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Content Creation Will Make You Insane If You Let it

Content creation will make you insane if you let it.

So many people have been talking about content creation lately. But do they ever talk about the daily grind of what happens when you have to churn out content on a daily basis? Mostly, content creation is glorified as something easy and simple that anyone can do. How much work goes into the creation of content, though? Like so many things in life, the answer is: it depends.

Who’s Your Audience?

Your audience is made up of at least two parts: those who actually visit your webiste and read your posts, and the little bots that roam around Google visiting your site. Having new content on a consistent basis helps your site rank higher so that both the people and the bots are satisfied. Of course, your human audience should come first. You don’t want your words to sound like they’re written for bots!

Photo by James Jordan

The Problem is Consistency

Coming up with one or two or even ten blog posts isn’t the problem. The problem is sustaining your content creation for months and maybe years. Will you ever get tired of writing? What if no one reads your writing, or you don’t just don’t feel like blogging any more? Will you be able to continue writing even if you don’t want to? If you’re feeling stuck, you might like this article: Content Creation: How to Make Your Writing More Fun! And, once you’ve read that and followed it, you could also share that blog post four (or more) different ways.

Content Creation: Be a Tortoise, Rather Than a Hare

Creating content for your readers puts you in the camp with the tortoises, not the hares. That is, you need to have steady progress and keep at it. Someone told me something a long time ago, and it stuck: Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair for success. So sit down and write something–anything–even if it’s bad. Write one sentence. Then write another one. See where it takes you.

Photo by Colin Remas Brown

Wrangle Those Words

Keep at it, even if you don’t feel like it. Because sometimes you’ll change your mind as you start writing. It’s like going to the gym. Put on your gym shoes and get yourself there and fake it if you have to. One thing that helps me write more is to read my words out loud. Try it and let me know how it goes! And don’t go insane in the process.

How-to Secrets to Blogging for Your Success

You might think there are some secrets that you have never heard about when blogging for your business. To be frank, it’s a lot like staying healthy. The things you need to do are simple, but not easy. Here’s a short refresher.

Be Consistent

I’ll cut right to the chase here and tell you the #1 secret to your blogging success: consistency. That means blogging when you don’t really feel like it. Sometimes you’ll really want to write something. Other times, not so much. I publish every Thursday morning at 6 a.m. Lots of times I don’t feel like writing. Not at all. By the way, if you missed last Thursday’s post, here it is: How Pivoting Away from Drama Will Make You Less Stressed.

Add An Image or Two

You don’t need a lot of images, but you should have one or two images. According to most content marketing experts, visual content performs better. “32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second (27%).” This is according to Hubspot’s 45 Visual Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know in 2018. So if you combine good writing with good images, you’ll have knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark great content.

Include a Few Tags

After a while, you can choose from your most-used tags. WordPress automagically adds an archive of the tags you’ve used in the past. When you add your tags, you WordPress can help by giving you clues about which other posts you might link to, as explained in Yoast’s post: Tagging posts properly for users and SEO. As you might expect, my tags are generally about Facebook, Instagram, social media, startups, Twitter, etc. Yours might be very different. What is your audience interested in hearing about? Write about that.

Use a Couple of Links

I like to add a couple of outgoing links to good sources, and then a couple of links to my older blog posts. Do you have a formula for what you do when you write? If you missed my post about writing habits, here it is. Content Creation: What Are the Best Habits for Writing?

These Secrets Aren’t Really So Secret, Are They?

Leave you best-kept secrets in the comments! Hahaha! Just kidding. But if you do want to comment, I’d appreciate it.