By now, most business owners know that if they want to drive traffic to their website, simply relying on good search engine optimization (SEO) is not enough. You need to have compelling and interesting content posted on a regular basis.

The problem is, most businesses are not in the content industry; they are in the business of selling whatever product or service that they sell. So how do they produce a variety of interesting and engaging content consistently?

If the business owner enjoys writing, creating his or her own content can be a great way to establish a voice online, and speak directly to customers.

If the business owner does not enjoy writing, however, it can become a tedious and painful experience that doesn’t produce the desired content anyway. Writing unique and consistent content alone is extremely time consuming. Combine that with the fact that the business owner doesn’t want to do it, and it’s no surprise that it often falls off the to do list once other priorities arise.

So how can a non-writing small business owner generate good content in a way that makes economic sense?

Step 1: Create a List of Topics

The first step is to develop a list of topics you’d like to create content around. This can be as easy as spending 15 minutes brainstorming everything you think would be valuable, engaging and interesting information for your target audience. Once you get started, you may be surprised how fast your list grows.

Step 2: Hire a Researcher

The second step in streamlining the content creation process is to hire someone to conduct online research. Take the list you created in Step 1, and let the researcher dig into what’s out there and flesh out some of the ideas even further.

Your researcher can look for umbrella topics, break down complex ideas, and add new angles based on what’s found in the research. He or she can also compile links to articles already written on the topics you’re exploring so you can take a different approach with your content.

One potential goldmine of topic ideas are the comments on existing popular posts related to your selected topics. Views shared, statements made and questions asked in response to the content can provide many more topic ideas for your list.

Step 3: Find a Freelance Writer

The third step is actually having the content written. And if you don’t want to do it yourself, then you need to hire someone to do it for you. Freelance writers vary greatly in price; but, in most cases, you should be able to find a good writer who charges around $30 for a 300-400 word post with original content.

If you are producing 10 blog posts (this will give you enough content for five weeks, at a rate of two per week), your total will come to somewhere around $300 for writing. You should estimate another $100-150 for research.

Step 4: Use the Content Creatively

If that estimated cost seems like a lot to you, keep in mind that you won’t just be getting 10 blog posts in return; here is where else you can leverage all of that content and research.

For example, why not repurpose one or two of your blog posts and send them to your existing email list.  You can easily create a monthly email newsletter based on content you’ve posted on your blog, perhaps with slight modifications.

You can also use snippets of your blog posts on your social media profiles to start conversations. And don’t forget about the links to existing articles on the topics you’re interested in. You can become a content curator in your industry by posting the direct links that your researcher uncovered. You would probably  have enough links to share on your networks to build a good audience every month, all of whom will be exposed to links to your own newly created blog posts, too.

Suddenly that investment doesn’t look so large, does it? And perhaps most valuable, that investment has left you free to actually run your business and not worry about writing content you really don’t want to write. Priceless.

Image credit: raffit

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