Planning Paradox: How to Create Higher Value Content in Less Time

February 17, 2014 by

www.jeffkorhan.com

If you have struggled with planning your content marketing you are not alone.

However, once you get your plan in place, you will be astounded at how you can deliver more impactful content for your community, and in less time.

I’ve been there too; and that is why I’m excited to share how this is working for me now.

Of course, you will have to adapt this to your available resources, the specific needs of your customers, and most importantly, how your business can uniquely help them.

#1 – Give Your Customers What They Really Want

If you have been blogging for a period of time you are fortunate, because you know from experience what your customers most want from you.

However, many of us fail with this. We give our community what we generally want them to have, as opposed to what they really want.

As an example, for my audience a couple of the most popular topics are writing and social media tools. While I tend to think of writing as blogging and content marketing, writing in particular is the keyword that evidently most resonates with my community.

Writing is foundational to all forms of marketing. Therefore, I have pushed it to the front of my 2014 editorial calendar. It is the focus for this month of February, with topics that build upon it to follow.

How about social media tools? While I love learning about new tools, my strength is applying my business experience to choosing reliable tools that will stand the test of time. In other words, I only share the few that I have had direct experience with and can confidently recommend.

Therefore, I refer those hungry for an ever-growing list of cutting edge tools to my friend Ian Cleary at Razor Social. That’s his strength and focus.

This all comes down to knowing your audience and how you can best help them. Sound familiar?

This is your content marketing mission statement.

#2 – Design for Progressively Increased Value

The purpose of your content is to deliver value to your community that in turn leads to profitable outcomes for your business

As Epic Content Marketing author Joe Pulizzi says, “You can educate and inform your audience, but if it doesn’t lead to profitable customer actions, it’s not content marketing.”

Do you want to take your content to a higher level?

Design a process to create content so valuable your community will gladly pay for it. Tweet this

Start by considering how to address the topics that your audience never gets tired of learning about. These are topics specific to your industry, but that are of universal interest. For financial advisors, these topics would include preservation of capital and retirement planning.

Choose a dozen or so topics and organize by month, with seasonality being a practical method. Then brainstorm on subtopics and decide what will be the most logical order for each month.

When you do this you are designing your higher value content marketing. At the end of the month you will have sufficiently planned and organized content to create a high quality eBook or long-form article that can then be used as an incentive, such as for new subscribers to your newsletter.

If you want to increase the value even further, these short eBooks could be organized into a traditional book, or even a training program.

The idea is you are not just planning to get the work done, but planning it such that every piece of content builds upon the prior content, so that it all grows into high value content that better accomplishes your business objectives.

#3 – Atomize Your Content for Social Media

When your content is planned and organized, you will quickly discover how it makes your work easier, while concurrently making your content better.

You have no doubt heard about repurposing your content. I’m not fond of the term, because I think many interpret it as taking something from here and putting it over there, with the hope that they can squeeze a little more value out of it.

A better approach is to learn about atomization. This term refers to planning the design of the content for the respective distribution channels BEFORE it is created.

When you have a plan you know where you are going. That focus gives you the power to consider in advance how your content can be more useful for your communities on the respective platforms where it will be consumed.

I imagine Stephen King writing a novel and considering who will play the main character when the novel is made into a Hollywood film, and even what that film will be entitled. Obviously, if this were true (which it probably isn’t) it would change how the original content in the novel is written.

That’s the idea of atomization. It’s more than planning, more like pre-planning.

So, as you create your content, consider how you will later break it down, retitle it, and remix and associate the various formats of print, audio, photos, and video so that it is highly focused for the respective social media channels.

This is what I find interesting.

You can build higher value content by planning both it’s construction and deconstruction. Tweet this

It’s a simple matter of building themed content and then planning for it’s distribution on the respective social media channels.

Leave a comment and share how your content planning works.

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley 2013)  

He helps mainstream businesses adapt their traditional growth practices to a digital world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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Writing for The Web: 3 Important Tips

February 7, 2014 by

www.jeffkorhan.com

Before the web, writing a letter, an article, or even a book was straightforward.

It was all about the content.

