I know that the first step in any sort of thought leadership with social media and SEO campaigns is to be able to actually have content to contribute, but I often find myself running of out time during a normal business week just trying to handle the workload I have for clients (I work at a PR firm in Chicago-land).

Does anyone have any best practices for ensuring that content gets generated for your own company to help spur new business and establish thought leadership?

I agree with Nichole that we all, or at least most of us, struggle with this. An editorial calendar does help, and I also like the Post Ideas+ plugin for WordPress. Every time I come up with a good idea for a blog post (or maybe even a bad idea), I put it in there, so whenever I sit down to write I have ideas — which seems to be half the battle.

I also agree with Nichole that scheduling time is important. Since I work for multiple clients, I found that I was always putting client work ahead of my own blog, with the plan to get to my blog later. Later never came.

So now, after doing a quick check of client emails, I spend some time writing before I start on work for other people. This may not work for everyone, but I’ve found that I will, no matter what, get client work done, so it doesn’t hurt for me to work on my own blog first thing in the morning.

However you do it, it’s a matter of making it a priority and keeping your blogging appointment like you would any other appointment.

@ryansegovich Regularly schedule an appointment with yourself then write/create/repurpose as much as you can in your allotted time.If you stick to one theme from a variety of angles (how to ___, mistakes to avoid when ___, quick and easy ways to ___, what I wish I knew when I started ___, etc.) you can generate quite a bit of material in a short amount of time compared to trying to work content creation into a busy schedule.

@ryansegovich Along with the other great tips above… passing along a top post(s) of the day or week, from other sites or blogs, I think serves this purpose. It demonstrates your thought leadership, provides useful content, and also introduces your readers to good resources they may not have known about previously.

I personally think that ‘curation’ is a valuable service that bloggers (especially the less prolific writers) can provide. I rely on a handful of trusted bloggers to basically tell me what I should be reading around the web every day.

@ryansegovich Lots of great tips here from everyone; two from this list that work well for me are keeping an ed cal and repurposing content.

Another useful practice that works well for me is keeping an ideas file in Notepad open on my desktop at all times.  Anytime I’m consuming anything online — blogs, newsletters, social media status updates, videos, really anything — and I see something that sparks an idea, I save the article or video link to in my Notepad doc.  When I have 15 minutes or so of uninterrupted time, I’ll grab one of these ideas and make notes on it.  I do this with hard copy newspapers and magazines as well.  That content then serves as inspiration for blog posts of my own, my weekly newsletter content, and so on. 

One of the best things I did before I started my latest blog was sit down for an uninterrupted hour, and just write down every idea I could think of for blog posts and email newsletter topics.  I came up with about 40 blog post ideas and 30-35 newsletter topics right off the bat.  I wanted to be sure I’d be able to create a deep bench of content before I got started, so I wouldn’t wonder what to write about each week!  This has been uber-useful, because whenever I’m feeling pressured to come up with something to write about, I just go to the ideas file.

I know part of the issue is having *time* to write, but once you have a big ol’ reservoir of ideas to work from, taking the time to write doesn’t seem so daunting, because when you sit down to crank out content, you have a whole slew of ideas at your fingertips.