Your website requires content – a lot of it – to stand up against online competition. The more content you create, the more visibility you gain and the more visitors you attract. Research shows that websites that consistently add new, fresh, and engaging content are the ones that receive the most traffic and generate the most business. To succeed online, you need to keep producing more excellent content.
But therein lies the problem. How can you keep adding great content and remain consistently good?
Here are three ways that will help you consistently produce great content.
1. Produce more content….!
The more often you do something, the more you learn. Writing content occasionally does not prepare you well for consistently creating high-quality work. The best content creators are those who spend a lot of time writing. They write frequently, and through this, they learn to improve their skills, develop better writing techniques, and become eager to learn more about the writing process. The more you write, the more you want to write well. One thing that holds content creators back is not producing enough material. Step up your game…! Create more content, and you will get better at it, helping you be more consistent in producing great content.
2. Have a plan, a schedule and a strategy
Instead of creating content when the muse takes you, have a plan. You can use tools like CoSchedule or my own Blog Planning Tool to help you plan, but before you even think about organising your posts each week, you need to have a strategy. You need different kinds of content. How often will you add blog posts? How many times a month will you be producing a video? How often will you have “long” content? These are things you need to consider. Then your overall strategy might be two blog posts a week, one video a month, four long articles a year, one white paper every quarter and so on. You can then enter these details in your calendar, and you can then spend time considering what you might include. Rather than thinking of content when you need it, there will be a “mulling over” process, thanks to the strategy, which will help you create great content consistently.
3. Read more – especially your competitors
There is a link between great writing and reading. The more you read, the more you can write well. Indeed, I made that point almost five years ago in this post on “how to write a great blog.” Read widely and you will absorb what makes great content, helping you produce even more good stuff yourself. It’s a process of osmosis. But also make sure you read your competitors’ websites and blogs. They will be producing content for similar audiences so looking at what they produce shows you the kind of thing you could be doing. Again, this will help you focus and, therefore, be more consistent in producing good content. You could also use a service like Buzzsumo. Type in a word or phrase and you’ll see a list of content and how widely that item has been shared in social media. This shows you what topics interest people, showing you what to write about more regularly, again helping you be more consistent. But don’t just look at the list – click on the links and read the articles that are widely shared. They are likely to be good articles; read them and learn from them so you can produce material of the same standard. The more content on your topic that you read, the more you will be able to produce consistently great content.
It isn’t that difficult to be consistent with the quality of your content. But you need to have a strategy and a plan, and then you need to write as much as you possibly can and read extensively. Ask a top author how they produce loads of best-selling books. They’ll tell you two things: I read every day, and I write every day. Simple.