7 Key Ways To Increase Your Content Marketing Output (While Not Scrimping On Quality!)

For it to be worth creating in the first place, there’s no real replacement to content quality. It’s an essential element of your content marketing – without a focus on quality, you gain little if any benefit.

But you also need the quantity. For effective content marketing, quality and quantity must go hand-in-hand together.

For example, if you create the odd sporadic blog post every two or three months, don’t be surprised if little happens.

On the other hand, with regular content production (and importantly, promotion of it – Kim Roach has some great tips on doing this), you start building momentum:

• People get used to seeing your content regularly, building your relationship with them along with your own reputation and credibility. Shares, comments, click-throughs and other signs of engagement with your content increase.
• For Google, regular content production and increased output means authority and your rankings start increasing accordingly, steadily building your traffic.
• You get better at it! The more you create, the more skilled you get at it, the quicker you become, and the more in-tune you become with your marketplace and what works and what doesn’t.

In fact, Ana Hoffman of TrafficGenerationCafé (@anatrafficcafe) states that without such regular content production, her traffic and affiliate sales plummet, even while all other activities stay relatively constant.

However, the more content you create, the more time it takes. And you still have a business to run, right?

So just how do you boost your content marketing output, while minimizing the additional time commitment?

Here are 7 key ways …

Repurpose content

All sorts of content can be turned into a different types and distributed through new channels to reach new audiences. For example, turn videos, podcasts and presentations into blog posts, and vice versa. Convert blog posts into ebooks, or into a series of social posts you schedule out over days, weeks or months.

Marketing experts from Mark Schaefer (@markwschaefer) to Rebecca Lieb (@lieblink) to Lee Odden (@leeodden) and many others (including Ana Hoffman, mentioned above) practice and advocate repurposing.

… you should become a master at repurposing every piece of content you create. Repurposing content increases the exposure of your content, spreads the traffic generation net wider, and helps you appeal to your target personas across a wider variety of media.
Ryan Scott, Inbound Marketing @ lean-labs.com

Repurposing saves a ton of time because you’re not thinking up new content from scratch–and it works just as well as brand new content. A new, quality blog post underpinned by good research might take several hours to put together. Creating a presentation based on it for SlideShare might take a couple hours. Creating a video based on the presentation might take an hour.

Whereas marketers might occasionally or sporadically repurpose content, and often do so in a very randomized, fairly directionless manner, I would strongly recommend systemizing it and making it a key part of your ongoing marketing activities. It works – so do more of it.

Share more often

Why create just one tweet from your post, when tweets are so fleeting? A good post will contain a dozen or more tweetable points – spread out those tweets over a few weeks. Try linking some back to your post, and others just as useful info you want to share with your audience.

I’ve taken this approach over the past few months, simply using vWriter to get multiple different tweets scheduled out for me automatically. I’ve found that each such tweet I share gets roughly the same amount of traffic. Half a dozen tweets linked back to the same post gives you 6x the traffic. Worth doing?

Similarly, the same content you share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and/or Google+ today can be shared again in 6 months time, and potentially again after another 6 months.

(TIP: When creating your content it’s a good idea to ensure it’s as evergreen as possible!)

Presuming you’re properly implementing (1) above and repurposing content on a regular basis, you’ll also have a ton more content to share and connect with your marketplace. You’ll be in front of them more often.

Curate content

Create new blog posts by finding leading posts on a particular topic, and then aggregate them into a new post on your own blog. Link out to them, and make new connections by reaching out to the bloggers in question to let them know, either through email or via social media.

Here’s an example of such a blog post created by Digital Marketer for DIYReady.com (yes, you can use the same technique for most niches):

Content curation also works for your social channels.

Find suitable authoritative sources of content that your audience would find valuable. Send out regular social updates with links to all this content.

This not only builds up your own authority, but can help forge connections with other bloggers that can often turn into long-term, profitable partnerships.

Delegate

This doesn’t simply mean ‘find an outsourcer’ or head straight to Fiverr. It means delegating the busy work as much as possible and, with a mix of both people and technology, automating it wherever possible.

This type of delegation is essential to free up your time and allow you to concentrate on the activities where you add the most value and generate the most income for your business.

