Short Form Content And Consistency!
Did I Say That Out Loud?
Medium Non-Members Can Read The Full Story HERE!
What Will You Learn From This Article?
A Writer’s Struggle Is Real!
How To Get New Writing Ideas.
A Plan To Maintain Consistency.
Short Form Content Attempt Failed.
A Writer’s Struggle Is Real!
Allow me to start by saying this is one of those days where I am completely out of ideas (momentarily, I can assure you, this happens to most writers, I’m sure). I know, right? Here I am with over a decade of knowledge and failures to back me up. And I got nothing!
The voices in my head are quiet. And I’m not sure what is scarier, the fact that ideas seem to escape me (momentarily). Or what they might be coming up with next. They do make an awesome crowd to work with though!
I have mentioned this several times in other posts, but just in case you didn’t know. This is my second attempt at Medium, a long story and the consequence of making a really stupid mistake.
“I used the wrong auto posting tool with Medium which I never should have done and basically sunk myself. We are our own worst enemies sometimes!”
That said, I would have you know that I have one of those “brick wall” days. No matter which way you think, you hit a brick wall and all your ideas seem to be right outside.
Just last night I had trouble sleeping, with so many ideas flooding my mind. What will happen if I combine that with this? Or use part of that with this to have that result. It’s rather difficult to explain.
But I am sure most of you reading this, as fellow writers, will know exactly what I am speaking of. Especially when you constantly research and create content marketing strategies.
This morning, however, “poof!”, gone! But that’s not the worst of it. I have to meet my own writing challenge. Getting on the Medium ladder from the bottom…again. I was such a simpleton the first time around with Medium!
Therefore I have no choice but to step up my game, and then the “brick wall!”. Even when you do work from home, making money online. You still “work for a boss”, YOU!
And if your passion borders obsession you will be the worst boss you have ever worked for! No tea breaks, no lunch breaks, long hours. And in the beginning, hardly any salary or benefits!
I set a goal, of at least one quality and useful article per day, for the next 90 days. (By the way, it doesn’t look like this will be short-form content…!) The point, however, is that I tried, right?
For those of you who don’t know, this is the difference between short and long-form content.
Short-Form Content — Up To 1200 words.
Long-Form Content — Between 1200–7500 Words.
Usually, my writing is around 2000 to the 4000-word mark. As you can see, even without any useful ideas I still find it hard to “shut up”!
Perhaps writing this will jump-start a few ideas, let’s see what happens, shall, we?
But why 90 days? Because generally, most content marketing strategies can take around 3–6 months to start getting some solid traction!
From previous experience, I know for a fact that you can make quite a bit of money on Medium with affiliate marketing. But there are rules which we’re not going to get into right now.
What was that?”,
Sorry, just a voice in my head. I think “they’re” back! Just having a quick staff meeting, please excuse me…
“I think a tiny light just came on!”.
“What do you mean tiny light?”
“There, in the distance!”
“Good Heavens, you have good eyes…!”
Let’s go see what this tiny light is, one of my staff members just pointed it out to me. Do you want to join me?
How To Get New Writing Ideas.
Admittedly, some of these ideas were mentioned in other posts. But I’m trying to “fill the gaps”, so please bear with me.
The “light” that just came on means I am going to have to finish this article and get back to commenting. The ideas are slowly seeping back in, and I’m hoping for a flood of ideas.
Engaging with audiences, as I was just so elegantly reminded is among the top ways to get new ideas. Find out what people are looking for, and as a writer for ILLUMINATION, the ILLUMINATION “Slack” site is rather helpful.
Kind of like an online forum with different topics where you can share your work and engage with other professionals. But we also have Facebook groups and pages.
The point is to get active and pay attention to what people within your niche are talking about. Use Quora and pay attention to the questions asked so you can come up with solutions. Always base your content ideas on these requirements.
Provide Answers To Questions.
Offer Solutions To Problems.
Provide Guides To Achieve Goals.
Ideas must form a plan when it comes to making money online, be it affiliate marketing, writing, otherwise, or both. A plan that offers a solution to a commonly identified need within your niche.
In my case, being in the “writing” and “online marketing” niches, quality traffic must be one of the most commonly identified needs. There is not a marketer alive who would not want more quality traffic to boost sales.
Watch a few YouTube videos about what other professional marketers are doing. But don’t copy their work, you must create your own unique strategies and content.
