Tips to Create Great Content within Minutes

As you know, content development is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition. It is also very expensive for small business owners to afford that kind of effort. So they tried the new concept of micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content within little time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.

Using the following ideas, you can develop sufficient micro-content for your social media marketing strategy devoting only few minutes a day for these activities.

Do a Proper Preparation:

Like any marketing initiative you must have a concrete idea about your strategy, selling points and targeting audience locations. Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You'll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative. Once you have a complete idea of "your story," here are some content marketing options that work using few minutes a day:

1) Slideshare:

Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides. Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website.

2) LinkedIn Forums:

LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content.

There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the "search" function at the top of the page, highlight "groups" and look for a few of those have like-minded people who might be interested in you. If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.

Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website. I have made some fantastic connections this way and acquired some great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they "click" on your profile. Depending on your industry, spending at least 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.

3) Networking on Twitter:

This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content by building a targeted audience through Twitter. It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening. Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you're just starting to tweet.

1) Create a habit of sharing Information: Today, every article, post and video has a "tweet" button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.

2) Leverage your Networks: If you have surrounded yourself with interesting people, they're providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don't have to generate everything yourself. "Re-purposing" other people's content takes almost no time all.

3) Try following the "3 x 3 x 3 rule”: If you are new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects: a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.

Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content drive people to action on your website. Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio-data.

Don't be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so that your moments of daily networking are well-utilized.

4) Connecting Through Comments:

Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:

• As small business owner I advised commented on a magazine's Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
• Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
• My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That's not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long "shelf life."
• Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.
• I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re micro or small. People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy? Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments? 

5) Micro-videos:

Videos are just so hot right now but you don't have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.

Within few minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream and LinkedIn status.

6) Micro-Content and Blogging:

There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:

• Cut and paste answers you've already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
• Start a blog post with, you found this interesting article through a link on Twitter and share the great content from one of your tweets.
• Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
• Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.

A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts within minutes.

Hope the above tips are very helpful for writing informative content for your business website. Feel free to send your suggestions and comments for the enhancement of this blog. You can also contact me for SEO analysis and online promotion of your business website.