By Gavin Klose
Co-founder of Feedsy

With email newsletters or social media, sharing posts and articles from other experts in your field can certainly help you get some clicks and attention. Unless you’re doing it through your Feedsy blog, however, you’re probably sending people to other websites to get information instead of pulling them back to yours.

Generating your own content is the best way to get the attention of your audience and bring them to your website. But creating content can be overwhelming.

Your posts and content don’t have to be perfectly polished and totally scripted.

Take a moment to talk to your phone or webcam and upload it to Feedsy (via a YouTube link) or directly to your social media channels. Share what you’re doing today on Instagram. You can be casual, as long as you’re still professional.

Not sure what to talk about? These 5 tips will get you started.

#1 Share your world

Is there a customer you could profile? A team member to highlight? A charity your company supports? Sharing stories about your business culture helps customers feel connected to your company and your brand.

#2 What’s the buzz?

Industry news is always interesting to people in your field, and is likely to even affect them directly; let what’s happening inspire you while making it interesting and relevant to your customers. Comment on a new product launch, reflect on someone’s viral post or video, or talk about trends you see happening. This builds trust by demonstrating you are an expert in your field.

To make news relevant to your business and audience while creating traffic to your website, you need to do more than simply share the original article.

If that’s all you do, you’re sending people to someone else’s website instead of building your own audience.

And unless you have permission, copying and pasting someone else’s content into your blog is probably a breach of copyright.

You can add a link to the website with the original news item — but introduce the topic in your blog, and cover it so thoroughly that no one needs to go to the original source to know what’s happening.

#3 React to hot topics

Do you regularly read online news? Do you look for items that are trending, or articles that your customers might be getting excited about or interested in? If so, you are not alone, and this interest is something you need to tap into. Share your company’s take on a story, and show that you care about (and even enjoy!) the same things as your customers. This strategy grabs attention both because it’s topical and because it makes your brand more relatable.

Again, it’s important not just to copy and paste someone else’s work into your own blog. This is almost always a breach of copyright, and it won’t result in a positive response from your customers.

Instead, use Feedsy’s block quote feature to highlight a sample from the article you’re commenting on. Make sure to link to the original source.

If you introduce the article thoroughly, and give enough commentary of your own, that block quote is going to read like something supporting your point of view, and no one will worry about clicking through to the original piece.

And with Feedsy, you don’t need to worry too much about giving inappropriate advice; a general advice warning is appended to the bottom of each page.

#4 Teach How-To

Customers always want to learn, and showing them how to use your products in day to day life is a great way to create evergreen content. Keep things light-hearted and fun, so you don’t end up sounding like that boring teacher we all hated in high school.

#5 Start With Keywords

If you’re still not sure, you can always search for keywords using a tool like Wordtracker. You can also simply type a word into Google and see what the engine’s autocomplete suggests.

When you know what your potential customers are searching for, you can write articles and blogs addressing the keywords, bringing readers to your site.

While getting started writing your own content can be overwhelming, these suggestions can be a big part of getting you up and running. Feedsy can also help you by auto-curating and publishing relevant stories to supplement your own content to engage with your customers.