Need More Content? Don’t Start From Scratch

This is a guest post from one of my very favorite people, Susanne Myers. She’s one half of the fab team at Piggy Makes Bank, and when it comes to content marketing, she’s one of the smartest people I know. I’m excited for her to share her wisdom with you!

One of my favorite things about Six Figures Systems is that it it encourages me to be consistent. Each month there’s a new marketing strategy to try and add to my box of tools and if you’ve been following along, you know that this consistent effort to get the word out about your products and services helps increase visibility and reach.

Another big part of this puzzle is creating content. After all, without content, you don’t have your own products to promote and sell. You don’t have lead magnets to draw new subscribers into your funnel, and most importantly, you don’t have new “stuff” to share on your blog and across your social media channels. Ideally, you want to consistently create engaging content for your target audience. But that can be easier said than done.

If you:

• feel a little overwhelmed
• don’t have the time to create all this content from scratch
• hate the idea of sitting in front of a blank screen trying to figure out what to write about,
• suffer from writer’s block
• want a way to create content in a more efficient way
• simply want to make it more fun

… I have an idea for you.

Ready? Here it is:

Don’t Start From Scratch

You don’t have to write all your content starting with a blank word document or a new blog post screen. You can start with existing content and tweak it for your needs.

Let’s say you want to publish a fresh blog post today. You don’t have to start from scratch. You can start with something you already have and change it to fit your needs.   For example…

Repurpose Something You Already Have

Go take a look at things you’ve already written and see what would be a good fit. This could be part of a previous blog post you’ve written that you can expand on. It could be an excerpt from a short report or ebook. It could be something you’ve written in email or on social media. Or it could be one of the many things we all have in our files that we’ve started and never got around to finishing.

There are two different ways to approach this. You can start with a topic already in mind, and then go search for something related in your existing files. Or you can start to browse through anything existing that’s even remotely related to what you want to accomplish with your blog post. Keep looking until you find something you want to use as a starting off point for your new blog post.

Tap Into Your Community

Another way to create content without having to start from scratch is to tap into your community. You can ask your readers and subscribers a question, or you can have them ask you a question. The resulting blog post could be in Q&A format. You can also interview someone that’s part of your circle of influence. If you are a wellness coach, you could interview a nutritionist, or a personal trainer about their area of expertise.

One of my favorite ways to get an almost endless supply of content ideas is to keep an eye out for questions from my target audience in email, in blog post comments, and on social media. Whenever I find myself answering a good question, I copy and paste both the question and my reply into a blank draft on my blog. When I need something new to publish, I can pull up one of these drafts and a big chunk of my blog post is written. I just add an intro, a bit of extra content where needed and a call to action at the end.

Use Pre-Written Content (PLR)

My favorite starting place is to use PLR or pre-written content. You start with a complete article or blog post. All you need to do is edit it a bit to make sure it speaks to your audience and if needed add a call to action. In other words, there’s less writing to do with pre-written content than with the other two options.

As a PLR creator, I can also tell you that we put a lot of time and energy into researching our topics and article titles. That means you are starting out with something that your target audience is likely already looking for. Best of all, you don’t have to do any of the research. Even if you end up finding that you rewrite quite a few chunks of the article or blog post, you will still save a good bit of time because you don’t have to do the research on the topic.

Curious to learn more about PLR and how to use it? I wrote a simple guide for you that has some great ideas to help you start with PLR and turn it into some awesome content for your business.

Click here to get your copy. There’s even a little surprise waiting on the inside to get you started with using pre-written content right away. Don’t miss it!

About the author: Susanne Myers is one half of the Piggy Makes Bank team. She’s been creating content online in a wide variety of niches for more than 10 years, so she knows a thing or two about getting the words written! Learn more about Piggy Makes Bank, and grab a copy of their guide to using PLR right here.