Back again! Today’s topic is perfectly suited for me: how can you quickly pull together a Blog post when you really don’t have time? Whether it’s screaming kids, screaming clients, looking deadlines, travel or every day workload weighing you down, you still need to find time to make sure you and your business are visible. You need to proactively put yourself out there in order to get that much coveted search engine love.
So what do you do when you are rushed for time but don’t want to neglect your Blog?
For starters, keep tabs on your industry by setting Google Alerts for your top keywords and use that as inspiration for the topic. So many times picking the topic is the hardest part. Surround yourself with inspiration and you’ll at least have a starting point.
The second step is hard for people that don’t consider themselves a “writer” – just sit down and start writing. Get those fingers flying over the keys and see what comes out. You can always edit or even delete if the content isn’t working. But starting a free flow session is a great way to capture your thoughts and ideas and then you can go back and massage them after. I find people tend to write slower when they think about every word and try to get things perfect. If you can just get it all out quickly, you are more likely to get your posts done. And while you want to strive for quality work at all times, since people will judge you based on what you put out there, you don’t need perfection all the time.
It’s also OK to just be honest and say “Today’s going to be a short post, I’m slammed with deadlines but I wanted to share some info with you” and then just share a few stats or a short post. People will be able to relate to the humanness of it all.
Using stats with a little personal insight into what they mean or what people can learn from them is a great way to create a fairly short post.
Create a category for tips and plan to do short posts that just cover one tip. That way you don’t have to delve in-depth on every topic. When you have some time, do longer posts and when you are rushed, throw up a tip.
Get guest bloggers to help you fill in the gaps. It keeps things fresh and interesting and helps you and the guest blogger.
Don’t get into the habit of just copying other content that is out there on to your Blog. It creates duplicate content and doesn’t make you stand out and offer fresh thoughts and perspectives. Once in a while, do a short post linking to a great piece you want to share but don’t copy the whole text into your Blog.
Create a glossary people can refer to and add new words one or two at a time.
You can get creative and think of what content you can feed people in small pieces. The key is to remember not every post needs to be really long. The only thing every post has to offer is value to the reader. 