“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?”
This was a question an agency principal asked following one of my presentations. This is typical concern.
I’ve been writing about ad agency new business for 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 provides the resources and inspiration for writing. It also keeps me current with the new technologies that impact the communication industry.
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 that 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 Feedly.com. 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 an RSS reader such as Feedly 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.
Additional articles that may be of interest:
- How Do I Keep Up with Social Media?
- 50 Blog Post Ideas to Fuel Your Ad Agency’s Blog
- How to Write Your Ad Agency’s Blog
- 6 Writing Tips to Make Your Ad Agency’s Blog Effective for New Business
- How do users read on the web? They don’t … they scan
- Ad Agencies: 97 Articles on How To Write Effectively for the Social Web
- 40 Ways to Take Your Ad Agency’s Blog to the Next Level
- Let Hemingway improve your writing for ad agency new business
photo credit: Joel Bedford via photopin cc
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.
Thanks for sharing Richard.