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Create content

to connect with

your target audience

Valuable content has magnetic power. On your blog—or in addition to it—create an interesting mix of content in various formats to earn the mindshare and trust your brand needs.

C is for Content

I’m considering hiring you. I do a search for your name. There you are: your website and blog, your social media profiles, maybe more. What I’m about to see when I click—your content—is going to make some sort of impression on me.

Your brand is largely defined by the content you create and publish.

As such, The Road to Recognition is largely about content creation. The previous chapter was about blogging, a cornerstone strategy for most personal branders. Many of the chapters that follow focus on additional areas of content marketing. And most of the other chapters focus on strategies to enhance the success of your content because it’s a mainstay of your personal brand development.

Bottom line: the content you offer conveys to the world what you stand for and demonstrates where you can create value. It reveals who you are professionally. “Our online words are our emissaries. They tell our customers who we are,” writes Ann Handley in her great book, Everybody Writes.

The term “thought leader” has come to mean a person of influence—a trusted expert. Identify the thought leaders in your niche, or any niche. Unsurprisingly, they’re the best content creators.

Investing in content is investing in your career

Content marketing is essentially publishing valuable content to attract and engage a targeted audience. It’s been ridiculously hot for a decade and it’s impossible to fathom it will change anytime soon. Nearly every brand aiming to build their business via digital channels produces content of some sort. You must do the same. Why? Because your content:

 Showcases your skills—You put your knowledge on display and make it accessible.

 Attracts an audience—Content is discovered via search, social and other channels.

 Engages your audience—Great content gets people interested in you and can start a conversation.

 Increases your reach—When your content is easy to access and inspired, it’s often featured by other content creators and shared.

 Fuels your social media presence—Your content is the focus of what you share via social media channels.

What should you create?

A blog is a smart place to start, but it’s certainly not your only option and it may not suit you. Let’s explore your content creation options now. For starters, I’ll present a short list of what people are looking for from content:

 Education

 Entertainment

 Inspiration

The best content delivers a combination of two, or all, of the above. Let’s move on to how people consume content:

 Read

 Look at

 Listen to

Again, you have the option to use them separately or in combination. A multi-media approach will often improve engagement.

Now here’s a list of popular content formats:

 Blog post

 Article

 Infographic

 Video

 Podcast

 Case study

 eBook

 Book

 White paper

 Webinar

 Event

 Slideshow

 Newsletter

 Quiz or assessment

 Image

This list is long, but hardly complete. Content types continue to proliferate and are only limited to your imagination. The different types or styles of content you can create is long too:

 Guide

 Tutorial

 List

 Tool

 Template

 Story

 Opinion

 Review

 Interview

 Roundup

 Research

 Portfolio

So what content should you create? Consider this equation based on the lists I’ve offered:

Content Goal + Content Format + Content Style = X

X has endless possibilities. I don’t know there is a perfect way to solve for it. You need to research the needs and behaviors of your audience, market and competition. You’ll likely form some hypotheses—or hunches. Then you experiment (keeping an eye, of course, on your results).

Begin with something in your comfort zone. Say you’re a chef. Your formula might be:

 Educate/eBook/Tutorial—A free cookbook as a PDF makes sense.

 Entertain/Video/Review—A video of someone who’s tried your recipe and wants to comment on it might work.

 Inspire/Images/Portfolio—Food is nice to look at. Here’s an opportunity to create a collection of food photos from your kitchen.

You get the idea. You have a lot of choices and will only know what works best by trying different tactics. Most businesses actually use more than ten tactics. You need not try to meet or exceed this or any number, especially if you’re just getting started with your personal branding, but taking a diverse approach to content creation is likely to prove useful and help you fine-tune your strategy over time.

Make your content great

It’s easy to create mediocre content. And most do. They find something that’s performing well and create a copycat version. It seldom works. Amongst the oceans of content, the me-too stuff fails to make a ripple.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying “don’t go there” if the topic you want to tackle is a popular one. In fact, you should. What I am saying is you need to make your content better than the best that exists now. Like most things, to do something remarkable, you need to put extra effort into it.

