Building Up Content

It's summertime, and the living is easy! Here in Southwest Florida, most of us recognize that summer is a lovely, quiet, peaceful time when the roads are clear and the restaurants offer summer dining specials. Happy hour, here we come! Even though summer is indeed more relaxing, it is certainly easy to get into a mode where you are not expecting to do much of anything. Enjoy not having to deal with seasonal customers, clients, etc., in a flurry of activity, but anticipate working hard in order to get ready for the Fall. Set yourself up for success during season by building up content on your blog and paving the way for people to find you during the busiest times of year in our area.

The Fort Myers and Naples areas markets are driven by search engines. Visitors to our area find us through the most popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They, of course, seek out recommendations from others through the classic, ever popular, word of mouth marketing. They confirm these recommendations through search engines. In order to bolster your chances of being found, always remember the relatively new adage, "Content is King." Search engines crave new content on your site. Here's the trick -- it has to be well-written and free from grammatical errors. And most importantly of all is that it must be ORIGINAL. Never ever copy and paste!

During these summer months, build up content and schedule it for publication throughout the year. First, make sure you have a blog onsite that mirrors your own website. There should be a tab on your site labeled, "Blog" or "News" directing visitors to fresh content. Secondly, follow these easy tips for building up interesting content during the summer months:

• Make sure you are posting once a week at the very least. During the busy seasonal months, it is easy to allow weeks to go by without a post. In your mind, it is easy to justify. "I'm doing really well right now -- we're so busy, I could never find time to blog." Find the time NOW to post once per week. Twice or three times a week is best -- five times ideal. 
• After you finish your post for this week, start on your posts for next week (and subsequent weeks). You can use your blog's functionality to schedule posts on specific days at specific times. It's simple and easy to do -- it allows you to plan out content and marketing themes for the weeks ahead as well, which brings me to my next point...
• Create a schedule for your blog. Think of it as a marketing outline. What will you say about your products/services in the weeks ahead? Creating an outline allows you to fill in content rather than think, "What will I talk about today?" Take this proactive approach, and thank me later. This outline/schedule of sorts can dictate your social media efforts and all other digital media marketing you do throughout the year.
• Writer's blog bit your proverbial tongue? Write all those posts you've been meaning to write. Here are a few ideas -- client success stories, product usage information, stories about business growth, ideas in the development stages, reflections on your successes or failures, guest bloggers -- the possibilities are endless. If you still need help coming up with topics on which to write, send me an email or give me a call. I'd be happy to help brainstorm.