Blog Boosting: Five Tips for Content Creation

Content Marketing

Having an active, interesting and informative blog section on your website is a great way of engaging with clients and prospects but how do you find enough content to ensure it’s regularly updated?

An active blog is a valuable tool for letting your customers know what you’ve been up to – sharing useful information, highlighting any company updates and announcing any offers or promotions.

However, a sparsely populated and underutilised blog can make you look unprofessional. It gives the impression that not much is happening at your business and can dissuade prospects from following up any initial interest.

So, you need to ensure a regular flow of stories but where can you find all of the content?

Your initial reaction may be to panic as you decide you’ll never have enough items to justify a blog. However, if you look closely at your organisation you may be amazed at what you can find.

Here are some handy tips and tricks to get you started:

Make the most of existing content
This sounds like a bit of a no-brainer but we often meet clients who don’t appreciate just how much content they already have that they can reuse on their blog. This might be recent press articles, news releases, customer guides or details of product promotions that have been written for the sales team. All of these can be re-purposed for your blog.

Get colleagues to contribute
Ask your colleagues whether they have any ideas for stories. Encourage them to start writing them where possible – even if it’s just a list of bullet points that you can flesh out. This will help to keep your blog content varied and can give your audience more of an insight into your team and company personality.

Think seasonally
If you’re running out of content ideas have a think about any seasonal or topical activity. Obvious examples might include Christmas, New Year, Valentine’s Day, Summer etc. but also think about more industry-related events like exhibitions or annual product reviews that might be coming up.

Plan ahead
By forcing yourself to sit down and create a calendar of blog post ideas, you can ensure you have some stories in the pipeline. This will take pressure off in the short term and might spark an editorial mindset which will make it easier to spot future story ideas. Not forgetting, if you can write your stories in advance then you can relieve pressure during busy periods or holidays too.

Don’t forget images
Find out the dimensions and specifications for images in your blog posts. Then, set up a template (in Photoshop for example) which you can use to ensure consistency of image size and quality across your blog. There is nothing more frustrating than delays caused by lack of decent images.