These days your writing is likely to be published on the web, at least a portion of it, and that changes everything.

Why Writing for the Web is Different

In addition to building your audience, distributing content on the web is a means for driving profitable customer actions. This practice, known as content marketing, is just one of many reasons for learning how to write for the web.

One of the key distinctions about writing for the web is that your content is readily shareable.

More importantly, this content that started out as your writing can then be atomized (more than repurposed – reimagined) into appropriate portions to be consumed by different audiences, on different platforms, and in other digital formats that provide uniquely different context.

Thus, your writing for the web should consider all three – the original form of content, its intended audience and where they will interact with it, and the context within which they may find themselves when they do.

#1 – Design Your Content for Discovery and Sharing

Writing for the web is writing to reach a larger percentage of a defined audience. For this to happen your content needs to be designed for discovery and sharing, by both people and search engines. Following are key considerations for accomplishing this objective.

Title – Headlines or titles with relevant keywords are of utmost importance. It is best to have your title lead with the most relevant keywords, such as the word “writing” for this article in particular.

Consider the title of your writing to be a crafted description of what will follow. If it lacks clarity or focus, the assumption is your writing does too.

Meta Description – The meta description is the “slug” of content that search engines use to describe your online content. If your content platform does not specifically provide for this (such as a WordPress), by default the first sentence or two is what will be used.

Internal Links – Internal links tell the search engines that your content is relevant to other content on your site, with the first link being especially important. So, make it a good one and have it as early in the article as possible.

External links – External links to sites with authority on the topic of your writing communicate depth in your research. These authoritative sources essentially validate your work.

Subheadings and Key Phrases – After the title, the next most important keywords are the subheadings. These further describe your written content at a glance for Google and your audience.

Also, when you bold specific keyword phrases in your writing it further identifies words most relevant to the message of the writing.

Paragraphs – Writing for the web calls for short, bite-sized paragraphs. This practice has become an expectation that is carrying over to print.

Completeness – I’m often asked what is the ideal or recommended length for a blog post or online article. The best answer to this is whatever it takes to get the job done without any unnecessary fluff. Forget about length and instead focus on completeness of the message.

Visuals – Photos, videos, and audio that accompany your writing tend to follow it as it gets shared on the web. Therefore, it makes sense to choose supporting media that adds value to your writing.

Bonus – The visual design of your writing instantly signals to readers that you are a web savvy writer that has carefully considered the above essentials.

#2 – Serve the Extended Web Audience

When you write for the web you serve several audiences that have common interests, but that are uniquely different, much like an extended family.

If your content is well-designed, it will meet both the expectations of Google and the ideal audience that the search engines can help you to reach. The design criteria in #1 signal to Google that your content meets their standards, and its sharing by your audience further communicates its relevancy and authority.

In addition to the audience that has yet to discover your writing, there are those loyal subscribers that have come to expect your writing to reflect a personal style. Thus, the challenge is keeping your content sufficiently clean for search, while also being personal and original.

Originality is a quality that is sure to become increasingly important for authors of web content.

Writing for people and search engines will soon be the same as quality standards continue to rise. So, the best recommendation is to seek clarity, organization, and simplicity in your writing, while also balancing short and long forms or content, supplementing it with multi-media, and developing a style that resonates with your core audience.

#3 – Adapt to Digital Trends and Social Context

Repurposing your content to formats that better suit the contextual needs of of your audience will be sure to enhance its value.

The shift towards mobile in particular is increasing demand for content in portable formats, such as shareable photos, podcasts, and videos. These richer formats naturally lead to greater intimacy, a quality that is vital for building an audience.

The reason this is exciting for writers is this:

Writing is the starting point for creating high quality, shareable, multi-media, digital, and social content. 

Writing as we know it is changing, and it is more relevant than ever as a marketing skill. The challenge is rethinking and reimagining your writing for a digital world that is now central to businesses and their customers.

This article was inspired by many recent requests for advice on blogging and content marketing, so come back for more.

You may also be interested in how these skills will help you to Write Emails that Get a Response.

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley 2013)  

He helps mainstream businesses adapt their traditional growth practices to a digital world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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