13 Tips To Blog Consistently – But With Minimal Cost Effort

Blogging consistently is hard, which is why most people don’t.

Most people quit blogging in the first 3 months.

The key to blogging, is writing. If you can write consistently, you’ll always have content and therefore a blog.

While most people believe that blogging consistently is about constantly churning out articles yourself, we’ve assembled some tips to alleviate that burden, which hopefully will help you get creative with your blog and publish content more consistently.

1. Outsource The Writing

The easiest way for something to get done is to pay someone else to do it.

Yes, this is going to cost money but if you’re blogging to begin with you’ve accepted that blogging has some longterm ROI, and therefore is worth some price to pay for someone else to do it.

Finding someone is not too hard, for example, there are numerous freelancer marketplaces like Upwork on which you can hire bloggers who are capable about writing on a multitude of topics.

Or, you can use a service like Textbroker so you don’t have to manage a new employee.

2. Get Employees To Blog

If you don’t want to hire a content writer, you can make it a part of your employee’s jobs.

For example, Groove has a blog entirely dedicated to customer support, run by their customer success manager.

Basically, they’ve expanded his role and made blogging a part of it.

So, which of your employees are quality writers?

3. Crowdsource Your Article

An article we published not that long ago was titled: The Ultimate Influencer Marketing Guide | Question & Answer

Now, we wrote all the answers but the questions came from HARO, Help A Report Out.

We simply submitted a request for people to respond with their influencer marketing questions, then took those questions, answered them, and made an article from them.

You can do similar things with Quora, for example.

4. Do An Interview Series

An easy way to get new content by reusing the same template is with interviews. All you have to do is come up with the set of questions, send them over to a new influencer each week / month, and then post the interview.

The questions are the same but the content is different, making it unique and interesting each time, but requiring little work on your part.

5. Invite Case Study Submissions

If you sell a product or service, then you can benefit from soliciting case studies of people being successful using your tool.

Once a month we’ll make an announcement to our newsletter soliciting case studies. When people write about how much they love and use the software we get all the benefits of testimonials, social proof, and free content.

6. Invite Others To Guest Post

Many top blogs actually use guest writers to fill the majority of their quota.

For example, HubSpot and KissMetrics, are two companies that publish content all the time, the majority of which is from guest contributors.

But you don’t have to be a mega company to do this, for example, we also publish guest blogs once a week despite only receiving around 30k pageviews a month.

7. Repurpose Other Content

There’s a lot of content that can easily be repurposed into a post, for example:

• Transcribe a podcast
  
• Transcribe a video
  
• Infographics
  
• Presentations

So, take a piece of content you already have, in any medium, and then convert it to another. You can post it just the same on your blog, as well as other websites like SlideShare for additional exposure.

8. Keep An Editorial Calendar

I notoriously forget things I don’t write down.

So, if I want to write consistently, I keep a calendar. Once it’s down in writing it becomes significantly more likely that I’m going to complete it.

There are some great wordpress calendar plugins you can use, or just your own spreadsheet.

9. Write 1000 Words, Everyday

One experiment I’m quite fond of is Nathan Barry’s writing 1000 words everyday.

The task is simple – everyday write 1000 words. It doesn’t necessarily matter if they’re quality, in fact, in many cases the written content might even be thrown out or rewritten.

What’s important is that you write everyday.

What this leads to is 365000 words a year, which is more than enough for weekly blog posts, and even books. Here’s what Nathan got done after 100 days:

• 20,000 words of guest posts
  
• 30,000 words for The App Design Handbook
  
• 25,000 words for the new project (see below)
  
• 15,000 words for my own blog
  
• 10,000 words for my chapter in The Smashing Mobile Book

In fact it worked so well for Nathan he created an app called Commitment, all about sticking to something daily.

10. Use Voice To Text Software

Last year I had awful tendinitis in both my arms.

I literally couldn’t type on the computer, I signed up with Dragon’s Voice To Text software.

And it was game changing.

Not only did it work around my tendinitis, but after I got used to it and it adjusted to my voice, I found that it was actually quicker and more accurate than my typing.

Personally, I like to think and pace at the same time, so it’s a more convenient process for writing.

If you’re not a particularly fast typer, try a voice to text software. There are plenty of apps available, I’ve tried many, in fact, but Dragon is my favorite.

11. Update Old Content

Have you ever noticed on Brian Dean’s blog he writes when the article was Last Updated?

This is because he doesn’t just let old articles sit, but constantly keeps them up to date.

It’s a fact that updating content will help it rank better in the search engines.

It’s also a better user experience.

And finally, it can be easier than writing something completely new.

If you’re short on time, focus on updating an older piece and republishing it.

12. Republish Someone Else’s Post

Recently I received an email from someone asking if they could republish one of my posts.

They agreed to provide a canonical link back to the original source and cite it in the article as well so there would be no confusion of duplicate content issues.

I agreed – why not? It’s additional exposure for me.

The added benefit for them is essentially free content to engage their audience with, but direct them to their website instead of ours.

In this way, everyone comes out a winner.

13. Republish Your Own Post

Taking from the above example, can you republish a post that you wrote elsewhere?

Well, probably not without someone’s permission, but many outlets allow you to republish a post as long as you wait a few months and cite the original source.

So, if you’re struggling to keep pace with your off site content writing efforts and your onsite efforts, consider this strategy.

Your Turn

I definitely understand how blogging is a lot of time.

But, as you’ve seen from the above examples there are ways to make content without even writing a single word!

What other ideas do you have for blogging consistently with minimal cost and effort?

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