The Content Crunch: Getting Past the Blank Page
In years past (well, way past, but if you’re my age it really seems like yesterday) building a website was akin to creating a really nice print piece. You planned, you drafted, you paid attention to design and detail, you built it – and then you left it. Your website gave users great information, such as what you offered, where to find you, how you differentiated your business from all those others. It will have allowed customers or clients to contact you, and might even have gone so far as to sell your product or capture sales leads for you. But, chances are you weren’t even thinking about rewriting it until you started to feel a little pain, or that it lacked something.
By 2011, with the adoption of content management systems, blogging for business, and social media, some websites are re-written almost daily. A company may have a core group of followers that are listening in for wisdom, tips, and the next good deal, or they may constantly be testing and re-purposing content in order to continue attracting a stream of new customers — or both. Now, especially in certain industries, if you are not continually adding new information you will be at a real disadvantage in both naturalized search and keeping your audience engaged.
Let’s say you have assigned your resources and planned accordingly. Your new website, with a couple solid pages, has launched to rave reviews. You have a blog ready to be filled up, and social media set up to push your blog content to. What now? How, exactly, do you come up with valuable content that will support all the work you have already invested in this marketing effort?
The Content Crunch Part B, Step 1: Start Simple
First, just … start. My completely non-studied or academically supported opinion is that writing great content is about 60% getting past the point of procrastination. Take twenty minutes, write a few words down about what you know (your product is a great place to start.) Keep in mind that depending on your site design, three paragraphs and 400 words are usually more than enough for a page. Leave it for a day, then go back and edit it, and – do not be afraid to post it! Hit publish on that blog! Update that page!
You can (and will) always get better, later.
The flip side of this is, if you are a prolific and careful writer, you will need to pare down what you’ve got. Pretend you are summarizing your 15 page article into a three paragraph abstract. That’s all you need (for now, and possibly forever.)
The Content Crunch Part B, Step 2: Work Ahead
Web content management systems offer a really neat feature: the ability to use the system not only to put the content up on the site, but to draft and review it. You can create a page or a post with not so much as a whim of an idea, leave it in your queue until you are inspired to expand and finish it, send it out to your team for review, and edit it comprehensively before it ever gets published to your website or blog. Take advantage of this to leave yourself starters for later, when you don’t feel so full of ideas. Start a page on a new product or service and keep adding to it as you get more information, so that by the time you know what you’ve got, you are mere moments away from publishing it.
This is especially essential when a team of people is responsible for updating your content. Case in point: here at TAI we have four blog contributors, who are all busy people. By working ahead and having a number of fully finished or even partially drafted posts in the system, when one writer is delayed, another post can pop in and take its spot. It took us a long time to figure this out, but it works pretty well.
Next time: Step 3 and Step 4, and more ideas as to how to generate valuable content for your readers.