How To Sustain A Writing Practice For Your Business Blog

If you are a small business owner or a marketer, you are probably in charge of coming up with posts for your company's blog. While the most efficient way of dealing with this is hiring SEO writing services, you should still learn how to sustain a writing practice over time. Even if you have capable SEO writers, you would want to have a way of measuring your workers' progress. Here is a writing process that helps you set measurable, objective milestones for your content writing team.

Identify The Smaller Milestones

Writing blog content seems like a single task, but you can break it into smaller steps. Research and keyword selection, identifying the content format, outlining the article, creating infographics or choosing photos, editing, assembling the elements, and quality checks are all distinct from the actual construction of sentences and paragraphs that is 'writing.' Not all businesses with blogs follow the same steps for their content creation process. If you have not done so, it helps to document your content creation process. Knowing the steps helps you plan efficiently.

Make A Content Calendar

Since creating content involves several smaller steps, you have to know all of them to figure out how to scale the entire process up. You also have to be aware of where each step will fall in your schedule; if not, you will surely miss out on something. A content calendar helps with keeping everything organized. It provides a bird's eye view of the things each team member must deliver in the next month. Content calendars let managers check if some processes have overlaps or if the wait time for specific components is too long.

Make it your priority to have a content calendar as soon as possible. If you do have one, check if there are ways you could improve on it. Do you have too many deadlines in the middle of the month? Perhaps you schedule too many days for research and not enough for editing. Having a content calendar helps you visualize things better. 

Have A Content Schedule

Typically, people only have two to three posts in advance of their current ones. This situation usually leads to rushed posts, which almost always means subpar content. When you are on a very tight schedule, your staff will always be on high alert, which isn't a good working environment. Ideally, have at least a week of content planned. It would be best for you to keep six to eight months' worth of posts and articles in the pipeline, which is feasible for companies starting from scratch. Giving yourself this much lead time allows you to visualize the next months.

Long-term blog plans also allow you to batch tasks, which makes you more efficient. Instead of logging into your keyword research tool every day, you can dedicate one or two days to it every quarter. Batched tasks also provide enough time between writing periods, which helps you see more of your efforts on the company's SEO. If you don't know where to begin with a calendar, you should get SEO writing services. Most will help you figure out your goals and schedule before you begin.

Always Write With An Outline

This stage is when you begin writing your post. Since you have the structures in place already and you have a documented process, you can start writing your outline. Don't start putting paragraphs together without having a blueprint or an outline. Writing freestyle might be great for a personal journal or rambling on group chats with friends, but it does not contribute to your brand image.

Writing freestyle is also slow; if you have an outline, you know what you want to say, which means you will be more efficient at writing. Have a detailed outline; write down the intro, two to three main points in the body, and conclude. Each section should have one or two subpoints you want to discuss. This process can be a pain when you're just starting, but it will make you a better writer in the long run. Treat your outline as a microcosm of your content calendar.

Ensure That Your Content Provides Value

To provide value to your audience, you only have to do one thing: document your experience as a brand. You need to write about what you have learned about your industry through managing your brand. Only write well-researched content. If you have relevant anecdotes on personal experiences, all the better! The posts your audience wants to read are the ones that discuss things that could happen to them, things they are going through, or things they would rather not go through.

Everyone reads to find information useful to them. If you have a blog, even if it is for promoting your business, make it mostly about things that could interest your audience instead of about your services. Generally speaking, it's good to have 80 percent informative, 20 percent persuasive content in your posts. If you keep featuring your offerings prominently, people will not want to read your blog since it will read as one long advertisement. If you provide value—if you always think of how a post benefits customers—you will always have something to write.

Rewrite Content To Fit Various Formats

Repurposing your content is not the same as plagiarizing it. When you repurpose, you take content (a blog post or an article) that you or your company owns and convert that into a different format. For example, if you publish a blog on the automotive industry, you could take the most critical parts of the essay and turn them into the main points for a YouTube video or a podcast.

Reworking your content lets you reach an entirely different audience. The people who like reading your blog posts might not be the same ones who would enjoy listening to a podcast while working out or driving. If you repurpose your content, you can deliver the same message to a different audience without you having to do too much work. What's more, the interactions you get from these different formats vary. As such, you might get different ideas for future posts, videos, or podcasts from them.

Conclusion

Sustaining a writing practice is hard, even for seasoned writers. Aside from dedication and discipline, you need an organized plan, so you don't get lost in the many things you need to do to keep a blog together. Having a content calendar and outlining your articles helps. The best way to deal with this, though, is by hiring an expert!

Team up with Ranked if you want results that build in the long term. We provide SEO writing services to SMEs, enterprises, and agencies, helping more than 2,500 clients in over 40 countries grow their businesses at scale. Get in touch with our team or activate your account today!