Your Audience Has No Time for You Either!
Producing content on a regular basis isn't easy. It takes time, energy and discipline—some of your most valuable resources are required to create a posting schedule and then stick to it.
However, don't think you're the only one with time difficulties. Your audience doesn't have time for you either! They don't owe it to you to stay interested in your business or to read your blog. You have to give them strong reasons to give you their prized attention.
They have a lot going on, and you know from your own experience that our lives are busier than ever before. There has never been more strain on our time than there is now due to the fast nature of modern life. Our jobs are busy, our family lives are full of activities and there is always more to do than time to do it.
It's not just that our audience is busy—their attention spans, and in particular the attention span of web users is shockingly low. According to the National Center of Biotechnology Information, the average attention span of human beings is only 8 seconds. That's 8 seconds to grab audience attention—an entire second less than that of a poor goldfish in a bowl! So in a nutshell, you have about 2 short sentences to win or lose your audience.
Here are some more statistics: The average office worker checks their email 50 times a day and checks their smart phone 150 times a day. You have to go to greater lengths to produce higher quality content if you want content marketing to work for you.
The fact is your audience doesn't have time for you, so how can you afford not to make time for them?
Figure Out Where Your Time Is Being Wasted
Start by mapping out each step of the production process from start to finish. Determine how many ideas your team can come up with each week, how many hours per day your writers can realistically spend writing drafts, and how long it takes for those drafts to be approved and edited. Maybe you find that most of your time spent is in the approval process. You can focus more on that phase, and determine what it is that takes so long, and how you can make this time more efficiently spent. You may find that the ideas are all there, but the reason for less-than-adequate publication is because of the editing process.
Set Realistic Goals. Fix the Issue
Once you identify where your time is being wasted, you are now able to set realistic goals that you are more likely to achieve on a consistent basis. It doesn’t mean that your writers aren’t capable of producing quality content, aren’t good at research, or simply aren’t motivated; you probably have set your sights too high. If your writers are coming up with 20 ideas and drafts for articles, but you only have time each week to review and edit 1 of them, let your writers focus less on idea generation, and more on other tasks, such as research, content trends analysis, social data, etc.
You can also look at finding a way to fix your time-wasting weak spot in the production process, and figure out a way to make this faster. You may wish to hire an additional editor to take on more drafts, or shift your writers’ responsibilities, making some of them focus on ideas and others on editing.
Think quality over quantity, but also create content on a consistent basis. Just because you may not be able to hit that 20 articles-a-week goal, it doesn’t mean that your team can’t produce quality content on a weekly basis.
Not seeing the kind of content creation results you want? Need help determining where your time is being wasted and how it can be better utilized to produce results? Contact us at 888-646-8003 or send us an email.