How To Climb Out of the Content Marketing & Blogging Doldrums

Whether you nurture your company’s content marking efforts or lovingly tend to your own personal blog, you eventually find yourself feeling stuck. Your goal is to keep readers engaged and coming back to feast upon the quality content you’re cranking out, but how do you keep viable when you feel creatively drained? Take a step back and don’t be afraid to change up your blogging strategy. Sometimes shaking up your content mix is the only way to escape a serious case of the ‘blahs.’

Let’s review what types of material you could be incorporating into your blog and jump-start your ailing creative process!

Short & Sweet 

These topics require little time, have a big impact, and attract sharing. All good things.

– Share positive tidbits from motivational quotes to emotionally-stirring images to comics to video clips. (Note: Don’t go off the deep end. If you’re a financial advisor, don’t share cat videos. Make sure it makes sense.)

– Focus on feel-good human interest stories.

– How-to’s. You probably have some shareable tips and tricks up your sleeve. Everybody loves the concept of working smarter, not harder.

– Pick topics of a regional interest that could project further and attract a wider audience. (ie. Seeking the finest crab cakes in Baltimore. Tailgating tips from the SEC.)

– A look inside. (ie. Behind the scenes look at your brand or personal creative process.)

– Find an intriguing piece of content from another source that deserves some attention? Reference it, link back to the piece, and add in your own two cents.

Rebel, Rebel

It’s okay to raise a little heck sometimes. This strategy takes a little more finesse, but it does attract a response.

– Share a strong opinion.

– Does your industry have a “dirty little secret” or any “mysteries” you are willing to bring to the surface? (ie. How do gold and diamond buyers determine the value of unwanted jewelry?)

– Play Devil’s Advocate

– Provide a unique point-of-view or direct response to a hot topic.

Bread & Butter

This type of content takes time to construct, but it’s rich in valuable information.

– Hit your audience with some real data and research backing up your views. This can come from your own findings or you can analyze, interpret research from other parties.

– Interview or invite a thought leader to write a guest post.

– Compose case studies. Have you come across any interesting or surprising trends lately?

– Create a clean and simple infographic to visually display data, statistics, etc.

Now that you have possible avenues to explore, take a few minutes to evaluate the content you have been producing. Is there a common theme? Have you been cranking out variations of the same article? What has worked with your audience and what flopped?

Doing a little evaluation will help propel your strategy forward and reap real, actionable results.