Creating Content: The Gas to Run Your Inbound Marketing Vehicle

Let’s say your blog is a shiny, new racecar. You’re dying to take it out for a spin… but not so fast. You can’t drive a car without any gas in it, and that’s exactly what your blog posts, premium content, and other pieces of content are—the gas to drive your blog toward inbound marketing success. 

Unfortunately, inspiring your team of writers to produce quality content on a consistent basis is not always as easy as swinging by a gas station to fill up your tank. However, there are some actions you can take to start building up a community of interested, capable, and committed writers that will drive your lead generation process.  

1. Build a Pit Crew of Writers

Ideally, everyone within your company should be invited to contribute to your content creation efforts. From salespeople to executives, engineers to designers – all members of your team have an experience, tip, or trade secret that they could turn into a blog post or piece of premium content.  

The reason it’s important to solicit blog posts from as many people as you can is because sometimes the shy ones or the people who aren’t confident in their writing skills, might just have the best stories to tell. I suggest you encourage involvement from a variety of departments and people. It will not only help you keep your content calendar full and allow for a diversity in voice but it will help your staff become more knowledgeable, invested employees.

2. Motivate Your Writers

Even the best blog writers can go through writing dry spells, and because it’s not likely that blog writing is anyone’s primary job description, it can easily be put on the back burner and pushed to next week. There’s nothing worse than visiting a blog that interests you only to find they haven’t updated it in weeks, or even worse, in months.  

Here are some of the best ways to keep your writers motivated:

• Inform them of the benefits. Be sure they understand how blogging helps your company, and also how it helps them. For instance, he or she will be viewed as a thought leader and gain credibility amongst their clients and peers. It’s a built-in online portfolio of their expertise.

• Make it mandatory. If you have a dedicated team of writers, be sure to give them goals and deadlines – and even more importantly, hold them accountable. This might mean you need to get managers onboard and ensure they understand the benefits of your inbound marketing efforts.

• Make it a competition and provide rewards. This is especially effective with salespeople who are naturally competitive. Provide rewards for the writer who gets the most social media shares, comments on their blog post, or downloads for a piece of premium content. Be sure not to make it purely a numbers game but instead focus on the creation of compelling, quality content that drives results. 

3. Make Things Easy on Your Writers

By providing your writers with the resources they need, you’ll help ensure they aren’t left floundering alone at their desk staring at a blank word document, or worse, spending their valuable time writing a piece that is not a fit for your blog at all.  

How can you do this?

• Keep writers updated on your keyword strategy. This will help them focus their blog post topics and provide some inspiration. Just be sure they understand these are guidelines and that a great idea might not fit into any box.

• Send out updates on what’s working best on your blog. This includes any particular topics or writing styles that are striking a chord with your readers.

• Make sure they know and understand your company’s pledge and target persona. These two elements are key in pointing your content creators in the right direction.

Also, be sure to remind them of some of the best and easiest ways to write an interesting blog post. These are tried and true blog post formats that can simplify the blog writing process when any writer is unsure how to explain or approach a topic.  

• Tell your readers “How-To” do something. If a client has ever asked how to do something – then your answer is probably a great blog post. Write it just like you would explain it to someone.

• Create a “Top List.” For example: “The Top 5 Reasons You Should Use Inbound Marketing” or “The Top 10 Ways to Optimize Your Website.” People love lists and the format is very reader-friendly.

• Content curation is another fantastic approach. This is especially helpful for beginner bloggers, and it will also help with your link-building strategy. When you find remarkable content from other sources, link to it and add some original thoughts or opinions. Just remember to always give credit and link back to the source.

Follow these tips and you’ll be well on your way to keeping your blogging tank full of quality content that will ultimately lead to more visitors, higher lead conversion, and at the end of the day… more sales.