Every once in a while we need to be re-motivated, to be reminded of some basic truths about ourselves, like how your content is not as successful as it could be because you are being a little bit lazy about it. With just a little bit more effort and thought, you can make your content much more successful.
It’s easy to work really hard and produce a bunch of content. It’s easy to create a bunch of assets, a ton of volume, and a ton of ways for our audience to connect with us.
Effort, a lot of times, can be a mask for not thinking things through.
Specifically content because you can just post it and move on to the next act of creation. Sometimes it’s easy to forget and really strategize how you’re going to best serve your audience through that content.
Two considerations:
#1 — Treat your content like a product launch
We’re going to explore this idea more in a different episode, but just to touch on it here: if you’re taking the time to make a piece of content, that content should be valuable enough that you have some kind of launch or promotion strategy behind it.
Think about it: There’s a lot that goes into a product launch, whether physical or digital. There’s a lot of planning, a lot of writing, a lot of scheduling, and a lot of promotion. Take time to consider…
- Is this content something I am willing to put in the effort to do all of that for?
- If not, is this a worthy piece of content to be creating and putting in front of my audience?
- Or do I need to scale back the volume and work on increasing the quality so it is worth putting that effort behind?
#2 — Reflect, Review, Revise
How are you analyzing, measuring, justifying, or making decisions on what future content will be?
If you are simply producing content at scale, promoting it, distributing it, and not making revisions or decisions based on what is working versus what is not, you’re losing so much momentum you could be enjoying by thinking about this a little more strategically.
This is called the “test and learn” method, a popular adage in the tech startup world where companies go out, build a feature, put it in front of an audience, and collect feedback. Then they revise it and put it back through the cycle again.
The same thing should be done with content.
That’s the entire thesis behind building one pillar asset: to create a bunch of different pieces from it to distribute among a wide variety of people so you can see where that message pops. What type of content is it most effective being delivered as? An Instagram story? A YouTube video? A podcast? A written piece of content?
If over time you don’t realize that, for example, every time you talk about how to create content on a Thursday that it does best as a blog post, you’re just leaving wins on the table. You have to analyze to see what’s working.
This is why a content calendar is so important, so you have a way to review at least once a month. Look at…
- What did you do over the month?
- Where did all the content go?
- Where did you get the most attention for that content?
Starting off, it might not be 1,000s of views. It might be a couple of hundreds of views over here and 10 views more on a certain platform, but if it’s consistently 10 views more, note that.
Acknowledge where and when you’re doing best and use that information the next time you come back to the creation table so your content is more valuable, more impactful, and worthy of being promoted and distributed like a product would be.
In conclusion
There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to content, only playbooks on how to best structure your attempts so you learn thoughtfully and can create more effectively in the future, so give the test and learn method a try.
It does put more work on you as the creator but, if you make the effort and apply this note, it’s going to make your content a whole lot better.