If you want to use content marketing to promote your business online, the greatest hurdle can be writing high-quality content on an ongoing basis. This might not be a problem if you are a big business and you have a budget to achieve this. But if you are a small business, it might be a bit difficult to hire a full-time content writer and you may have to churn up something relevant on your own, preferably, every day.

According to this Content Marketing Institute report (it’s a PDF), 51% B2C content marketers face the challenge of producing enough high-quality content. 57% claim that they don’t have enough time to produce the sort of content that is actually effective. Predictably, larger companies, since they have more budget and they can hire the people who can produce quality content, don’t face much difficulty in producing high quality content compared to smaller companies.

Why do you need to write high-quality content on an ongoing basis?

There is lots of competition on the Internet. When you are not writing, scores of your competitors are. This is because people who take their content marketing seriously know that without content no marketing exists. Since everybody is producing content in one form or another, everybody tries to outdo each other. Although it would be impractical to outdo everybody, there is a certain degree of pace that you need to keep in order to remain visible and not get left behind. For example, if you are a small business I would suggest that you publish at least 3 blog posts every week on your business blog and then promote individual blog posts as much as you can using various channels available to you. This is an ongoing process. You can’t add 20 odd blog posts and articles in one go and think that your content marketing is over. In fact, it has just started. The search engines won’t even start crawling or indexing your content if you just have 20 blog posts. You need to continuously publish for at least a few months in order to get a decent presence on the Internet, compared to your competitors.

How do you write high-quality content extremely fast?

So how do you write high-quality content extremely fast so that you can fit in content marketing with your busy professional schedule? After all, writing content isn’t your main occupation. It is just one of the marketing activities and as you already know, there are many other promotional activities you will need to focus on in order to beat competition.

1. Always be on the lookout for great writing ideas:
   You should be sensitive towards receiving new content writing ideas because once you become sensitive, you will notice that such ideas are everywhere. While reading blog posts and articles, while going through your Facebook, Twitter and Google + news feeds and even while reading magazines and newspaper, once your mind becomes receptive, you will receive content writing ideas. There is a UK-based company for whom I’m writing content that is totally unrelated to its field, still I need to relate the content to its field and write interesting content. Now I wonder why I never did this for my own business.
2. Maintain an ideas bank:
   Ideas come and when you don’t preserve them, they go vanish into the oblivion. So once they hit you, you need to save them somewhere. You can use something like Evernote to preserve your ideas. If Evernote is too bulky for you, you can use Google Keep.
3. Work on multiple content topics at the same time: Sometimes you feel stuck and when you feel stuck, it causes delay. When you start working on a blog post or an article for your website, don’t think that you need to publish it on the very same day (I used to get trapped in this rut). You need to practice patience. Let it simmer whenever you feel that you cannot move forward. Instead of wasting your time staring at the screen, move onto another topic. When you feel that you have something valuable to add to the previous blog post or article, come back to it and start writing again. Make use of all the technology tools available to you. Save your content writing documents on the cloud using services like Dropbox, Google Drive or even One Drive so that you can access your documents from anywhere, from any device.
4. Remain ahead of the schedule: It’s like, if you need to complete or publish something on Wednesday, don’t wait for Wednesday morning. Try to complete it on Tuesday, and if possible even on Monday. I’m trying to practice this with my content writing projects. Sometimes I used to feel very relaxed because hey, if you need to dispatch something on Wednesday, why worry on Monday, or even Tuesday. This creates crunch time and when it is crunch time, it’s difficult to be in a commanding position and for a writer, it’s very important to be in the commanding position.
5. Maintain and stick to an editorial calendar: Editorial calendar means deciding on which day you’re going to write and publish what. Maintaining an editorial calendar is a good way to keep your content writing juices flowing and also remain on schedule. If you don’t have an editorial calendar, you become relaxed. For example, if you were supposed to publish something on Wednesday and you didn’t, then there is a great chance you won’t publish it even on Thursday, or even on Friday. And then it becomes a pattern. You start missing days and then soon you realise, you aren’t publishing content at all. Having said that, my personal experience is that an editorial calendar works better for bigger businesses because they have dedicated teams of content writers to take care of the tight schedule. When it comes to small businesses, more than sticking to the editorial calendar, I stress on regularly publishing content, as often as you can, because this is far better than having no content.
6. Constantly save reference and research material: Just like you should preserve ideas, you should also preserve reference and research material somewhere. Again, my favourite tool for this is Evernote. You can create notebooks and within those notebooks you can create notes to save different stuff. This isn’t the best thing, the best thing is that you can attach tags to various notes. For example, if I have saved something and tagged it as “content marketing stats”, the next time I need to use some solid content marketing stats in one of my blog posts, I can quickly search the relevant tag and find the material that I need to use. Remember that it is not about saving your stats and other bits of information, it’s about finding them when you need them. Evernote is great in finding your saved information but I haven’t used Google Keep extensively (but considering it’s from Google, it might have faster searching and indexing mechanism). Another benefit of using Evernote is that you can get a browser plug-in that allows you to save information while you’re surfing the web which, right now, is not possible with Google Keep.
7. Develop your own unique voice: You can write high-quality content extremely fast if you don’t try to imitate someone. This is same as trying to walk like someone else – although for some time it might be fun, after a while you will get tired and you would like to resume your own way of working. The same goes with content writing, or for that matter any sort of writing. You need to develop your own unique voice, your own style, your own way of writing. When you have your own way of writing, you are extremely comfortable and when you’re comfortable, you write fast and fluently.
8. Continuously educate yourself: Continuous education is a must if you want to write high-quality content fast on an ongoing basis. The more you know, the more confident you feel and the more confident you feel, the easier the words come to you. If you don’t know something, how are you going to write about it? If you are not comfortable with the topic, you will need to do lots of research and you will need to write about stuff you don’t know much about. This makes your writing stiff. As a professional content writer, I’m used to writing on totally alien topics with great amount of ease but that is because I have gotten used to it. I have been writing content for different businesses for many years now so if I need to do some research and then write accordingly, I don’t face much problem, but then again, in order to come to this level, you need lots of practice and experience.
9. Cover a single topic in a single piece of content: You don’t want to pack everything into a single piece of content. For example, in this blog post I’m writing about how to write high-quality content extremely fast. I’m not writing about optimized content. I’m not trying to tell how to make your content social media friendly. I’m not telling here how to optimally use keywords in order to improve your search engine rankings with SEO content writing. No, I’m just talking about how to write lots of high-quality content in as fast a manner as possible.
10. Rewrite existing content: You can rewrite existing content faster than writing new content from scratch. If you have lots of blog posts, webpages and articles already published on your website, you can choose a subtopic and then expand upon it. Or, a lot must have changed since you wrote on that particular topic a couple of years ago. Why not write it with a completely new perspective, using the latest information that you have with you?

The tips mentioned above will help you create high-quality content quite fast but ultimately it depends on you whether you want to develop the mindset that helps you write quality content on a regular basis. It’s all about getting started and once you get used to it, you will discover that it is quite easy to regularly write and publish good content not just for your own blog or website, but also for various other websites where you can expand your presence.