5 Things you need to become a productive content creator

As a content marketer you need to be productive – there’s no escaping to it.

Content marketing is not easy peasy – it requires consistent hard work! And for that you need to be a productive content marketer.

When I say content – it includes a lot of different forms of content that you need to create on a day-to-day basis.

Right from content for your website to email newsletters and product sales pages there’s a lot of content involved!

So you really need to buckle up and get in the game.

You cannot be lazy. You cannot write whenever you are in the mood.

If you are a serious content marketer you need to be serious about your productivity as a content marketer too!

In this post, I share 5 tips (that has played a very crucial role in my content marketing efforts) to help you become a productive content marketer.

Here you go …

#1 Knowledge about content marketing

First of all, in order to be a productive content marketer, you have to have proper knowledge about content marketing.

Of course you will have to undergo some learning, and trial and error to gain this knowledge and experience – but this is totally crucial.

In particular, having the specific knowledge about how to make content marketing work for you isn’t something you can learn by reading a few books or a few blog posts.

You have to experiment a lot and find out what works for you.

And before you even start thinking about running those experiments, you will have to have clarity.

As you can see, it is all about getting clarity about what you want to achieve with your content marketing campaigns.

In the end, it should be both useful to your readers and as well as prove useful to your business.

Having this knowledge will help you to achieve your content marketing goals much better – making you way more productive than attempting content marketing without any knowledge.

#2 Have content goals that align with your business goals

Just in relation to what I said, having content goals makes you a productive content marketer.

Without proper goals, you will simply be creating random pieces of content that don’t align with your business goals.

So here’s the first step – you will need to write down your business goals! That was a no-brainer, right?

But most bloggers – I can confidently say – ignore this very crucial step! And fail in content marketing.

Or progress very slowly towards their goals.

Time waits for no one, you know – so you should really be productive when it comes to content marketing.

Have very strict, and sharp business goals.

Write a content plan that will align with your business goals.

Set up a system in order to set your content goals in alignment with your business goals.

So here’s how to do it.

Write down your business goals – how you want to attract audience, how you want to do business with them, how you want to build rapport, how you want to build trust, how you want to build your brand and things like that.

Now, write down your very specific content goals that are perfectly aligned with your business goals.

Every piece of content you create and publish should help you achieve or lead to achieving any of your business goals. This is a strict rule if you want to become a productive content marketer.

Otherwise all your content marketing efforts will go in vain.

Now once you have your business goals and content goals, just set up a system to keep in all in one place, excuse and track your results.

A system to capture content ideas, create content regularly, and track conversions.

That’s it.

#3 Fodder for your brain

In order to be a productive content creator, you will need to feed your brain with a lot of fodder.

But not junk!

And you need to provide this fodder for your brain on a regular basis.

I keep up with happenings in the niche all the time via a combination of Feedly, and Pocket.

Since I read a lot, I get to know what my competitors are aiming at, and it also helps me generate tons of useful content ideas.

#4 A system to manage and run your content marketing campaigns

Now, as I said, it doesn’t matter if you have tons of blog post ideas under your belt, or if you are a sincere reader of other blogs – without a system to manage and run your content marketing campaign, you will still fail.

It is not just about having content ideas to write all the day. It is about keeping those ideas organised, and have a system in place where you would really stick to the plan and execute it!

In my experience no matter how smart you are with planning without a system it is so hard to cope – that’s the point I’m trying to make!

You don’t need anything so fancy – a few simple (content creation and content management) tools will do.

Some people just manage with pen and paper (notebook).

I use a combination of Asana (for editorial calendar), Evernote (for blog post ideas), Scrivener (for writing and keeping note of word count) and the Writeometer app (for keeping track of word count).

This might sound like a lot of tools – but after numerous trials with different kinds of tools, I’ve found that this combination works for me!

This need not be your toolkit – something else might work better for you.

No matter what you choose, just have a system in place so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

#5 A system to track your content marketing efforts

While it is important that you need a system to execute things, it is even more important that you need a system to keep track of your progress in content marketing.

You might think that it is not necessary to have such a system – I too thought the same, and boy, I was SO wrong!

You certainly need a system to track your progress.

Without such a system in place you won’t know what works and what doesn’t in your content marketing efforts.

Again, what kind of system to use highly depends on what you want to track and what efforts you put into your content marketing strategy.

I personally track my daily writing – because as a blogger (who runs multiple blogs) I need to do a lot of writing.

I need to create content for multiple blogs, write guest posts, do blog commenting, create product outlines and content, write newsletters, write video scripts and much more.

That’s a lot of writing. So I need to make sure that I put my fingers on the keyboard and write a certain amount of words everyday, no matter what.

And I have a system to track this.

I also have to track how each of my blog posts perform – depends on what I want from a particular blog post.

I would like to know how each of my blog comments convert – in terms of bringing me referral traffic.

I would like to know how my guest posts convert.

I track a lot of things!

At the same time, you also have to be aware that you should not be obsessed with numbers or the tracking itself.

While it is important to have a tracking system (for anything you do) it is also important that you are not addicted to those systems.

Only track at a reasonable frequency and at the rest of the time, actually do stuff that will bring you results.

On becoming a productive content creator

Apart from all these things you also need the right mindset.

Take away anything from your mind that dictates negative things to you – like “you’re too busy to do it”.

Or something like “content marketing won’t work for me and it only works for the big companies”.

Even if you are a solopreneur, content marketing will work for you and it is the only, free thing (as in “free content for my website”) that will easily help you promote your business as a blogger.

It is free advertising. And more than that, with content marketing you can build rapport, close deals, change people’s lives and be helpful!

In my opinion, these are HUGE.

So implement these tips right away to become a productive content creator and rock your content marketing campaigns.

Do you want to create killer content for your business on a regular basis? Then don’t hesitate to grab my course!