Do what you do best, delegate the rest.
Chris Ducker (via Twitter), ChrisDucker.com

You’re essentially looking to create a machine within your business that just works–whether or not you happen to be around that day. Your business should just work, and that requires effective delegation. Your business cannot grow beyond a certain level without it.

Delegating tasks to individuals also takes time, and so if you can automate that too and streamline the whole process, then you save even more time.

So, in terms of creating more content, what exactly can you delegate?

Here are just a few ideas:

• Do you prefer speaking and creating content orally? If so, send the audio file to someone to convert into a blog post. Even better, create a regular podcast, and have someone create other types of content from that.
• Whenever you create content – blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, presentations, white papers, and so on – have someone create social posts for it across different social networks (see #2 above). While you might want to take care of interacting with people on social media personally, someone else can easily take care of regular posting to your social accounts on your behalf. As a business owner, it’s not the best use of your time, and delegating it on a regular basis frees up your time to create more content to feed your social networks with!
• Similarly, much of your content repurposing can be delegated. Once you have your seed content (eg. your blog post), someone else can easily convert it into other forms and other media and save hours of your own time. Again, it frees you up to create more seed content and build the amount of content you have out there referring others to your business.

Habit

The repetition itself becomes the important thing.
Haruki Murakami (Japanese novelist, with sales in the millions worldwide) in an interview

By making content creation a daily habit, you’ll be surprised just how much content you can create:

• Daily practice will make creating content a lot quicker – and easier. If you create new content once a month for example, you’ll likely find the mental cogs more than a bit rusty each time, and getting back into it will be hard. Half the time will be wasted by becoming easily distracted, lacking confidence in what you are doing, switching ideas, and so on. However, if you’re just picking up from where you left off yesterday as part of an ongoing process, you’ll find it just flows a whole lot easier.
• You’ll have a better idea flow – something you’re working on today can spark new ideas for another two or three posts or other types of content. For example, in creating this post, I have also added draft posts containing rough notes for at least three others, captured at the moment of inspiration.
• The momentum you develop in creating content daily will build positive feedback from your activities, and motivate you into creating even more.

Do it at a set time each day. Find a time that works for you. Some people write best in the early hours, others while burning the midnight oil. Find a time and stick to it.

I write every morning.
Ernest Hemingway

Just Write

If you’re unsure what to write about, just write about anything.

Quite often lack of content quantity is more to do with lack of inspiration than lack of time. You can’t think what to write about, so something else naturally becomes more pressing and provides a convenient excuse.

Truth is though, the more content you are able to create, the more you’re investing in your business’s traffic and future success. It’s absolutely key.

The very act of writing oils the cogs, sparks ideas and prevents blank page panic. It’s a writing technique used by writing professionals and prolific authors all the time. Don’t worry about correct grammar, spelling or structure. Just write and get the words down. Try writing just 750 words a day about anything. This stuff works.

You can come back later and either scrap it, or polish it and shape it into something spectacular. Or if that part’s not your strong point, delegate (see #4 above). Provide the basic ideas, the basic foundations, and let someone else create the high quality content you need out of the chaos you create! If your expertise is more speaking on stage rather than putting pen to paper, stick to your strengths and delegate the rest.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
Jodi Picoult, New York Times best selling author, in an interview

The point is just to write, get the ideas flowing, and let the momentum build. Do so every day (see #5) and you’ll find content quantity is no longer an issue.

Revisit and Refresh Old Content

The more content you have, the easier it becomes to create new content.

For example, go back over content you created two or three years ago. It’s likely that some of it’s now out of date, or you’d put things differently based on new experience and wisdom. It might even quickly spark ideas for new content.

So create new content by simply refreshing the old. Similar to repurposing (#1 above), it’s a lot quicker than creating new content from scratch.

Once complete, link to your new content from the old, for example for people who come through via the search engines. This keeps people on your site for longer, develops your authority with them and shows you care about keeping your content up to date.

An additional benefit is that this microstep of clicking through to other content on your site actually develops and deepens your relationship with your visitors. It increases the likelihood they will return in future or convert to a lead.

Have you found this helpful? Are you inspired to create more content in your business? Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below – and please share this post with others, thank you.

---