How not to be repetitive when regularly writing content for your blog
To maintain your search engine rankings and to keep your audience engaged, you need to publish content on your blog regularly, preferably, every day.
But, how much new content can you publish?
Sooner or later you come to a point where you feel that you are repeating topics.
Repeating topics doesn’t just make people lose interest in your blog it will also have a negative impact on your search engine rankings because then your ranking juice begins to get diluted when the same sort of topics from your website compete for different positions in search engine rankings.
Why you need to publish content regularly on your blog?
In an ideal world, you shouldn’t have to. In an ideal world, you cover all your important topics and then you focus on your work.
In reality, a continuous tussle is going on. All your competitors want to gain an edge over you.
If you have better search engine rankings, they want to rank higher than you.
If you have better web presence, they want to have better web presence than you.
If you engage more on social media, they want to engage more.
Your competitors are not just competing with you – knowingly and unknowingly – they are also competing with themselves, and in the process, even when they don’t intend to, they’re creating hurdles for you.
You constantly need to overcome these hurdles.
You may have to overcome more hurdles or less hurdles, depending on how much competition you face and how aggressive your competitors are.
To continuously get targeted traffic to your website, you need to maintain your search engine visibility and these days you also need to maintain a presence on social media and social networking websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
If you don’t publish regularly, you lose your search engine rankings, people stop noticing your website, and there is no original content to post on social media and social networking websites. There is no content for email marketing.
You may like to read: Why it is important to publish fresh content regularly on your website.
Regularly writing content: how not to be repetitive
There are two major downsides of being repetitive when writing content for your blog or website regularly:
- Your visitors begin to feel you have got nothing new to say.
- The search engines either conclude that you are publishing duplicate content, or your rankings for your keywords begin to get diluted through your own repetitive content.
You face the following problems, consequently:
- You need to publish regularly.
- You need to come up with original ideas each time you publish.
Listed below are a few things you can do to regularly come up with original ideas and avoid being repetitive.
Do regular brainstorming
Writing content for your website or a blog on an ongoing basis is a serious business. After all, you intend to generate business, right?
Just as you draw up a business plan, you need to regularly brainstorm on what you’re going to write about (or what your content writer is going to write about).
Surprisingly, I have worked with many clients who think that topics are just magically going to crop up.
Just to prove how important it is to regularly come up with right content writing ideas, I charge extra from my clients whenever they insist that I should come up with my own content writing ideas for their website.
Normally, I insist that they give me the ideas because I know that it can be a big drag.
Anyway, coming up with great, relevant and meaningful content writing ideas is a serious exercise, and you will need to brainstorm regularly. You will need to assign separate time.
You may like to read How I generate content writing ideas for different clients.
Maintain an ideas repository
Sometimes ideas do crop up magically, so you need to capture them as soon as they appear, otherwise, like a tiny magical fairy, they’re going to disappear.
Maintain an ideas repository. It can be an Excel sheet. It can simply be a text file. Google Docs document. Voice recordings on your phone. A conventional notepad. Anything. Something that is always nearby, and you don’t have to waste time trying to locate it.
For many years I used Evernote to capture ideas. Then I stopped using Evernote and switched to OneNote.
But I also save drafts with just a title and a few words, within the WordPress dashboard. The main point is, when an idea strikes, save it.
No need to get too bogged down by longform content
Longform content – blog posts and web pages having more than 2000-3000 words – is good. It gives you a competitive edge because not everyone can publish longform content on an ongoing basis.
You may like to read What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how the improve your SEO?
But, the idea of writing 2000-3000 words can be daunting. It can also stultify your creativity because instead of focusing on the topic, you are worried about how to stretch it beyond 2000 words.
Sometimes, if you can manage just 300-400 words, don’t lose use sleep over it. Remember that publishing something is always better than publishing nothing. If there is an interesting idea and you cannot stretch it beyond 2000 words, don’t worry about it, just publish it as it is.
Give new angles to old issues
The possibilities are infinite in this world. Just when you begin to think that every story that could have been written, has been written, there is a new chart buster or a New York bestseller.
