The Business of Blogging: Content Marketing – Content Generation Ideas To Keep Your Blog Rolling

Today, more than ever before, content is king. It doesn’t matter where you look in marketing, what is the driving force behind everything is content – on blogs, in newsletters, even in social media.

The challenge then becomes keeping up with the content demands of your marketing machine. That’s why I pulled together 6 simple ways to keep the content flowing all year long.

#1: Hire a Ghostwriter – Someone who specializes in creating compelling content that both educates and informs your audience AND softly sells your product or service. If you are just starting out, hiring a ghostwriter is probably out of your budget.

#2: Invite Guest Bloggers – By approaching guest bloggers, much like I do at DirectSalesClassroom.com, you can have a different article every week without having to create each one yourself. Reach out to your contacts in your industry who are talented writers. The challenge is that you need to proof and/or edit the posts to ensure it fits with your blog.

#3: Browse Article Directories – Don’t have a guest expert who you can turn to? An alternative option is to pull articles from an article directory like ezinearticles.com. It does require careful proof reading and author scrutiny since anyone can (and does) post on directory sites, but it is a valuable source of quality content.

#4: Ask Your Audience – If you choose to write your content yourself, there is a way to make it easier on yourself: simply ask your audience what they’d like to learn more about. A one-question email, or a tool like kwiksurveys.com will make it easy to collect responses and compile the answers into a usable format. Here are a few example questions you could ask to gauge interest in topics:

“What is your biggest question about (insert problem you help solve)?”
“If you could ask me one question, what would it be?”
“When you think about (problem you help solve) what would you say is your sticking point?”

The idea is to keep the scope of the topics narrowed down to the topics you’d like to write about versus an open flood of topics you may not have the knowledge to adequately (or accurately) cover.

#5: Borrow Inspiration – Look at content from other experts in your field. Other experts in your field may have knowledge that you don’t and by researching it, you are both learning it and bringing that new learning to your audience for the first time. Look for an interesting way to present your own take on a hot topics. You could also use any of that content written by others as a springboard for new ideas and content that you create yourself.

#6: Create an Editorial Calendar – Using an editorial calendar is not only a great way to help you pick topics, but also keep you focused each week on specific topics that are relevant to your business direction. During the summer, you may choose to write about getting ready for conferences, while early fall may be a good time to write about holiday preparations.

Whatever option you select, there are a wide variety of ways to bust through writer’s block and keep quality content flowing on your blog and in your newsletter all year long.

Want more business boosting ideas? Connect with Lisa Robbin Young on Twitter or on her Business Action Hero site!