How to write content for your website without hiring a content writer
I know, such advice isn’t good for my business, but so far I have learnt that people who don’t want to hire a writer won’t hire, and people who do hire a content writer, have a clear idea why they are doing so, and nothing is going to stop them.
Why you need to write content for your website?
Without accessing content, the search engine crawlers cannot figure what your website is about. The search engine crawlers use big data and AI algorithms to make sense of your website. Hence, a few pages and a few blog posts won’t do. They need to access lots of content from your website before they can rank it for the right search terms and keywords. Hence, you need to write lots of content for your website.
Another reason is that your competitors are constantly trying to outdo your content writing efforts. If you publish one blog post, they will gladly publish 10, or if not 10, at least 2-3 blog posts for every single post you publish. Multiply this with 25 competitors that you have and you can imagine how much content is being pumped.
You are constantly catching up. Does it mean it is a no-win game? No. You can outdo your competitors even with less content provided you stick to high quality content. And regularity.
Of course, you also need fresh content to educate your audience and keep people engaged. If you don’t publish fresh content your website becomes stale, and you give no reason to people to come to your website repeatedly. Research has shown that it takes 5-6 visits to the website before people decide to do business with you.
Why do people hire a content writer to regularly publish content?
There are different reasons why people hire a content writer. Some of these reasons are
- Lack of time: They don’t have time to write by themselves.
- No writing experience: Writing is a skill that needs to be developed. It is time-consuming. It is an entirely different, dedicated profession.
- Regularity: For better search engine visibility and user engagement you need to publish content regularly. You need a commitment. It is a separate, stand-alone activity.
How to write and publish fresh content on your website without hiring a content writer
Mind you, in case you don’t want to turn into a full-fledged content writer yourself (leaving your current profession), this is a temporary situation. Maybe you are a startup. Maybe you don’t have enough funds.
The thing is, right now you cannot offer a good compensation to a content writer. But, as your business grows, as your needs to get higher search engine rankings and higher visibility grow, you will need to hire a professional content writer. So the tips shared in this blog post are only for a temporary situation.
Here are a few things you can do to write and publish content on your website without hiring a content writer.
Regularity and quality are important than quantity
This is something that I keep telling my clients repeatedly: don’t get obsessed about how many words you should write. I’m not saying create 15-word posts, but you don’t always have to aim for 1000 words or 1500 words.
Engagement is more important. Hence, if you have got something important to say and you can say in 400 words, just publish 400 words. Make sure that whatever you are saying is relevant, educational and informative.
Use your subject matter expertise
You already have immense knowledge of your field. If you are an accountant, there are many topics and subtopics you are aware of. If you are an engineer or a software designer, there are many aspects of software design you can talk about (just make sure they are fit for your audience and not for other software designers who may not be your target audience).
Sit someday with an Excel sheet and in one column enter all the topics you can think of. You will be surprised to know how many topics you can come up with.
Interview influencers
Everybody likes to share insights. There must be multiple influencers in your industry. Choose a topic and interview a few influencers on that topic. They will get additional exposure and you will have something to write about.
Prepare a list of questions – 10 or so – and then approach a few influencers and ask them to send you the replies. You can interview them live using Skype or phone (or Zoom) or simply ask them to write down the replies to your questions.
An interview is ready-made content. You just have to prepare questions and the remaining content is provided by the interviewees.
Curate content
Content curation saves people lots of time. It requires some research but if you make collecting and preserving interesting content a habit, it won’t take much time.
While you are browsing the Internet, you keep coming across interesting content based on your industry. Instead of simply reading or viewing and then moving on, save those links. Then every week, compile those links into a single blog post. Write a paragraph and then share the link, for every piece of content. Such curated content is also good for your search engine rankings because concentrated amount of information is available under a single link. Google algorithms like such links.
Repurpose your existing content
If you don’t want to hire a content writer, this is another way of writing and publishing content on your own. But this requires you to have some existing content. There may be many pages on your website. Your blog may have a few blog posts.
Above I have talked about content curation. This is a subtopic of a bigger blog post that I’m writing right now. I can also create a separate blog post on the importance of content creation. Content repurposing can be done not just for your own website, but different platforms. You can turn your existing blog post into a newsletter issue. You can rewrite an existing blog post by adding some new information and publishing it on LinkedIn. You can write a smaller version on LinkedIn and then put the link to your existing blog post on your website.
Publish guest blog posts
For this your website or blog needs to cross a certain threshold level. People would like to write for your blog or website if they expect good visibility or some SEO benefit. For that, you should have a decent presence on search engines and the guest blog posters must be impressed enough to approach you to write for your website. This takes initial hard work.
On an average I get 2-3 queries from different guest posters expressing their desire to write on my website. Although for a few months I haven’t been accepting guest posts (in fact, I’m writing this blog post myself, after many months), I am going to leverage this opportunity in the coming months so that I can publish content regularly on my content writing blog.
Conclusion
Provided that you are a prolific writer, and you love to communicate through the written word, you don’t ever need to hire a content writer, otherwise, this is a temporary solution.
Why do you need to ultimately hire a content writer? Regularity. Google and other search engines are constantly crawling the web to find new content. They set up a pattern to crawl certain websites and blogs. This pattern depends on the publishing frequency. If you don’t publish regularly their crawlers don’t crawl and index your website in a timely manner.
Although you cannot outdo your competitors (because every other business that offers something similar to your business is a competitor, and there may be hundreds), you can convince search engines that they can rely on you for consistent supply of high-quality content through persistent publishing.