How To Create A Blog With Feedly

One of the biggest challenges in content marketing is the continual need to come up with creative ideas. In fact, when we asked social media managers about their challenges recently, ideation was ranked number one.

It's not that there is a lack of creative minds, it's more down to the fact many marketers don't have the time.

A process for inspiration

Whilst there is no magic fix for creativity, one element that will help, is having a process for inspiration.

There's no shortage of things to read and inspire you online, the challenge is how you curate that inspiration into something practical.

Note : Are you not only stuck on where to post, but also WHAT to post? Come along to a free social media strategy session where we'll give you inspiration, tool recommendations, and general advice that'll help you get started.

Enter, Feedly

Feedly is a fantastic tool for doing just that. Feedly allows you to keep up with the topics you care most about.

1. Firstly, you create a 'Feed'. For example, if you're interested in content marketing, you could call it just that

Connecting feedly and contentcal

2. Then add sources for that content. Use Feedly's pre-curated list, or sites that are relevant:

how to use feedly

3. Choose relevant sources to add to your feed

Social media news via feedly

4. Simply click into your new Content Marketing feed to view a list of articles from your chosen sources

Feedly app

Feedly now becomes your primary, intentional source of inspiration. No more scrolling through social hoping that something will jump out at you.

Not all of the articles will be relevant for you to create something off the back of, it's all about picking the nuggets of inspiration out.

This is where boards come in. You can save the articles that you find particularly useful to boards, which act as your personal collection of ideas and inspiration. You might select a group of articles about a similar topics, or a particular author that you know makes great idea-sparking content.

Moving from inspiration to ideation

Once the process for inspiration is set, you can take the ideas you have saved and move them into the content production process.

This is where ContentCal and Zapier come in.

ContentCal is the tool you'll need to organize your content marketing, from ideation, to planning, to publishing, social media analytics and [community management] (/platform-features/solutions/community-management/ "community managment). In this case, it's best to specifically focus on the 'Content Hub' within ContentCal.

Zapier comes into play here, to connec Feedly and ContentCal together, to give you one seamless process.

Zapier allows you to connect over 3,000 different applications together within minutes, with no code!

This video walks you through the setup process:

See ContentCal and Feedly on Zapier

The perfect content curation process

Inspiration is now happening in a more intentional way through Feedly, and Zapier is automatically sending ideas to ContentCal. The Content Hub on ContentCal will develop ideas into planned content - giving you an overaraching systemised process for content ideation.

You'll find that ideation and creativity now becomes a consistent and, most importantly, repeatable process, that won't feel as time consuimg or sporadic as it used to

If you need help getting this setup for you, get in touch with us at support@contentcal.io.