Houston, we have a problem. Inbound Marketing has become an essential for many businesses, but creating exceptional content that fuels the process takes a lot of time. It’s daunting, so a lot of organizations start and then give up a few months down the road.
Here are 6 time saving tricks for inbound marketers:
- Keep it Snappy. We skim on the web. It is a medium that zaps attention. Keep this in mind and design your content accordingly. Generally, blog posts shouldn’t be longer than 750-800 words. Include visual elements.
- Plan, Plan, Plan. Don’t just jump to whatever task is currently at hand because you’ll just end up all over the place. Instead, plan your initiatives before you put them into action. Take a step back and think about your target market, how you want to grab their attention with your content and what you want to achieve from this interaction. Pretend you’re back in school – write an outline. You will have better definition to your message this way.
- Reuse and Recycle your Content. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t redo what you’ve already done: instead, repurpose your current content whenever possible. Those powerpoint presentations you already have can become content for articles and blog posts. If you’ve already done the research and you already have the material, think where else it could be used.
- Learn the Shortcuts on your Keyboard. It sounds like a silly little trick, but think of how much time copy/paste saves you on a daily basis; how much time you save using ctrl+A to select all content on a page instead of scrolling through the whole thing; ctrl + backspace deletes by word and ctrl + shift lets you select whole words at a time instead of having to go letter by letter. Wikipedia has a whole list of them here and a quick google search can show you great tricks to speed up the specific tedious tasks that you perform every day.
- Use other people’s content. Others create killer content, too. Curate it. Also be sure to interact with your followers and answering their queries and comments, or re-posting relevant content about your industry or community.
- Have Fun. Having fun with content creation will make the task seem like less of a chore.. Write something that makes you smile or better yet laugh.
Here’s hoping these tricks will save you time on your inbound marketing efforts.
