Content Marketing Hacks Guaranteed to Save You Time

What is the biggest challenge content marketers face?

That’s right: lack of time.

Content marketing is hard work. It takes, persistence, commitment - and a serious time investment.

The time required to get powerful results from your content marketing efforts is discouraging to many, but there are little things you can do everyday to improve efficiency.

To help you maximize your time and get more from your content marketing efforts, here are the three best efficiency posts from August.

Be Less Busy And More Productive

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast features Tony Crabbe, business psychologist and author of Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much. Crabbe says we feel busier nowadays because work invades our lives all the time - not just while we are at the office.

We need to constantly be busy in order to feel productive. But Crabbe says our problem is that we are short on attention, not time. In order to better navigate our hectic work lives, we need to learn to manage our attention better.

When we always focus on the crisis of the moment, we have no bandwidth for strategic thinking and long-term planning. Crabbe says the solution is to focus on doing the big stuff better and more interestingly. This podcast shows you how to dramatically improve your productivity by managing your attention.

12 Time-Saving Tools for Content Marketers

The right tools are essential to help you dramatically increase the impact of your content marketing efforts. This post describes 12 tools that make it quicker and easier to:

• Develop content ideas

• Get more from your analytics

• Monitor social media trends

• Manage email campaigns

• Extend your blogging outreach

• Scale your content production

• Improve your impact

• Stay organized

• Create and share infographics

• Record and edit audio content

• Edit images

• Track your hashtags

Whatever your goal, there’s a tool for it. More time saved means more time available to spend on your content marketing strategies, which translates to greater profitability.

4 Science-Backed Reasons to Read More (Even If You're Busy)

By David Ly Khim from HubSpot

Reading is a luxury for most people, but the HubSpot folks think it should be a priority, especially for content marketers.

Studies show that reading improves your brain connectivity, prevents Alzheimer’s, makes you better able to empathize, and helps you get inside the minds of others.

That all sounds great, but how exactly do you find the time to read? This infographic from HubSpot shows you how to make time to read 30 pages a day - which adds up to 300 pages every 10 days, roughly 900 pages a month, around 10,950 pages a year...you get the idea!

Bonus!

If you need more time to blog, we’ve got you covered with our post Create More with Less: Top Blogging Efficiency Hacks [Quick Video]. It shows you how to reuse your existing content (without looking lazy), and it includes a bunch of other tips for creating more posts faster.

These tools and tricks are real lifesavers in this fast-paced digital world. So what are your favorite content marketing efficiency tips? Let me know in the comments section!

Image by frankieleon via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0.