10 Essential Content Creation Tips for Solopreneurs and Small Business Owners

Do you need help creating content for your small business? Our proven content creation tips will help you start.

Creating and publishing good content is a great way to scale a business online. Content contributes to brand awareness. Expertly crafted content can convince a customer to hit Buy Now.

With the prevalence of social media these days, a blog post or well-scripted YouTube video can potentially reach thousands of new customers.

A good SEO strategy can land you on the first page of Google, meaning your business is the first one a potential customer sees. According to a survey conducted by HubSpot, 56% of respondents have bought something from a company after reading a blog post.

While solopreneurs and small business owners might not have the means to hire a marketing team or access premium content creation software, you don’t need a huge budget to make content that will stand out from the crowd.

Below we’ll walk you through some content types and how to use them to achieve your marketing goals. Learn more in our guide on the best content marketing tools.

Helpful Content Creation Tips For You

1. Write Your Unique Value Proposition

The digital space is incredibly crowded these days, which makes it all the more challenging for small businesses to stand out. To put it in perspective, in 2022, over 500 hours of footage were uploaded to YouTube every single minute, while more than 95 million videos and pictures were uploaded to Instagram daily.

Although these figures sound discouraging, you can still carve out an online space for your business. First, you must focus on your business’s unique selling point. Then, tailor your social media posts and blog content to highlight this so you can gain the attention of your target audience.

Let’s say you sell a protein coffee drink. While the average coffee drinker might not be interested in your product, fitness enthusiasts certainly will.

Reaching your target audience requires researching what platforms they spend their time on and the vocabulary they use so they can find your work. This can mean using the correct keywords in a blog post or hashtags on social media.

The protein coffee drink mentioned above will likely do well by posting educational blog posts about nutrition, and Instagram reels showcasing its benefits. Meanwhile, a B2B business will have the most luck with email marketing and posting on LinkedIn rather than posting funny videos on TikTok.

2. Research Your Audience

To gain the attention of your target audience, research what platforms they use and note how they speak or write.

Good content writing means using language your target audience understands. For example, a B2C (business-to-consumer) company should avoid technical jargon. A B2B (business-to-business) uses terms professionals in their field expect.

To retain an audience, post engaging content that resonates with them consistently. While buyer personas are a helpful starting point, holding focus groups and customer interviews will be more helpful as it eliminates the guesswork.

You can learn about their questions and challenges by speaking directly to customers. Then, host a brainstorming session to develop a social media and website content strategy to answer those queries. Read our list of brainstorming topics.

3. Create Content Consistently

A successful content creator embraces consistency… and usually on one platform. Popular social media platforms algorithms are more likely to pick up content from users who post regularly (as long as the content isn’t poor quality).

Likewise, building your website’s domain authority (DA) is a great way to improve your chances of ranking on the first page of a search engine and helps your business look credible. Regularly posting content on your website, on top of general maintenance like fixing broken links, is essential when boosting your DA score.

Plus, the more people visiting your website, the more people will sign up for your newsletter, as long as your landing page shows the value of your business.

If you don’t have time to create and post new content daily, hire content writers and copywriters to create blog posts and videos in bulk. If you’re doing it yourself, try our content writing practice exercises.

You can repurpose content to save time too. For example, posting a TikTok video as an Instagram reel or briefly summarizing the key points made in a blog post in a thread on X (formally Twitter) and an email newsletter. You can also create templates in Canva and reuse images on Instagram and Pinterest, even as infographics on your company blog.

4. Use Multimedia Content

With so many social media platforms and types of content, you’ll never please everyone. For example, some people prefer to read a blog post, while others would rather receive the same information in a video or podcast.

The solution? Post different types of content on one or two platforms or channels where your ideal customer spends their time. This diversification can cater to different audience preferences and increase engagement. Plus, you can re-purpose some of your content across platforms. Creating multimedia can be hard, so you need a content workflow.

5. Optimize For SEO

No matter how great your blog posts are, if they’re not optimized for SEO very few people will read them. Conduct keyword research to find out the exact search terms your audience uses. Then, incorporate these terms into your blog post to generate organic traffic.

Effective content creators know how to get their work picked up by search engines without making the blog post unreadable due to keyword stuffing. Keywords should be spread evenly throughout the blog post and only used when necessary. You can also use secondary keywords, generally synonyms of your primary one.

Crafting meta descriptions that contain your keyword, placing them as close to the start of the SEO title as possible, using sub-headings appropriately, and incorporating it into the alt text of some of your images (while still describing the image for visually impaired readers) goes a long way.

