Most small business owners understand the importance of content marketing, but few are doing enough. Some of the common excuses I have heard are – I’m too busy to blog. I don’t know what to write about. No one wants to read what I write.

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These are terrible excuses and I’m going to show you how to overcome them.

If you want to gain more clients, you will need to make time and plan out your content marketing strategy. Given how people are reliant on the Internet and Google to research for new products and services, you need an excellent online presence in order to attract new clients. This is especially true for small businesses who don’t have huge marketing budgets. Content marketing is one of the cheapest and best ways to be known and be relevant in your niche.

Blogging is a big part of content marketing and I know many small business owners say they don’t have time for it. My suggestion is: outsource it. If President Obama can outsource his speech writing, you can outsource your blog writing.

Outsourcing your writing means you only need to focus on planning your content marketing strategy, after which you can get someone to assist you in rolling this plan out. In general, I recommend that most small business owners publish at least one article a week. This can be done on your own company blog, on LinkedIn’s Pulse or other online magazines such as Executive Lifestyle.

In order to start the outsourcing process, you need to plan your content marketing strategy by focusing on the keywords or questions that your target market will likely search for. An easy way to think of this is, for example, imagine you are a lawyer specialising in estate planning and wills writing. You will want to answer questions such as “Who Needs A Will?” “Top 5 Things To Include In A Will” And “Can Children Have More Than 1 Guardian?” This will ensure that you have an audience for the articles you publish. It will also give you ideas on what to write about.


Once you have around 10 to 12 topics or questions, note down five to eight bullet points for each of them. This will be the skeleton of your content marketing strategy. Next, develop your own writing voice. Plan to write three blogs on your own so that these can be used as a guide for the writer you will hire. The blogs don’t have to be too long. Between 500 to 1000 words is sufficient.

Next, post a job up on Upwork (formerly oDesk, formerly Elance) or Freelancer looking for a writer who has experience in your industry. I normally prefer to specify the industry so that the writer is somewhat familiar with the topics. When you hire the writer, get him or her to read the blogs you have written and ask them to write one article based on a topic and the bullet points you provided.

Once the freelancer has written the article, look through it and edit it, making sure to explain to the freelancer why you made the edits. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, you will find you need to make fewer edits and the content marketing process gets easier. Your online presence improves with less effort on your part so you can focus on other parts of your business.

Visit UnBusy Entrepreneur to find out more about Olivia's work.

_{This post was first published on UnBusy Entrepreneur blog and has been reposted on Executive Lifestyle with the permission of the author. Image Credit: President Barack Obama tosses a football by U.S. Embassy, Jakarta}

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