How to Raise Your Publishing Game Without Taking Up All Your Time
Every professional needs a great website.
Whether you’re an independent creative or a 200-person business, you can’t afford to be a shrinking violet. Not anymore.
The problem is, maintaining an active, attractive website takes a lot of time and resources — luxuries you probably don’t have in spades.
In this post, we’ll quickly review five strategies you can employ to expand perhaps the single biggest bottleneck for your personal or corporate website: your publishing schedule.
- Create a Content Calendar
First things first: create a realistic content calendar and stick to it. If you’re reasonably confident that you can produce one high-quality blog post per week, great. Do that.
Just don’t assume that you can scale your production up to three or four posts overnight while maintaining that same level of quality. Maybe in the near future — but you’ll need to use the rest of these strategies to scale up that far.
- Stick to a Relatively Narrow Wheelhouse
Stick with what you’re good at. Noted film producer David Mimran focuses his content creation primarily on film-related topics. That no doubt shortens his content creation runway and allows him to crank out high-quality posts quickly. After all, he’d much rather be doing what he does best: making movies.
- Use a Double-Track Editing Process
It sounds counterintuitive, but siloing your copy editing and content editing is rocket fuel for your publishing efficiency.
On your first pass, focus on editing for clarity and structure. Does what you wrote actually, you know, make sense? Did you say everything in the clearest, most efficient way possible?
Then, move onto editing for grammar, spelling, and all that other boring stuff. Don’t commingle the two — you’re certain to make mistakes that way.
- Use High-Quality Freelancers as Appropriate
You don’t have to do everything yourself. At least, not if you don’t have time. Instead, use reputable platforms like Upwork to find quality freelance talent and task them with producing non-core content as needed. Remember, you can always edit and rewrite what they’ve put together; at least you’re building on a base, not starting from scratch.
- Lean in on Visual and Multimedia Elements
Don’t send your audience running headlong into a wall of text. Take a page out of SEO expert Brian Dean’s book and produce “visual-first” blog posts brimming with charts, graphs, and other media elements. Your readers’ eyes will thank you, and they just might learn something along the way.
Stop Worrying, Start Writing
Virtually every writer experiences writer’s block at some point. Most will tell you that the best way — the only way, really — to overcome it is simply to write through it. By the time you come to and focus on what you’ve been doing, you’ll realize that you’re past the pit — free and unencumbered to write once more.
You don’t have to be a professional writer to produce a halfway decent personal website, of course. But you’d do well to learn from those who’ve successfully beaten back the curse of writer’s block. Rather than worry about how your website and blog will come off to those who don’t know you that well, focus on getting something down on the page — and then another something, and another, and another. There’s nothing wrong with learning on the job, as long as you’re actually learning.
