Photography: Busy by Daniel Morris.

‘Busy People’ includes most of us. We’re working or studying full-time, trying to maintain active social lives and pay attention to our families. Creating successful web content can seem incompatible with these things, but it’s not: as long as you focus on creating content that one busy person can manage.

• Tricky content

Aggregating
You’ll run into tough times if you commit yourself to a writing process that involves finding other people’s content and commenting on it. This doubles your content creation time because you’ll spend just as much time searching for content as you will creating it. Websites and blogs that use this format well update rapidly and are staffed or contributed to by a number of people. This type of content rarely works as a one person job, let alone a one busy person job.

Breaking news
If you’ve committed yourself to reporting breaking news in your niche then you’ll need to be checking for news constantly. Missing news by just a few hours can result in plenty of other sites scooping you. I’d recommend you don’t focus on news unless you’re willing to live with your feed reader open. This doesn’t mean that you can’t comment on news after it’s occurred, though.

Little bits of a whole
Posting little snippets of content frequently throughout the day seems to be a great way to attract readers but unfortunately it’s not something one person can do effectively if you’ve got other full-time commitments.

• Better content

Write about what you know
It can be tempting to create content on a topic you don’t know much about (because it’s the next big thing, because the ads pay well, or for whatever reason). However, if you do, you’ll have to devote time to learning about the topic so you can write on it with authority. That’s more time you’ve sunk into content creation which could be spent elsewhere. Better to go with a topic you’re already very familiar with, allowing you to focus on writing.

Self-sustaining content
If you focus on creating the kind of content that doesn’t require you to have your browser window open then you can be much more flexible with your content. If you’re writing from your own thoughts and knowledge and not relying on others you can do this almost anywhere - on the bus ride home from work, on your lunch-break, during boring classes, waiting at the doctor’s surgery, and so on. This is time you can now use for writing which otherwise would have been wasted.

Content you can write ahead
If you pick a niche that allows for content which doesn’t lose relevance with time then you’ll be able to produce a back-catalog of content when you do have time to use in periods when you don’t.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger (who’s probably busier than most of us!) writes a number of posts in one sitting and then slow-releases them during the week, allowing him to focus on other things. Because his content is always relevant he’s able to dictate when he creates content, rather than being dictated by the content itself. If your niche required you to post breaking news as soon as it occurred you obviously wouldn’t be able to do this.

Quality over frequency
I’ve yet to see a website or blog run by one busy person which manages to be both high quality and rapidly updated (more than 3 new items a day). While providing something new every few hours is a great way to ensure readers check back it’s usually not possible for most of us. Instead, concentrate on providing quality content regularly but not necessarily rapidly. Several quality posts per week is an impressive feat for a busy person and there are plenty of very popular sites updated at this rate.