them into a tag cloud application to find unexpected keywords)
#6: Eavesdrop (listen in on conversations online and offline)
#7: Crowdsource (ask your audience for content topics)
#8: Audio Books
#9: Google News
#10: Attend Industry Events
#11: Frankenblogging (combine your half-written posts to create one full post by finding the common link)
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