Content Strategy

Creating content for a website isn't enough - making your ongoing content development work requires strategy. From editorial calendars to information architecture, strategic content creation increases the power of websites.

4 Signs You’re Strip Mining Your Niche

April 26, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Sometimes, the best way to get at a resource is by digging a pit and pulling it out.

People have been doing this for some time – but is it appropriate for bloggers to be approaching their niches the way some mining companies approach environmental conservation; with scorn, disregard for wasted effort, and their eye on nothing but fast profitability?

Like open pit miners, some content producers go right for the veins of gold in their niche by going broad and shallow with their content. By not only writing for your very specified subject matter, but addressing subjects in a strategic manner, you’re going to get more out of the wells you dig in your niche.

Here are some signs you might be missing the opportunity for sustainable work:

1. Removing overburden

When you’re starting niche work, one of the really tempting strategies is to write all the obvious blog entries first – 10 Ways to Get Better Sales, or How to Own A Hacksaw are great titles – but when you spend your first month in a blog with nothing but these super obvious subjects, one of two things happens; either you gain no ground because you’re showing no depth, or you lose enthusiasm because the learning curve goes from bunny hill to K2 after you’ve exhausted the easy topics.

2. Chopping off the mountaintops (overt criticism)

There’s always kerfuffle about negative action – but relentlessly hamstringing the competition isn’t just a bad idea online, it can be downright fatal to your career as a blogger. Because nothing ever really goes away (see also; Eternal Cache mediatrope), even if your opinions about something change, your Voice of Record never will. Endlessly pursuing conflict for whatever reasons you name is counter-productive.

3. Failing to survey properly

If you don’t do the research, no one can blame you for getting it wrong, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Missing vital details, neglecting to give proper credit, or opining without disclaiming an article as opinion, can be damaging to your long term opportunities as an authority on the web. And that’s just with individual articles.

If you dive into a niche that’s dried up, or being effectively addressed by a range of other knowledge workers who both got there before you and know more than you do, you’re only going to be able to get a certain amount of return on your work.

4. Paying no heed to the tailings

Run-off from a blog may be harder to quantify than from a mine, but the fact remains that unaddressable byproducts exist. Unanswered comments, unthanked retweets, ghost town Facebook pages – all of these are the tailings of a sloppy blogging operation. Missing the opportunity to clean up after yourself, by responding to comments, and thanking those who share (when you find them), is a great way to waste future advocacy.

There are better ways to produce serialized content along a constrained topic set.

Because, let’s face it, that’s the technical definition of Blogging, isn’t it? We’re not just weblogging any more, we’re not journaling – certainly not if the idea of a niche has entered the discussion. Creating serialized content in a shallow manner will net swift results if done well – but it won’t last forever.

Image by Kevin Dooley.

5 Ways to Make Every Blog Post Count

April 25, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

Bloggers toss out a lot of content.

We’re the serial monogamists of the writing world – forever working on a new article, loving it until we publish the next one, and moving on in an endless succession of text production. Our job, as Merlin Mann so eloquently puts it, is to “make the clacketty noise on our keyboards until the right words fall out.” The trouble with this is that eventually, even the best words don’t feel right, and we lose ourselves in the production.

“Oh,” we say, “I don’t really have to put the time into this post, because the next one will be published tomorrow.”

Bullpucky.

In Cranking, an essay on failing to prioritize a book on setting priorities, Merlin talks about the manner in which he’s developing his work for the book he’s under contract to deliver. He’s struggling, in part because he’s not an author. He’s a writer, sure, but as we’ve discussed before, authorship and writing are different things. Merlin’s having the issue many transitioning tradespeople have – he’s trying to apply the method that works in one medium to another, and failing (as he says, not me). Does this mean his book will suck? Quite the opposite – should it ever be released, I think it’ll end up being a canonical example of what productivity books are for; helping people get their work done better, quicker, sooner.

Why is this a big deal for bloggers?

Because I’m in the same boat, and I think a lot of you are too. While some people are diving back into the things that work for them, there’s a feeling that not everything we do actually counts. One of the thing that I read from Merlin’s essay, and some of the reactions to it, is that while prioritization is key, making the work you actually do more meaningful is a great way to avoid burnout, while being more productive.

So let’s talk about some of the things you can do – for yourself – which might just help keep you in the zone, and make sure the posts you publish are worth your time.

1. Limit the number of categories on your blog.

When you force yourself to write only about stated subjects, you automatically increase the likelihood that your articles will be more impressive over time. By keeping yourself to a strict regime of topics, and retaining an open approach to themes that address those topics, you’re going to do better work. If even a cinnamon toast can come back to creative work, for example, you’re on the right track.

2. Research is your friend.

Do your discovery! While not ever post requires fact-checking, looking into your subject matter can almost always provide some additional resources. Maybe someone’s already related food to sales pages, for example, and you’re writing the same theme from an entirely different voice. Referencing existing material can be as helpful for fact checking as it can be for making sure you don’t sound too old hat.

3. Make sure you’re filling in all the fields.

Search engine optimization aside, it’s generally a good idea to go for completeness. Have you referenced everything you need to? If you’re in an SEO-ready blogging environment, are you entering your own titles and meta descriptions? Have you tagged and categorized the blog post properly – or are you relying on your defaults to cover these things for you? Just like you can’t steal third base from first, you can’t expect a blog post to do well in search without some tender care. And, as much as we love social media, it really does contribute to the per-post feeling of ephemera.

