“Darren, do you have any tips for creating more content for my blog? I have grown my blog to become reasonably successful but as it grows find myself with more and more requests and questions from readers that take me away from writing content. What should I do?”—William
Hi William and thanks for the question. I do have one tip that comes to mind that I hope you find useful. It certainly helped me keep my inbox load light and create more content!
I certainly understand the pressure of managing a growing blog, and the demands that come with it. A few years ago, I would wake up in the morning to many reader questions and wonder how I’d ever get any actual posts written.
That was until I realized that the emails in my inbox were actually part of the answer—not the problem.
What I came to see was that many of the questions readers were asking me about the topics of my blog were things that others would be interested in hearing about also. If one person is asking a question, many others are probably thinking it.
I began to approach writing answers to emails differently, so that I could capture my responses and repurpose them as blog posts.
Of course I would normally take off the greeting at the start and farewell remarks at the end of the email—and I might change the opening paragraph to introduce the topic a little more. But I would write the bulk of the response in such a way that it could simply be copied and pasted into a blog post.
In doing so, I killed two birds with one stone:
- Individual readers were satisfied. Actually, they were ecstatic because they were getting such comprehensive answers.
- I was creating relevant and useful content simply by clearing my inbox!
The added bonus of this approach is that these posts were written in a much more personal style than normal. It’s amazing how writing something in response to a real person with a real problem or need (instead of covering a random topic for a nameless audience) changes your style of writing.
I hope that this approach is helpful for you. It took a little while for me to build it into my natural workflow, but once I began to think this way, I started to see more and more opportunities to do it. I’d estimate I added three to four posts to my output each week using this technique.
The other thing I’d add is that you can apply the same approach to answering questions from other sources.
For example, I often find myself doing the same thing as I answer questions in forums, on Twitter or Facebook, in the comments on my blog—even the questions I see other bloggers asking on their blogs. Pretty much anywhere you’re asked a question (or where you see someone asking a question) you can use this principle: answer it in such a way that you can repurpose the information for publication on your blog.
Hoping this has given some food for thought! Thanks for the question, William!
Darren
PS: Do you mind if I use this as a blog post?!?
