How to Plan a Year of Great Content on a Small Budget

Producing great content is the simplest and the most direct way to establish a relationship with your audience. Quality content testifies about your knowledge, dedication and seriousness as a brand and an individual, however, producing great content once is not enough. In order to build trust with your audience, you need to show consistency. You need to buy them time to get to know you and time for them to get to trust you. Here are several tips on how you can plan an entire year of great content on a small budget.

Plan different formats

In order to break the monotony, you need to start working on different content formats. This, however, is a great thing, seeing as how you can recycle the same piece of content several times over without being accused of plagiarism or even being sanctioned by search engines. Think about it, a great blog post can easily turn into a great infographic, a slideshow or even an educational/informative video. This way, you’re not just efficiently recycling some of your best, most successful, ideas but also giving your audience some much-needed variety.

Research your competitors

When working on a huge budget, you could afford to launch a ton of content, see how well it performs and then make the necessary adjustments. However, you can take the other approach to this situation, as well. Why not take a look at some of your most successful competitors? You can analyze their content and see what they do well and what you could do better. This way, you get to capitalize on their activity and strategic thinking. No, this is not industrial espionage, it’s research and it’s what everyone does.

Research the statistics

The next thing you need to get into a bit is blogging statistics. You see, only 19 percent of bloggers actually include videos in their posts, yet, there is an estimate that a piece of content with a video is 50 times more likely to drive organic search. Still, the type of video and the quality of video makes all the difference here. So, you need to start by either researching the topic of by finding a partner with enough experience with corporate video production and editing. Quality is everything and quality requires experience.

Guest posting

The biggest problem with content is definitely the issue of time it takes to write a certain post. The reason why this is so big is due to the fact that, on average, in 2019 it took 3 hours and 57 minutes to write a blog post. However, the number of bloggers that work more than 6 hours on a single post is growing as well. In other words, the biggest challenge is finding time to satisfy the need of your audience for frequent blog posts. One of the ways to satisfy this is to look for guest posters. For this to work, you need to set standards and write comprehensive guidelines. Then, you need to improve your blog so that you get the right type of attention.

Prioritize platforms

Different platforms require different forms and formats. For instance, Facebook and YouTube fans prefer long videos. In fact, Facebook users consume 100 million hours of video content every day. On Instagram, on the other hand, images and short videos (especially stories) are huge. Blog posts are universally popular for a while now. In order to figure out where you should focus most of your attention, you need to get to know your demographics and the best way to do so is through surveys and extensive analytics projects.

Expand your talent pool

The privilege of being able to hire remote workers is something that a lot of businesses downplay. No, it’s not just something that you do amidst the pandemic. It’s a way for you to hire the most qualified person available, regardless if they’re living half-way across the world. Unlike with customer support, content creators have deadlines instead of work hours. This means that they’re not even inconvenienced by the time zone difference. Also, due to the purchasing power parity of their home region compared to your own country, you might be able to hire their services at a considerable discount.

In conclusion

The very last thing worth taking into consideration is the fact that while having a tight budget doesn’t mean that you are not going to invest any money in your content. The latter is a recipe for disaster but the first scenario doesn’t necessarily restrict you much. Even on a budget, you can express creativity in so many different ways. Doing the best you can with limited resources is what separates the rest from the best. Resourcefulness is the single best trait that a person in a competitive field can possess.

Author
Nick Brown is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged on projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.