Writing for your blog or community pages can be a challenge. Make your life easier by covering and sharing content that is part of your everyday work.

Here are five quick tips I just gave a client Bryan Davis who provides mobile phone and telecommunication services.

Five Quick Content Themes

1. Question of the week – the answer to a challenging question you were asked this week i.e. just share what you said already
2. Latest new phone gossip – an overview of content you have read in the course of doing your daily work
3. News round up – the top news as found in your Google Reader that week. You choose this on personal opinion or pick the ones with the hightest PostRank score
4. Money saving tip – you do this for clients every week. Share the love!
5. Industry Insights  - your opinion on something topical and how it relates to your audience

You dont have to change the future of the planet with your blog posts – you just have to add value to your audience. Twist these five suggestions to fit your work and you will soon find creating content easier.

One of the biggest challenges when creating content is finding time around your existing work and all your other social media efforts. What you should do is use the content creation process to engage your audience.

The great benefit of doing this is when you do finally publish it you will have a ready prepared audience eagerly waiting for it. What’s more if you produce your content on a subject that is topical to your business it will be easier to write, you may learn something new and you will also likely generate more enquiries.

Share Content Plans With Followers

When you first start to create a piece of content you may often wonder what people want to know about. Using trending topics and discussions with lots of comments is a good way to find out. You could of course just ask. A LinkedIn discussion, Facebook update or just a quick tweet will do nicely.

Planning an industry survey – what’s the biggest challenge you face in using social media for your business?” Please reply and RT

Survey Your Respondents

Once you have some responses put together a quick survey. Google Docs surveys are simple and free to deploy. Share your goals and intentions along the way as this will make people feel more involved. You can even offer early access to the data as an incentive. A quick blog post is a good way to do this. You can share details of the blog post on back your social profiles, such as the LinkedIn discussion.

Thanks for all your responses. The biggest challenge currently faced is “How To Measure Results of Your Social Media Efforts”. I compiling an industry report on this subject and will give anyone who answers my short survey early access to the findings. Please take 5 minutes to answer these six questions

Tease Your Audience

Brands such as Apple are experts at building anticipation and desire for their products by leaking out snippets of information. You can keep your audience engaged by sharing findings and thoughts along the way e.g. on Twitter:

Amazing insights from measuring social media survey. 28% of businesses say they don’t know how to measure results. 32% say the do. Which part are you?” Full report to come.

Publish Your Report

When you results are all in then it’s time to create and publish your content. Remember, you want it to have reach and you want it to drive traffic back to you. Write a blog post and place the report in it. A great way to do this is publish your documents and presentations on Slideshare.net and embed the player in your blog post. This excellent social network will help you get your content shared. If you want to use your report to build an email database turn off the download feature and put a link to your email subscription page throughout the presentation. Remember to tell people how to get it.

Share Content With Your Audience

Go back to the original contributors first. Let them know they have first access. Ask them to comment and to share it with their network. If you don’t tell people what to do they wont. After a day or so make a larger more prominent series of announcements about your survey. Do so on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn updates. Reference it in the comments of other relevant blogs and discussions. Email it to bloggers and publications who might want to reference the findings. Be sure to always drive people back to your blog for full access to the report.

I read yesterday that not keeping your blog updated is worse than not starting one in the first place. I don’t need reminding of that as I tell clients the same thing all the time. But isn’t this my first blog post since 21st of September? And, I promised that I would write a at least once per week. Yes I said that and I haven’t posted for two weeks. My excellent excuse is that I have had a baby. Jago Jensen was born healthy and happy but it has highlighted I didn’t have a blog content contingency plan in place.

Writing blog content in advance

Having an effective content plan in place is vital to a successful blog. In his excellent blog post on the subject Hendry Lee outlines the steps to take. He also includes this advice for writing blog content in advance

Blogging requires you to update your blog regularly with useful content. Readers who subscribe to get updates for your content expect you to update your blog every so often. They will lose interest if you fail to satisfy them.

Don’t put your blog on hiatus if possible. Ask others to guest blog for as long as you are away. You may also write the blog posts upfront and schedule the publishing in future dates. Thanks to blog software this is very easy to do.

A few benefits of writing blog content in advance:

• Compatible with your schedule. You can write blog posts whenever you have time.
• Higher quality. If you are not on deadlines, you can take all the time you have to produce content.
• Site can run itself for some time. If you have a two-week vacation, you can leave a note but keep the content coming.

You can read the rest of Hendry’s post on Blog Content Planning for more advice. I have and will be updating my plan – especially the advance content – accordingly.

How much content have you written in advance? And what have you done when you weren’t around to keep your internet marketing active?