4. Make every possible connection.

Cross-linking posts, and linking out to other bloggers, is important; links are part of how the web works, not to mention being important for SEO. At their core, however, links are a great way to expose new readers to your existing material – which will help you feel like the things you’ve done in the past actually mean something. More than just increasing the value of the work you do today, cross-linking your blog posts can also increase the value of the work you did last month, last year, or even further in the past.

5. Ask questions.

Unless you’re writing a research paper, don’t be afraid to leave things open to interpretation, and encouraging discussion. Even if you end up with an in situ comment count of zero, you might be causing ripples – giving people something to respond to can help then find their way as well, and may end up in some ancillary social sharing, a trackback, or other forms of off-site engagement.

Back to you – what have we missed?

There are a lot of ways to make your blog posts more effective – what works for you? How do you maintain interest, without feeling overwhelmed by the inner editor, or worse, by the inner apathetic? How do you make your work count for more than you once thought it might?

What Happened to Blog Reactions?

April 19, 2011 by Ian 5 Comments

This week’s #blogchat focused on engagement – comments got all the cred.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised – comments are great. They exist on your platform, they’re relatively long-form compared to some other reactions (like tweets and Facebook comments), but it felt like the really big, high caliber blog engagement actions were missing.

What happened to blog reactions?

In the hey-days of LiveJournal, one of the biggest signs a conversation was – well, big – would be when someone on your friends list actually entered a post in direct reaction to something you wrote. Not just a comment-length “check this out” notice, but a full on essay-length journal entry eviscerating, deconstructing, or otherwise responding to what you wrote.

It was fairly commonplace, at one point, to follow chains of journal entries ten or fifteen layers deep before finding the initial instigator. Does that happen any more? Not so much.

We’re worried about spam. Not just comment spam – trackback spam.

The same way comments have become a great place for less-than-ethical linking, trackbacks to unwary bloggers have turned into the vogue Den of Thieves to be avoided at all costs. We want social reactions, comments, and shares more than we want other bloggers linking to our specific articles – we want them linking to our domains, which are evergreen, rather than individual articles which are timely and may grow stale over time as information changes.

But is this how we build community? It’s mechanistic, pragmatic, and unsustainable – it furthers no conversation, and encourages blind authority over the communion of conversation.

In our rush for personal authority, we seem to be losing some of our community.

We all want to be the instigator – to get the comments. Yet we all talk about contributing to community and furthering the conversation already in action at the same time – what better way to do that than to react to something in a thought-out, constructive way? We need to remember that adding to a conversation assumes that you don’t have to be the origin of that conversation. Starting new work all the time is like perpetually saying hi. And that gets video-game-esque really fast.

Give yourself some leeway to pick up where someone else left off now and again – and not in the way you pick up where an author left off for a book review. The instigators will probably want to converse with you a little more, if you’re really thorough in adding to their conversations – and your regular readers might find a new resource or two in the mix as well.

What say you? Bonus points if you continue this on your platform instead of mine.

Image by Nigel Howe.

Oh, for the Love of Obscure Services!

April 18, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We love to complicate things – we use services like Flickr’s Creative Commons search to fill our sites with awesome pictures, like laughing mantises or rock platforms.

Sometimes, it’s awesome to find the simple things; like Placekitten. Drop by and check them out – it’s handy to have tricks like this up your sleeve when you’re working on things like blog posts, and need something simple and fast. Like a kitten. Or, in the case of placehold.it, the service which PlaceKitten was inspired by, empty boxes like the one below.

Is it subject-appropriate visual interest for a blog post? Not necessarily.Handy for tossing something together quickly, for example, when you need to preview a blog post or ebook for layout? You bet.

It’s little things like these that can help speed up your production time and reduce the hang-ups in mid-action that so often cause procrastination.

… And here’s another placekitten!

Stop procrastinating! Place a kitten, save a blog post!

[Hat tip to Chris Coyier at CSS Tricks for the unintentional new tool, via: “Faking ‘float: center’ with pseudo-elements.”]

Links That Think – Falling With Grace

April 11, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot more reading than writing lately.

Given that I follow about 200 RSS feeds in my Google Reader, a convergence of ideas usually takes some strain – however, this evening I found a sequence of posts that was particularly elegant.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to project planning, preparation, and the effects of preparation lately. As I’m revving my motor back up after vacation, I’m finding a lot of other people are being intentional about getting back into the swing of things as well.

First, Uncle Seth talks about how to fail – something we can all get better at. When I was learning Judo in my early teens, I found it fascinating that almost the entire White Belt is about falling correctly when you’re thrown. What can we learn about failing correctly, so that we land and spring back up when we’re thrown?

Then, Stan the Man at Pushing Social gave us some hints on how to fall into the “Burnout Sucker Punch” with grace – which is a great head-first guide to finding ways out of that pit of writing anhedonia.

Stan’s article reminded me of something James at Men with Pens wrote some time ago about avoiding writer’s fatigue – which still holds true. Setting yourself up early – like, before you even begin a project – is a good way to avoid, or at least delay, fatigue.

Preparation often equates with infrastructure – Amber Naslund dropped a post today about how, while infrastructure isn’t always sexy, it’s so necessary for whole preparedness. In particular, the preparedness she’s speaking of relates to moving on from social media being flash-in-the-pan to full integration. You can’t integrate without infrastructure.

And speaking of integration – Simon Salt at The Inc Slingers wrote a particularly puissant post about the integrity of your personal brand – and, in essence, how shutting down (prolonging your state of prone repose) after a fall can be helpful. Simon was speaking not just of falling down, but intentionally stepping away for down time – which is also key.

What are you learning lately about falling down and getting back up?