Member-only story
Write Content That Makes A Difference
Plan Your Content To Succeed
If you want your content to make a difference to both you and your readers lives, you can’t just site down and write content without thought and planning.
I know because that was what I used to do, I was even proud of my ability to create vacuous content in a few minutes, with no thought for outcomes or my readers… and for that, I am eternally ashamed.
Luckily, I soon realised that writing content that genuinely focused on helping the reader achieve their goals was a much better way of using my ability to create content.
Here is what I now do for every piece of content.
Step 1: The Basics
The first thing you need to do is to get the basics in place. What is the desired outcome of the content you are writing?
If it doesn’t have a defined outcome, ditch the idea until it has.
The outcome can be for someone to take an action, move forward on their journey, get some important advice that will help them, click a link, buy a product, get on a list, etc.
If you don’t have an outcome for every piece of content, you are doing a disservice to your reader and to yourself.
When you’ve defined the outcome, pencil in the steps to get there and think of it as looking at a map; planning the route is much easier if you know where you are going.
This step helps you to focus on the desired result and create the right call to action.
When I created Content Centric Marketing, the first part of the training focused on encouraging people to build repeatable habits. These then naturally lead to the ability to create content that gets results for both you and the readers.
By both getting and providing regular results is how you build a sucessful content business.
Step 2: Creation
Let’s create the content.
First, choose where you’ll write the first draft. I use Notion or IA Writer as they store all my content, even the ones that are never published — and there are a lot of those!