I have observed that everyone these days wants to educate. So, web design agencies want to publish content that teaches you how to design websites. Mobile app development companies want you to know how to develop killer mobile apps. Financial consulting companies want to teach you how to manage your finances well.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t do it, but when you solely focus on educating your visitors in a “10 ways you can…” format, you are bound to run out of topics.
Focus on stories instead. Every story is unique in itself. Tell people how you solve individual problems.
For example, explain in a blog post how as a web design company you helped a business promote its brand on the web through a unique web design approach.
As an accounting firm, explain how you helped a business get out of a financial mess that seemed insurmountable before you took over.
You don’t always have to have solved real-world problems yourself. You can solve a hypothetical problem. You can give your own take on a problem solved by someone else.
Maybe you read some news about a business house and you can write about how the problem the business house is facing could have been solved with your service.
Cover recent studies and reports
People love data. They get impressed when you tell that so many people are doing so many things in so many ways in these many days during such and such hours.
Since people love data, bigger agencies are constantly gathering information and then tabulating it for presenting it graphically in an awe-inspiring manner.
For example, this study on HubSpot reveals that businesses and companies that publish 16+ blog posts every month get 3.5 times more traffic than businesses publishing 0-4 blog posts per month.
Though, this is common sense – more content means more traffic – but a study that reveals exact numbers is more convincing and reassuring.
Similarly, every month there are 4-5 studies by different companies and agencies in your niche and you can use these studies to create data-packed blog posts.
One day, you will be publishing your own studies and people will be linking to your studies to create blog posts and articles.
Talk to people for fresh content writing ideas
You can also “crowdsource” your need for fresh content writing ideas by regularly interacting with people wherever the opportunity exists.
You can spend time on online forums.
You can participate and go through Quora discussion threads.
You can encourage people to leave comments on your blog, asking them what they would like to read about.
You can interact with people on Twitter and Facebook.
Whatever platform you prefer, interact with people to get fresh content writing ideas.
Use social media to get new topics
Social media is all about content. I have mentioned Twitter and Facebook above, and even Quora, but you don’t always have to interact with people. You can simply observe conversations and note down what people are talking about in your niche.
Sometimes you can find interesting ideas on YouTube. Many people don’t prefer to write, they would rather make a quick video. Topics that you don’t find on Google, sometimes you find them on YouTube.
Doing image search is also a good way of coming across good content writing ideas. In images, people use phrases and expressions that they don’t use in the text. You can get a completely new take on a subject.
Infographics. These days many companies publish infographics. You can pick any of the subtopics and write complete blog posts around them.
Read books, white papers and case studies
In-depth knowledge in your field can be gained by reading books, white papers and case studies.
Every new chapter in a book, every new heading or subheading, can give you a new content writing idea.
Even if you don’t get a single idea from a book, it will create a fertile ground and trigger your creativity that will in return, help you come up with original content writing ideas.
In whichever field you are, reading books anyway helps you grow intellectually. Even if you don’t plan on writing blog posts, reading books is a good habit to develop.
Use blog topic idea generators
Personally, I’m not a very big fan of online blog topic idea generators, but they can at least kickstart the creative process sometimes. They can give you a nudge towards the right direction.
When you use these topic idea generators, you simply submit your main phrase and then they churn out 5-10 topics you can work on.
Some good blog topic idea generators are
There are many more blog topic idea generators. BuzzSumo above easily comes in the most expensive category but it also gives you many more tools.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, regularly publishing high-quality content is simply unavoidable. Even if you think that it is needless to publish content regularly, your competitors don’t think so.
Sooner or later, every business realizes that it needs to have a sustainable content writing and content marketing strategy. Some realize its sooner, and some take their own good time, incurring lots of losses in the process.
So, once you have decided that you need to publish content regularly, you need to set in motion a process that supplies you with fresh content writing ideas on an ongoing basis.
In the beginning you may face some problems, but as you get used to regularly publishing content to promote your business, you will be surprised how fast you come across new ideas.