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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?