The point of the monster emoji email was that content marketing can consist of insight that’s valuable to your audience but also of content that’s helpful.
For every recent year of hard work under your belt, you have about 20 useful “How To” articles. The farther back you go, that number shrinks, but you still have a good 50 to 100 useful, short “How-To” blog posts in you.
Before you get started, a tip – forget about SEO. For now.
Instead, just focus on creating something helpful to a specific type of person in 280 words or less (this will also fit into a LinkedIn update).
How to do so? Start by answering these 6 questions:
- How do you want your blog post to serve your readers? What will they get out of it?
- Imagine it’s three months after your blog post was published, and we’re looking back on the results together. What’s the blog post done for you that made the effort worthwhile?
- Who Is your primary audience for this post?
- Describe a typical person in your primary audience. Give them a name, describe them as if you’d describe any real person you know. Who are they, what do they do, where are they in their relationship with you and your company?
- What doubt is this person experiencing because they’ve not read your blog post?
- What transformation will this person get in their work because they read and implement your blog post?
The rest is easy once you answer #1 – and one approach to it is to create a step-by-step roadmap. Like this post. Also consider: even the most complex and important 6-figure business decisions can be reduced down to a 5 or 6 step list.
This has been a hell of a year; it’s OK to keep it simple.
Best,
Rowan