When the Well Runs Dry: How to Ensure an Endless Stream of Content

“A day without content is like a year without rain…”

Okay, maybe that’s not exactly how the song goes, but a “content drought” can feel just as devastating.

If you as the owner handle your business’s content output on your own, you risk running out of ideas. Once you do, is it the end?

No. I’d say it’s just the beginning. Here’s how to ensure an endless stream of content.

The Consequences of Running Out of Content

Every piece of content is another door into your site, and effective SEO places that door right under the public’s nose (i.e., on the front page of Google). But what happens when you suffer from a lack of ideas and stop uploading fresh, optimized content?

Optimized content lives on a bell curve. It may not have much engagement in the beginning, but as it gains traction and ranks for the keywords you want, it can stay at the top for months or even years.

As time passes, it comes down on the other end due to a mix of competition and relevancy. That’s why you keep uploading content — as one post comes down the bell curve, another comes up.

If you don’t add fresh content regularly, you’ll fall off the front page of Google permanently, which your competitors want — so they can steal your audience out from under your nose.

Don’t give them the satisfaction.

Signs Your Content Well Is Running Dry

Perhaps you believe the content ideas will always be there, but here are some signs a shortage is around the corner:

• Your content no longer resonates with your audience — your number of likes, comments, etc. is dwindling.
• You’ve gone off base and ventured beyond your original plan/content categories.
• You’ve lost motivation and creating content feels like a chore.

Don’t panic. It may seem far-fetched, but there are ways to ensure you never, ever, ever run out of content ideas — like, ever.

8 Strategies to Ensure an Endless Stream of High-Value Content Ideas

1. (Really) Listen to Your Audience

In every point of contact with your clients, customers and audience, there is an opportunity to mine content ideas — buckets of them. The problem is you’re so close to those ideas that you don’t recognize them as content fodder.

Immediately after every client interaction, take a few minutes to ask yourself, “What were the biggest questions that client asked? How can we answer those questions in our content strategy?”

Or, maybe your clients are asking the wrong questions, but in return, you’re giving them much-needed advice. Don’t undervalue those verbal nuggets. What are you telling your clients that you haven’t talked about before on your blog/channel/social media/etc.??

2. Leverage Other Channels

If you’ve only uploaded content to one channel, you now have well-thought-out topics, opinions, and content you can repurpose for other channels — YouTube, LinkedIn, a blog, etc.

When it comes to bringing content to new channels, I strongly believe in a slow-burn approach — mastering each channel one by one and not biting off more than you can chew.

3. Create/Update Your Content Calendar

The success of your content marketing strategy hinges on the strength of your calendar.

Planning content ahead of time means:

• You avoid scrambling for inspiration.
• You can work on your content on your own time, while your mind is at its best.
• You’re more organized — which is beneficial for both your business and your mental health.
• You improve uploading consistency and stay top of mind.

Each of our clients has a detailed content calendar optimized to their marketing strategy. For every piece of content, we list not only the title, but also the main topics and subheadings, if applicable.

We also include a running list of potential ideas we encourage everyone from both teams — theirs and ours — to contribute to.

4. Do Your Research

Your content input is just as important as your content output. Ever heard the saying “Readers are leaders”? If you’ve gotten so busy you’ve stopped keeping up with industry trends, don’t be surprised if your audience leaves you for a competitor who’s constantly learning.

So, refresh your content input. Create a list of industry leaders and competitors and keep up with their content. Boom: You now have multiple constant sources of inspiration.

5. Refresh Existing Content

Look for 6- to 12-month-old posts that are losing traction and keywords to competitors (i.e., at the tail end of the bell curve).

Think they can be updated with fresh information? Update them using our content refresh guide, republish, and repromote. Your audience — even if they’ve read it before — could use the refresh as well.

6. Rework Existing Content

Your favorite content creators say and resay the same thing a million different times.

Take a look at your favorite creators’ output — Gary Vaynerchuk, Ann Handley, Tim Ferriss, etc. You’ll hear the same lessons repeated in books, videos, blog posts, etc.

Reworking existing content hits your audience at different stages. Maybe they don’t need to hear your entire 20-step guide again, but they’re stuck on step seven. You can make an entire YouTube video fleshing step seven out — and 19 others for the remaining steps.

7. Encourage Employee Contribution

If you as the owner have been the sole idea well, it may be time to tap into the wisdom of the rest of your company. Many of our clients have used this strategy successfully, and we use it ourselves.

This is the same strategy you use in the rest of your business to grow and scale: You get dangerous enough to delegate and articulate what you need, and then you teach someone else how to do it better than you.

8. Hire a Marketer or Agency

If you want to ensure an endless stream of content, it’s probably time to hire a marketer or an agency.

When we partner with a business, we start with their goal, the foundational concept of “what do you want to achieve?” From there, we take inventory of what our client has uploaded and figure out the best opportunities for where they want to go and how to get there.

Like what you’re reading? We’d love to help perpetuate your content well. Reach out if you’re interested in a new partner in your content marketing journey.