We all love Ronan Keating, well perhaps just me today as it was his song that inspired this piece of writing. As I was travelling to see a client just yesterday, I had the radio playing in the background, which to be honest I wasn’t listening too as I was using the time to put together my blog post for today. Following the JCK content calendar I had my blog title …or at least an idea to craft a blog from…but my brain was blank, I had the proverbial writers block.
And then it happened, I heard Ronan… “you say it best when you say nothing at all” and it stopped me in my tracks (well not literally we’d have had a pile up on the M4!)
And it got me thinking, perhaps if I really have nothing to say then lets not write a post today….after all if there’s no purpose what’s the point? Which then led me to
Who – What – Which – Why – Where – How – When
now not all of them are appropriate, but I think every time you produce a piece of content you need to follow this checklist:
Why: why are you bothering? if it’s just for the search engines – really don’t bother. If however it’s to educate your audience, tell them a piece of news, highlight an area of your business then you can check this one – your purpose is good.
Who: who are you writing for? we’ve previously talked about personas, its really important you know who your audience is so that you can connect with them. It could be a particular sub-section of your audience – you need to be specific.
What: what are you going to say – this is your content plan which you should create to give you a fighting chance, here at JCK we try and work with a 3 month plan… it doesn’t always work out and of course sometimes you do go “off piste” when unknown events happen that spark an idea. As long as you’ve validated the why and the who – go with it.
How: how are you going to get your message across? a blog post – a white paper – a podcast – a video. Think about the best format for the content you are producing when ‘words don’t come easy‘ could a video cut it?
When: Again back to your content calendar, know when you are going to publish – try and be consistent. Some pieces of content can only be published at certain times of year (how many Halloween inspired emails have you received just lately??)
Where / Which: This comes down to distribution – which platforms work with your content and where else can you put it? A lot of platforms give you the opportunity to embed your information in other places – use it if you can.
So there we go a music inspired piece of writing, that hopefully educated you and will enable your content creation to be just ‘like a rolling stone’