When learning from other professionals, you need to learn to “read between the lines”. While following advice and tutorials, also see your own ideas hidden within the method.
I hope that makes sense; it is the best way I can think of to describe “it”. For instance, let’s say you are following along to create a Facebook page.
Then explore all the other “buttons” that are not included in the tutorial. Many videos are made to gain views and may not show you everything.
That way you come up with a “better” way to create Facebook pages. Now make your content a bit better than that of your competitors, which is also how you get to stand out and build trust.
Your ideas and solutions must be better than that of your competitors. I watched a few tutorials on Quora spaces, not reveal much. So I started digging deeper “reading between the lines” and the journey led to over 1.2 Million content views per month.
You get your best new ideas by paying attention to what other people are talking about, and the guidance some of them offer. Always be open to learning, don’t just focus on earning.
A Plan To Maintain Consistency.
It’s going to get near impossible to keep up with providing unique, quality, and useful content. I am sure any professional writer will agree. For instance, I have 52 Facebook Pages and Groups.
With 128 Quora Spaces, Several Blogs, and Multiple Major Social Networking Profiles. While also writing on Medium and Patreon, I can assure you that there is no way you do one post per day on all of those personally.
As far as my writing goes, all my attention is currently focused on Medium. Therefore, the other “crowd” might have to wait a while, although there are solutions.
With most major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram you can use post-scheduling tools. But be careful which ones you use, do the research first.
There are too many different tools to mention. Among some of the more preferred post-scheduling tools, you may find.
FP Traffic (which Provides You With High-Quality Shareable Posts from sites like Bing, Google, YouTube, Reddit, and Many More) is one of my favourites.
And responsible for building large audiences for me with Facebook groups and pages. Because it also solves the problem of having high-quality consistent content to share.
Above, is an illustration of some analytics in FP traffic. Maintaining consistency on 42 Facebook and Twitter profiles. So far, built an audience of 38K fans with 19K posts on autopilot!
In my opinion, FP Traffic is also among the most affordable post-scheduling tools. After the trial, posting unlimited posts to unlimited profiles will cost you $10 per month!
There are also a few alternatives. The first two I have explored just briefly but did use Buffer before. Also, quite a great post-scheduling tool I have personally tested.
Go Schedule.
Hootsuite.
Buffer.
With Quora Spaces you already have a built-in post-scheduling tool, they even suggest posts for you to schedule. But with any post-scheduling, timing and consistency are just as important as the quality of the content.
With post-scheduling, you don’t just share your own content, you also share content from other people within your niche. That way you build recognition and get consistent exposure to your work.
Creating a mixture of scheduled posts will simplify the process quite a bit. Sharing other people’s content also maintains your consistency, which is the goal here. You can never do that by creating and scheduling just your own work.
Unless you’re going to duplicate your work so many times, readers might get bored with the same content. Adding other people’s content gives your reader the opportunity to continue exploring.
They will not forget about you; they will be back. And the person whose work you share will be thankful for it, and probably return the favour.
DO NOT EVER USE ANY POST-SCHEDULING TOOL WITH MEDIUM!
Short Form Content Attempt Failed.
Short form content attempt failed, again…lol! Even with few ideas, I still enjoy writing and talking about stuff, apparently. Passing the 1.6K word count, another attempt at short-form content failed.
But it was beneficial to me with regard to writing, and I hope this article also offers you some takeaways. There is a method in my madness but sometimes makes little sense to even me.
Luckily, most of the content marketing strategies I research, and test deliver results in the form of affiliate sales. Some are quite a bit more than others, but as long as sales are generated, it means the content marketing strategy is effective.
It would seem I “picked up my pen” along the way as I’m back with long-form content. Makes a lot more sense why you should just keep writing, even if you have no idea what to write about. Think I just proved that.
I really love it when I prove myself wrong. This morning I really thought I was going to skip one day, in my 90-day challenge. Once I started writing and just kept going, ideas slowly came back to life.
I was not expecting this article to exceed 500 words but already smashed that under the first heading. Because I honestly sat staring at my PC for a while, with no idea what to write about.
This started getting a little annoying too. When you know you must keep up, but you’re concreted to the floor!
With FPTraffic, it’s easy! We have a proprietary Content Finder you can use to search through billions of photos, links, and videos to find content to post to your social media accounts! — Source
AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: Some of the links in this post are links to affiliate offers. If you visit them to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is entirely up to you. All offers come with a full money-back guarantee!
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