Blog posts should also link back to related internal content and relevant, high-quality external content. Read our blog post self-editing checklist.

Update blog posts regularly, including new information, to stay ahead of competitors. For example, if you write a listicle about an industry topic but a competitor goes ahead and creates something longer… add more items to that post. These updates should provide valuable information if you want to keep ahead.

Building your DA score also boosts search engine optimization. One of the ways to improve this is by having other high-quality websites with a DA score equal to or higher than yours, link to your content.

You can either reach out and ask people to link to your site or create high-quality resources that attract links. Still, digital marketing teams often set some of their budgets aside to pay other websites to host a guest post or to create an original blog post with a backlink. Disclosing these sponsored posts is important to ensure you’re not penalized by search engines.

6. Engage With Your Audience

While creating great content is important, your audience will quickly lose interest if there is a one-way communication channel where you share content with your audience but never engage with them. Customers want to feel valued and like their questions will be answered.

Ending blog posts or videos with a question is a great way to improve engagement. This makes readers feel more comfortable sharing their experiences. Most importantly, you need to read and engage with these comments. This approach can help build brand loyalty as your customers feel like they’re part of a community. Tools like Taplio and Buffer are great for managing engagement on platforms like X and Linked In.

7. Review Your Content Analytics

You can’t just continuously post content and hope for the best. An effective marketing strategy entails checking metrics often to determine what kind of content has the most reach, engagement, and conversion rates. Otherwise, you will waste time and money creating content that doesn’t land.

You can use Google Analytics or Plausible to see how your blog posts are performing. As for social media, most, if not all, platforms give you access to analytics if you have a business account. Use these insights to refine your content strategy. As trends and algorithms change, you must monitor your metrics and adapt to changes continuously. Learn more in our content marketing metrics guide.

8. Collaborate And Network

You can do everything right and still find it hard to grow an audience via content marketing. It takes time to build an audience on X, Instagram and Linked. SEO-optimized blog posts usually don’t rank on page one immediately either. The key to speeding things along? Networking and collaboration.

If you’re a small local business, collaborate with other companies in your community or businesses in your field who aren’t competitors. Consider writing a guest post for them or appearing one each others’ podcast. You can also work with influencers to promote your business on their platform. This can help tap into new audiences and build relationships.

9. Aim for Quality Over Quantity

Although a consistent posting schedule is vital, going overboard will overwhelm your audience. Not to mention, the quality will suffer if you value quantity over quality.

You should post often, but not so often, that you’re the only thing on your customer’s newsfeeds or are sending multiple promotional emails per day. A survey found that 69% of people unsubscribe from newsletters if they receive too many emails.

Likewise, churning out long-form blog posts daily that are riddled with grammar mistakes will make your customers doubt your credibility. Instead, create valuable content. This will perform better as it’s most likely to be shared and remembered.

How often you should post depends on whether your audience spends a lot of time on social media. It also depends on the platform and the type of content. For example, followers won’t get overwhelmed if you post several Instagram stories at once, as they don’t have to view them, but they will unfollow if you post multiple photos and reels per day. Check out our round-up of the best content marketing books to learn more.

10. Test New Content Formats

With the changing nature of social media, what works today might fail tomorrow. A few years ago, almost no one created short-form videos and reels. They’re everywhere today.

By the time a marketing team signs off on a particular piece of content, like a meme, the trend is over. Avoid an overly complicated content creation process. Publish early and often so you can learn what works.

Content creators should keep an eye on what their competitors and influencers in the industry are posting so they can always post in a timely manner. You shouldn’t steal content ideas from other creators, but there’s nothing wrong with joining a trend as long as you put your spin on it.

What generates reach today might not work tomorrow. Be prepared for change. If most of your views come from one platform, an algorithm change that no longer favors your content will be catastrophic.

Monitor your analytics closely to adapt your posting strategy based on recent reach or engagement stats. Ensure you’re putting equal effort into posting high-quality content on multiple social media platforms on top of in-house content like video content, webinars and podcasts, newsletters, and SEO-optimized blog posts. Although a social media algo might tank your reach, you can stay in business with an email list.

What Types of Content Should You Create?

Content creation can attract new customers, convince them to buy your product, or send them running to your competitors. While it takes patience and persistence to build a platform and to rank on search engines, the payoff is certainly well worth it.

If you’re a small business owner or solopreneur, it’s vital to set some time aside or hire marketing professionals who can continually refine your content strategies to ensure you’re always relevant, keeping your customers happy, and conveying the benefits of supporting your business.