We all wish we had more time, especially when it comes to creating content. While it’s easy to commit to a killer content marketing strategy, following through with it is a different thing. Life gets in the way, and you don’t have hours to sit down and crank out blog posts. But what if you could speed up the content creation process without compromising quality?

The key to knocking content marketing out of the park is by approaching it as a long game. You can’t expect to publish three really great posts and immediately earn an influx of traffic to your blog. However, by embracing the following content creation tips, you can write content more efficiently and generate results faster:

1. Have a strategy.
Shockingly, only 44 percent of businesses have a clear-cut content marketing strategy in place. Therefore, it makes sense that a number of businesses have a difficult time gaining traction with their blogging efforts.

When putting together a strategy, you need to identify who you’re writing your content for and which marketing outlets are the best to reach your audience. Instead of just brainstorming blog topics, ask yourself the following questions:

What brand image do you want to put forth with your content?
What types of content will resonate best with your target audience?
How does your target audience like to consume content?

Answering these questions will help you put together a strategy to help you to best reach your audience.

2. Plan a month ahead.
If you’re like most business owners, the most challenging aspect of content marketing is coming up with topics to write about. By taking the time to plan out your topics a month in advance, you’ll be able to redirect the time that you would ordinarily spend brainstorming to actually writing content. Marketers that plan content at least a month in advance are able to speed up content creation time by as much as 50 percent.

3. Create original content more efficiently.
Rather than repurposing your existing content, look for opportunities to create original content more efficiently. A few techniques to create original content as quickly as possible include conducting interviews, taking advantage of user-generated content, and offering your audience a view from behind-the-scenes. You need to produce original content to build your brand and raise social awareness, and these proven techniques will allow you to accomplish this without spending countless hours putting together a blog post.

4. Optimize content to earn more shares.
Distributing content on your various marketing channels can be time consuming, so why not encourage your audience to do this for you? Here are several ways that you can optimize content to earn more shares:

• Include social sharing buttons on all content pages.
• Ask your website visitors to engage with your brand on social media.
• Change up your headlines when sharing content on different social media channels to align with the way users on these platforms interact with content.

5. Pay attention to your personal level of productivity.
Do you know how much time you’re really putting into content creation? If you’re spending too much time creating content, you may not be sitting down to write it at your most productive time of the day. If you’re a morning person, for example, block out some time first thing in the morning to take care of content creation before your day blows up with distractions. This will allow you to work smarter and create content faster.

Being too busy for content creation is not an excuse your business can afford to make. Use these tactics to help you create content more efficiently, or consider outsourcing content creation to a professional agency that can handle this critical aspect of marketing for your business.