Developing content can be a fun way to spend your working day. You can write blogs, make graphics, record videos and more.

However, as a busy business owner, it’s likely you don’t often find the time to update your website or your other content channels, so the impact of your content strategy gets lost.

Businesses that adopt content marketing into their wider growth strategy receive an incredible 126% more leads than those who don’t bother, so it’s well worth making the time for.

Yet how do you craft valuable and entertaining content without scratching your head and getting lost in the rabbit hole that is the internet?

Here are a few fun and exciting ways you can create blogs and social media without the headache of desk research.

ONE: Interview your team members

People are curious beasts, and any excuse to peer into the life of your business is welcome. Everyone’s got a smartphone, so it’s straightforward to create a recording you can use as the basis of your blog. Even an audio app will do the job just as well.

All you have to do is plan some insightful questions in advance and send them to your colleague for them to start preparing an engaging response. Don’t be mean and make them perform on the spot as their nervousness will come across in the video.

Once you’ve got the clip you want, you can either upload it as is to your video hosting service (YouTube or Vimeo, for example), create some clips in iMovie or another free video editing tool or use a tool called Otter to transcribe the audio and you can start editing your text or copying and pasting quotes.

TWO: Create surveys for your customers

Getting to speak to influencers in your field to make valuable, magazine-worthy articles requires a comprehensive digital PR strategy. However, if you work in B2B, your customers are already your industry experts.

You can create a free form in Google Forms to write out your questions. Send them to five or six of your favourite customers and Google will collect the answers in one place.

Say you have 5 questions in your survey, you then have five blog posts in your “Experts Series”, each blog focusing on five different opinions on the same topic.

THREE: Use social media to curate a “mashup”

A typical Google search brings up a variety of similar-looking articles which have all been based on the same press release. You then have to plough through them all to have enough information to create a vaguely original piece of content for your blog.

Instagram is a much fresher medium with original content that’s visually appealing. You’re far more likely to find an array of engaging responses to the topic your researching. If your business is garden design, you’ll find an abundance of beautiful images that illustrate the latest design features and trends. Pick four or five posts, and write a blog around them. Give a credit to the author, and kudos for their appealing images.

We know this works because newspapers adopt this tack all the time.

 

Not everyone jumps with joy at the thought of trawling through books and articles on a topic, but these three methods ensure you can offer something engaging and fresh to what is a very crowded space.

 

If writing blogs has become a headache and you’re desperate for someone to take over, then give Bold a shout – Our content team would love to help!