The reason Ghost Blog Writers exist is because people are busy.
Business owners, managers and marketers have a lot on their plates today. There is online advertising. There is social media. There are all kinds of things to keep track of and that doesn’t even count the more-than-full-time job of actually running the business, delivering products and services to customers.
Our clients see the benefits of blogging. Some try to blog on their own and find there is no time for it so they contract us. Others really want to blog, but they only have time for one post every once in a while so they bring us on board to supplement their efforts.
But some businesses get in trouble because they start working in online marketing and instead of paying themselves first with assets like blog posts they instead put effort into social media where your content is fleeting and owned by the social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
A new study put out by Pew Research indicates this is common among all social media users:
44% of Facebook users “like” content posted by their friends at least once a day, with 29% doing so several times per day. 31% comment on other people’s photos on a daily basis, with 15% doing so several times per day. 10% change or update their own status on Facebook on a daily basis, with 4% updating their status several times per day. Some 25% of Facebook users say that they never change or update their own Facebook status.
It’s much easier to click on the like button or to make a quick comment on a piece of content on Facebook (and on other social sites) than it is to upload your own photo or to even write your own status.
If you’re falling into this trap of liking, commenting and creating short content for social media then we have a few ways to invest more in yourself and your social media strategy by creating blog posts, videos and other forms of content.
How To Create More Content If You’re Busy
Each of these steps are things we do at Ghost Blog Writers for ourselves and for our clients. They save time and work better in the long run than making simple comments and updates on social media.
1. Create A Blogging Calendar
The first thing we do with every new client is create a content calendar. For us, it’s a blogging calendar, but you can take it further to create an entire content calendar that includes all the content you want to make.
Putting dates to content makes you feel obligated to do the work. It’s too easy to keep pushing the work on a blog post down the line if you don’t put a date on things. A regular schedule is good for you and for your readers.
You can even start out small. Come up with 12 ideas. Think about the most important questions that your clients ask and put down the 12 ideas in the calendar. Write one post each month based on those ideas. Having the ideas in place will take some of the work out of the way because when it comes time to write each month all you have to do is get started instead of finding an idea, which can take some time.
2. Repurpose Blog Posts Into Other Content (Videos, ebooks, auto-responders, etc.)
Does it seem that some companies are able to create all kinds of content? How do they have time to do that?
Many companies simply repurpose their content for different types of content. You can start with the type of content you’re most interested in like a blog or a video.
Take that content and repurpose it into a blog post, video, etc.
Then take it another step further and create ebooks and email auto-responders from your posts and other content.
3. Turn Blog Post Snippets Into Social Updates
We believe that a good social media strategy begins with creating content for yourself. When you put content on your own website you’re better able to control it, reuse it and reshare it as much as you want. Social content is difficult to find once it drops in the feed and you ultimately don’t own the content you share on social sites.
Here are details about The Snippet Strategy and how we turn one blog post into twenty (or more) social media updates. Use a software like Buffer (that’s what we use) to make sharing content on social media easy.
Hopefully these time-saving efforts can get your social media and inbound strategy turned around. We know you’re busy and these strategies have helped us.