Schubert Solutions

Sometimes 24 hours is not enough time to get everything done, especially when you’ve got a lot of content to create.  When you think about it, 24 hours is really not that much.  Take out at least 8 of those hours for sleeping–and you should be sleeping at least 8 hours–and you’re left with only 16 workable hours.  Need to eat?  Take out at least two more hours for that.  Have a family?  Yeah, they’ll probably want to hang out with you at some point.  Minus two more hours.  Commute to work?  If you’re here in DC or Northern Virginia, you probably do, and it’ll probably cost you another two hours.  You’re left with ten hours.  Ten itsy-bitsy hours in which to run errands, complete work, feed your cat, go to the little girl’s/boy’s room, etc.

Being that time is a hot commodity these days, how do you make the most of it when it comes to content creation?  To be successful, your content will ideally be informative, compelling, and interesting for your readers.  You’ll need content for article distribution marketing, blogging, press releases, brochures, white papers–the list is endless.  You can spend your ten hours working on all that content, or you can hire a freelance content writer to take care of it for you.  If you choose to work on content creation yourself, here’s a few tips for making the most of your ten hours:

1. Start with a topic that interests you, but also one that is in line with your business. Accountants can write about new tax legislature.  Veterinarians can write about common pet health issues.  No matter what you write about, keep on topic.  Tangents cost time.  Further, if you use your own knowledge-base and only use research to fill in the blanks, you can avoid the dreaded internet research chasm–one minute you’re Googling “Twitter usage statistics,” next thing you know you’ve spent an hour reading about Mary Queen of Scots.  It happens.
2. Subheadings are your new BFF. Subheadings help quickly organize thoughts within larger articles or content pieces, acting almost like a very broad outline.  If you’re writing an article about a philanthropist who just built a new school in a third world country, your subheadings might include:  ”Meet Joe Philanthropist,” “Benefits of Education in the Third World,” “Building an Institution and a Safe Haven,” or “Roadblocks Along the Way.”  All of these subheadings recognize different pieces of the story, and they help organize the information so that even readers who skim (and there are lots of them!) will get the gist of the piece.
3. Write a list. Lists are not only easy for readers to skim, they are also far quicker to write.  Got an idea for an article about comparing universities?  Top 10 Party Schools.  5 Best Schools for Creative Writers.  7 Universities with Low Tuition.  Fill in the list and you’ve got your article.  Added bonus:  list article headlines are very attractive to most web surfers.
4. Write another list. This list refers not to your article, but to your idea log.  While you’re filling your ten hours with various work and fun stuff, try to log ideas for articles along the way.  Journal them, e-mail them to yourself, text them to your inbox–however you need to do it.  When you get around to writing an article, you can skip right over the time consuming task of deciding on a topic.
5. Keep it short. Blogs have a sweet spot of between 300-600 words.  Articles work well between 500-750.  You don’t need to write an epic to get people to read your content.  In fact, you shouldn’t.