The book you’re reading is a content project, a large one. While its purpose is to help you understand the most effective personal branding tactics, your authors, Seth and Barry, have a personal branding agenda. We aim to be perceived as experts on the topic of personal branding.

Are we offering you insights into a subject no one’s yet touched on? Don’t we wish? But the topic’s red hot. What we’re trying to do is create the best possible resource and make it unique, not by way of its topic, but in the ways we’ve produced and packaged it.

One lesson you can take from this is quality trumps quantity in content creation. One-hit wonders usually won’t achieve their goals. You accomplish more by creating less content that’s spectacular than you will with volumes of par-for-the-course stuff.

Here are ten more strategies you should apply to make your content great:

Purpose

Make sure your content serves a very clear purpose for the reader/viewer/listener. Avoid being abstract or oblique. Determine what you’re trying to accomplish and nail it.

Relevance

Your content must address the reader’s pain and/or help bring them pleasure. It should enhance their life at work, at play, or in some way. Develop extreme empathy for your audience to help make your content consistently relevant.

Emotional triggers

Don’t make the mistake of believing your readers rely only on rationale to make decisions. It’s what we feel that drives our decisions. Great content trips the reader’s emotional triggers.

Truth

There’s a dreadful amount of conjecture flying around the web which threatens credibility. Backup the points you make with research, facts and quotes you can cite to authoritative sources.

Ease

Ease of access, understanding and readability are all-important to those that consume your content. Compose written content that is easily skimmable and be concise and on-point with your audio/visual content.

Original

Make your content uniquely yours. Even if you’re trodding in common territory with content on a popular topic, bring your point of view and voice to the table.

Headline

Content rule number one: thou shalt aim to arouse the reader with a magnetic headline or title. If it fails to create curiosity and interest, it’ll be the only line that’s read. Write several titles in an attempt to arrive at one that’s irresistible.

Shareable

Make it easy for your audience to do you the favor of sharing. Display share bars that are easy to find and use. Feed readers suggestions and shortcuts for sharing your content and ask them to share it. Thank them when they do.

Optimized

The best way to expand your audience over the long haul is to earn a spot on page one of search. Optimize your content for search engines by using keywords and applying SEO tactics. (More to come in chapters G and K.)

Call to action (CTA)

What do you want readers, viewers or listeners to do? Determine this. Tell them where to go, how to get there, and why.

Think broadly, execute narrowly

A topic related to content marketing that’s finally getting the attention it deserves is promotion and distribution. Together, you can think of them as reach. A chapter about the effective use of content would be incomplete if it didn’t broach the subject. Three important lessons follow, intended to help you maximize the reach of your content.

Think big

Big content takes on deep subjects in detail. Of course, creating it requires more time or money, but it can and should be a smart investment. Not everything you create needs to fall into the “big content” bucket, but some should.

Again, I offer this book as an example. It’s about a big topic. It also contains many subtopics (such as the subject of this chapter) that are big content topics themselves. You may not want to write a long business book at this moment in time, but think about how you might take on a big, juicy topic related to your area of expertise that has the potential to be “chapterized“ and the legs to take you far.

Repurpose your content

Most of the content you create for a single medium can be re-imagined and re-applied in other media. Apply the idea of repurposing content first to media types. For instance, your eBook can be a series of blog posts. A blog post might make a good infographic or podcast.

Secondly, apply the repurposing strategy to create a larger digital (or even physical footprint) for the same or similar content. You might:

 Offer PDFs or printed copies of written content.

 Create videos for your YouTube channel and publish on your blog or elsewhere.

 Turn a list post into an infographic or slide show.

 Recreate a recorded interview as text-based content.

 Roll several pieces of content into one larger work.

 Use existing content as the basis for webinars.

 Offer written content for syndication elsewhere or update it for publication on an industry blog.

The possibilities for content repurposing are immense. Doing it purposely, and well, can vastly increase your mileage and ROI.

Promote your content

You want to find ways to get your content out there, earn more eyeballs, and generate buzz. There are tons of strategies for doing so, but in an effort to not turn this chapter into a book itself, I want to simply close by advising you to capitalize on the investment you make in creating content by sharing it vehemently across social channels and promoting it online and off in as many ways as you can.