5 Content Creation Tips for Super Busy People

Producing online content is an important SEO strategy to generate more leads, move your audience through the marketing funnel, and generate revenue for your business.

But often people feel like they’re too busy to create that valuable content.

Maybe. But also, maybe not.

Here are 5 tips to streamline the content creation process so busy people everywhere can find time to produce valuable content (and reap the rewards of online content generation for their company).

Tip 1: Repurpose content

When you put in the hard work of creating a piece of content, you should get as much mileage out of it as you possibly can! An added bonus is that it will help you reinforce your message if someone encounters that information in multiple places.

Now, I’m not saying to duplicate a bunch of content as-is (posting the same blog article in multiple places), which can have negative SEO implications.

But if you put the time and effort into developing a well thought out blog post, consider using the same information to make a short form video or create an infographic. You can use snippets from all of those resources to create a social campaign.

If you’re creating a white paper or free tool, figure out how to give an overview (much of which you can pull or easily re-word from your white paper!) in a blog, a podcast, or a quick video.

So every time you create a new piece of content, take a moment to pause and consider how you can repurpose that content in other forms. It will save you time, help you keep churning out content, and help connect to people in different ways!

Tip 2: Harness the help of AI content generation

Warning: I want to make it very clear at the outset that I do NOT recommend publishing as-is AI-generated content. That can have some very significant SEO implications, as well as erode trust with your audience. I write in more depth about the SEO implications of AI-generated content in this blog.

But AI can help streamline the content generation process in two important ways:

1. It can help you brainstorm ideas for new content. Try getting new ideas for content by exploring different prompts. Ask ChatGPT for more topics in line with the most popular blog post on your website. Or ask it to generate questions from the perspective of your target audience, then write in response to those questions.

2. It can help you work through writer’s block. Ask ChatGPT to produce a draft response to a question, or give an explanation or series of steps to perform a task.

When you have those new ideas, or even a draft of content when you’re stuck, you must fact check everything, and edit heavily. But it can help you eliminate the time you spend staring at a blank screen trying to think of new ideas or how to construct a sentence!

Tip 3: Create a content calendar

If you set up a regular rhythm for yourself – perhaps monthly, or perhaps weekly – to plan out what content you will produce when, it will hold you accountable to creating that content.

We often underestimate the time we spend carrying the mental load of an unwritten to-do list. By spending time planning, you’re saving yourself a bunch of moments of mental urgency that distract you from other tasks at hand.

Intentionally planning content also helps you make sure to focus on your target audience, to block off open chunks of time for content creation, and to coordinate different pieces of content with each other (this is especially powerful when used in tandem with Tip 1 – repurposing content!).

Tip 4: Outsource content creation to teams (and influencers)

Every member of a company has a unique insight about what helps the customer or client. It’s not just a marketing person’s job to create content! Harness that insight into content production, and it will help you shoulder the load of producing content and provide more holistic information to your target audience. (The ebook A 7-week Guide to Growing Your Business with Web Content has a great practical exercise to guide a team through capturing a bunch of diverse content ideas from everyone on the team.)

Perhaps an engineer on your team knows that customers often ask about a certain feature, and she regularly has to send an email with a list of instructions, or an admin fields questions about the best service package for a client’s needs. You can ask each of those team members to create a short video or blog outlining a way to solve the client’s question or need.

Pro tip: provide a simple template of questions that can help those team members answer the questions in a systematic way. For example, tell them: Outline the problem, explain the solution, reinforce how your company provides unique value to the solution. (Or something like that.) A template can help people who don’t see themselves as content creators feel less intimidated by the process.

You can also reach out to influencers to create content on your brand’s behalf. Although influencers with large followings often get the most attention, micro influencers who have followers on more niche topics may be more effective and affordable to share content within a certain industry.

Tip 5: Use data, visuals and video

When people hear “content” they often feel they are being given a high school English assignment. Cue feelings of panic!

But content can take many forms. Not only do those forms all add value to communicating your message, they can sometimes be quicker and easier than writing a blog post. You may be able to take an Excel spreadsheet that was initially shared internally and quickly provide a meaningful visual to share in a social channel. Or maybe your team is gathered for a meeting, and you can collaboratively produce a short form video in 20 minutes.

You can even use your content calendar to plan to produce the types of content that you can create the fastest on particularly busy weeks!

At the end of the day, meaningful content is too valuable of a tool to give up on because it seems like it would take too much time. These tips can help even the busiest people create content that connects with their audience and boosts their business’s bottom line.