Content creation is one of the most time-consuming processes in your SEO practice. While constantly checking stats and rankings is a given, maintaining a steady flow of valuable content is equally important. SEO still favors “quality over quantity,” but leaving a blog stagnant isn’t maximizing its content marketing potential.
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While SEO experts don’t require daily blogs, a consistent flow is ideal. Not publishing anything for an entire year is bad, but high-quality material every two to three weeks is great. It may not be as exhausting for the content creator, but keeping a consistent schedule might still lead to creative burnout.
Let’s discuss a few tips to keep the creation process going:
1. Streamline Your Creation Process
There is no universal way to make original content, but everyone has their preferences. If you’re new to blogging, it’s good to try out different strategies.
You might be the type of person who prefers finishing drafts for multiple entries before editing them in succession. On the other hand, maybe you’re the opposite, and you want to work on one blog post at a time. That said, the more you research, draft, and edit, the more you’ll discover a process that works best for you.
Here are other tips that might help you create an efficient process:
- Pay attention to how you take notes, do research, and build outlines.
- Estimate the time you need for writing and editing.
- Find the best time and place for content creation.
- If you’re missing a lot of mistakes during the editing process, consider getting beta readers or editors.
- Address what’s making things difficult or slowing you down.
- Use writing apps to check your spelling, grammar, delivery, and plagiarism rating.
Don’t be afraid to change strategies when you’re facing new challenges in the process, either. The goal is to find which method allows you to create high-quality content without unnecessary pauses or distractions.
2. Set Up Deadlines for Each Creation Stage
Establishing personal deadlines is a good way to maintain consistency. First, break down your process into parts. For example, you can categorize each stage as planning, research, drafting, editing, and formatting.
Find out how much time it’s taking you to do every task, and build a schedule around it. This allows you to divide the task into hours and days instead of cramming all your work the night before your posting schedule.
That said, remember to set reasonable deadlines. If you need to dedicate a full day to writing a draft, don’t force yourself to finish it in half a day. Setting impossible deadlines will burn you out faster.
3. Write About Current Events
If you’ve been blogging for a long time, then you might start to feel like you’ve run out of ideas. Since blog posts need to be original and high-quality to rank well, you can’t just regurgitate content over and over. So, if you’re running out of fresh ideas, try looking at the news.
You can start by looking at social media platforms and forums and gauge how popular a specific topic is. You can go to a popular site’s “trending” and “recommended” pages to see which topic you want to start researching.
Just make sure the new trending topic is relevant to your blog. So, look for an angle or aspect of the story you want to write about. For example, some celebrity news can sometimes be viewed from different perspectives, like business, art, fashion, ethics, or law.
Don’t be afraid to look into more mainstream, pop-culture content, either. All you need to do is find relevance with your blog theme and past content.
4. Keep A List of Future Content Ideas
Even if you have two to three blog posts planned for the next few weeks, it’s always good to write down passing ideas.
They might still be loose concepts that need fleshing out, but you can always review them when you’ve run out of things to write about. Keep coming up with ideas and concepts, even when you feel like you already have so much planned.
When you see an interesting news story, bookmark it. Organize your bookmarks into folders for easy future access. This way, you can add other bookmarks into the folder when you find other sites or sources to supplement.
You can also hold off on certain drafts that might be more useful at a different time. If the content works better with more research than you can manage at the moment, set those aside. Posting one complete, well-researched blog is better for SEO than eeking out two haphazard pieces (no matter how good the title is!).
5. Pay Attention to Your Competitors
When a site is on the first page of a search, that means Google’s algorithm thinks they’re doing something right. So choose a keyword, look at the first page, click on the results, and see what competing websites are doing.
Here are some things to look out for:
- Look at the keywords they’re using, their headings, anchor texts, and the type of stock images they’re posting.
- Find an article that discusses similar topics to yours and see what they’re doing that you aren’t.
- Look through their blogs and find fresh titles, keywords, questions, and perspectives.
The last tip can come in handy where you’re on the hunt for new ideas. You might discover some keywords and topics you still haven’t featured on your own blog.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should copy their content. After all, duplicate content gets penalized by search engines. Instead, you want to look for interesting topics and ideas to get inspiration from them. The whole point of staking out your competition is to not only see what they’re doing but to also inform you on how to do it better.
So when you see a topic or keyword you haven’t written about, read what your competitor says about it and try new ways to present them. Write from a different angle, do more in-depth research, and find gaps in your competitor’s content.
If you don’t find solid topic ideas, find a good reference on how to refresh your blog. Switch up the tone or vocabulary you’re using, update outdated terminologies, and cite more recent events in your examples and statistics.
Author’s Bio
JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.