The Content Commitment

Here I am going to indulge myself, and with language fit for Tarzan, Frankenstein or Tonto, get right to the bottom line about content strategy:

“You, write.”

Sure, this is a reduction, but the necessary commitment needs to be realized, not forgotten or postponed, if your site is expected to improve in search rankings, attract the right visitors and keep a growing portion of them coming back as interested leads ready to take the step and convert.

In A Website that Works, Mark O’Brien succinctly explains what’s needed to maintain a content strategy for a healthy lead-generating website, outlines why a strategy is needed in the first place, and clarifies the advantages of various content strategy platforms. 

Chris Butler’s January newsletter justifies the time that writing will take, and he suggests limiting the scope of a strategy, delegating work to set goals and enforce editorial quality and to keep fresh ideas coming.

I have worked on many projects where, through the collaborative prototyping phase, we discuss the resources required to begin and continue content creation.   Many client plans to start a blog and/or a newsletter, and we often hear about what a challenge that this can be.  Blogs can be abandoned, newsletters that were planned can be left unpublished. Even news items, (not generally as great for lead generation, but new indexable content at least) after the big plans made while prototyping, can dwindle and the same featured few can linger on a homepage.

So, back to the basic message: Content Strategy means writing, on a schedule, pieces that will engage your intended audience. In most cases this means that someone in your organization will have to write, and ideally someone will have to act as editor–not necessarily revising the content, but establishing a schedule and keeping writer(s) accountable. Someone needs to act as CMS administrator too, to get the content onto the site and make it pretty, probably with images, and to apply useful meta data.

Here are a few more resources to keep make this easier:  

Newsletter: Four Stages of Content Marketing 

Blogpost: Three Common Content Strategy Platforms

Blogpost: Some Newsletter Formatting Tips

Or, just search our site for “content strategy”