5 ways to use themes for content creation

One of the hard things about posting consistently for me is coming up with good content. I often feel like I use up all my idea-generating brain cells on writing I do for clients, drying up the well for my own site! Have you ever felt the same?

One trick to help you out is to come up with a theme and follow that. It helps with organization and keeps you on topic for the purpose of your site.

Here are some ways to do it that I’ve found helpful:

1. Write based on your readers’ needs. As you create content, do so with them in mind. Relate to their experiences and challenges. Find ways to make connections.
2. Create content about key topics. For me, I focus on writing as a business so I search out subjects and stick with one for a month or so. This month is part of posts that relate to content creation. After that, I’m planning to do posts that relate to website maintenance.
3. Review your best posts. Do you have posts that received the most traffic? Can you build on those? Sometimes, you don’t even have to create a brand new post, but create a “why this topic still matters” or, “more about this post”. Build on what you know works well already.
4. Follow related social media accounts. This is something I do on Twitter for my clients that I write for. I find other twitter accounts in the same industries and follow those to find great articles and content I can glean from. Where applicable, I send them straight back to the link, or reference the source. Other times, it gives me a great idea for a silly caption to go with an image and then, bam… there’s my Facebook post for an IT consulting firm.
5. Create a daily game plan that follows themes. This is something I used to do on my personal blog. Each day of the week was a specific post, such as the cell phone pic of the week on Tuesdays. This format really helped when I wanted to post almost daily because I had a structure to follow (and a graphic header already created), and I more or less needed to fill in the blanks on the template. Using this strategy, I created the most posts on a consistent basis, although they were all pretty short. Ain’t nothing wrong with brief. Brief is often better.

Those are simply the first five that I came up with today. It’s far from an exhaustive list. How do you plan your content? Come follow me on Twitter and let’s follow others for more content, hey?