Reading Can Fuel Your Writing for Ad Agency New Business

“Okay, I believe that content marketing can create significant traffic to my agency’s blog and generate inbound new business leads. But my main concern is that I wont have enough to write about that would be of interest to my audience. What should I do?”

I’ve been writing about ad agency new business for four years. My wife will occassoinaly ask how can I possibly have anything more to write about regarding “ad agency new business”. But I still have plenty of ideas. At last count, I had over 200 post drafts that await my completion.

What fuels my writing? A solid reading program that keeps me ahead of the curve and provides the resources for writing.

My reading had to be strategic and more efficient. It also had to be focused, geared to the interest of my target audience which is small to midsize advertising agencies and specifically, ad agency new business. I learned early on to constantly manually searching online was a huge time waster.

The primary tool that simplified, strategized and focused my online reading more efficiently has been the use of an RSS Reader, specifically Google Reader. This Reader is set as my Homepage, on my Firefox browser to help me ritualistically start each day using it. I found that if I opened even on email, most of the day my reading was put on the back-burner.

Also, I’m ADD enough, that when I just Google information, I’m easily distracted and chase lots of rabbits. An hour or two goes by and I can’t even recall what I initially was searching for. Google Reader resolves this issue for me.

Using Google Reader can be awkward and first, but you will soon see its value and time-management benefits. I have hundreds of focused, daily RSS feeds coming to me instead of me searching for them. They are all one central location, organized in specific topical folders.

A couple of tools will enhance your Google Reader experience and make your reading seamless:

Bit.ly is a little tool is becoming a big deal. It is now the default shortener for Twitter and has rapidly become the most popular URL shortener available.Google Reader included it in their new “send-to” feature, which lets you share any post on Twitter, automatically shortening long URLs with bit.ly. Just sign up for bit.ly and drag and drop into your browser bar.
Press This. This tool is for WordPress.com users. You can collect and share bits of the web easier and faster than ever with Press This, the new WordPress bookmarklet. Grab an article title, URL and info quickly and add it as a draft post. When you are in your writing mode, all you need do is go to your blog post drafts and you’ll have plenty of writing resources to kick start a new post.

In addition to an RSS Reader, eNewsletters also provide a great resource. Some of these are daily briefs and others are received either weekly or monthly. Here are a few of my choice newsletters:

A couple of other online sources that are directed to my Inbox allows me to stay organized and focused.

Google Alerts (Some handy uses of Google Alerts include monitoring news stories, keeping current on a competitor or industry)
TweetBeeps (Keep track of conversations that mention you, your URL, your clients, anything, with hourly updates)

Additional articles that may be of interest:

Comments

Richard Posey says:

January 17, 2011 at 11:55 am

While I use Google Reader, I also use Google’s home page, iGoogle, stuffed with RSS feeds. It allows me to scan across multiple blogs quickly. I’ve also used tabs to allow me to quickly scan updates to blogs on specific topics. Here’s how my home page looks on one of my computers: iGoogle page. Same stuff you’ll find in my Google Reader, but just a different way of using the feeds.

Michael Gass says:

January 18, 2011 at 11:08 pm

Thanks for sharing Richard.