The Cream of Content: Whipping Up 4 Ideas for Digital Dessert
[Image source: Bonnie @ Flickr]
vox-popPRcareers is my baby. Since I have started it, I realised I do not have an outlet to think through my ideas on content in general. This post will be four ideas I have on improving content, but I do think aspiring ideas can take some of these ideas and mix them into their career approach.
Double cream: Look at the sites or blogs that you like. I refer to my favourite ones as ‘double cream’, because they are satisfying to my cerebral tastebuds. One feature popular slices of content have is structure.
Example: Content marketing blog Junta42’s posts are written where each word is needed, as opposed to adding extra words for the sake of it. This is what makes content appetising. Readers want more of good content and less of the bad types. As content creators, we need to look at what we can do to make our work ‘good’. This could include:
- Incisive quotes
- Videos embedded in our posts with a short paragraph explaining what the video is
- Monthly e-books on a popular topic
Should we be add lashings of the above to our blogs to thicken the content? I think so, because it is part of creating reader loyalty.
Stabilisers: Cream needs stabiliser agents to be digested by us. For content, this is frequency. We are not writing novellas at the same time, but serialising our work for our readers. For my website, I have not figured our what the equilibrium should be. There are different opinions on how often you should update your work. I like to make my point clear: You cannot ‘stabilise’ cream that does not have any fat in it. In terms of content, you have to have something there in order to choose what frequency you update. I believe that content creators must endeavour to update as much as possible, but obviously this is not always ideal or the case. Especially if you are doing all the work on the website yourself. I struggled to update vox-popPRcareers in its’ early months, but I realised that in order to grow it, I have to update it as often as I can.
Single cream: Sourcing other points of view is a mainstay of a journalist-imbibed work. But how can you do this if you are working full-time, want a social life and update your blog at the same time? I suggest sending introductory emails to contacts who are relevant to your niche.
Example: If you are an aspiring fashion blogger but work full-time as an engineer, think of your local charity shops. You could always pop in there on a Sunday afternoon and ask to speak to the manager of the shop. In 10 minutes, you could find out what the people in your local area of your city/town are buying. That is already a blog post metres above the rest for one reason: it has original research which is 100 per cent your own. I wish I could do more of this for my website; It is something I must do more of, and we all should because it makes your content smooth.
Crème fraîche: In one vintage episode of ‘Sex and the City’, Carrie Bradshaw tells her female friends that she believes her relationship has the shelf life of a dairy product. ‘It will start to curdle in about a week’, she quips. I think the same can be applied to content. Ideas matter – so coming up with alternative ways of presenting your writing is how we should be looking at someone. As an avid blog reader, I want to read posts that present issues in an original way. One key to this, in my opinion, is reading a lot of traditional media such as trade magazines along with digital. I think the so-called divide between the two is hype.
Example: If you love sweets and you want to write a blog about vintage sweets, I think you should be focusing on Kraft’s successful hostile takeover of Cadburys, an icon of 186 years’ of confectionery. By mixing in a different approach to tell your readers about your sweet obsession, you will make your content stand out.
I had success with this on my personal blog. When I came up with a list format post on the top 10 natural hair styles, someone put the post on Digg. I used a variety of sources to create that post (and naturally credited all of them).
Whip and Whisk: Like the different varieties of cream, content is diverse. The ideas I have discussed in this e-book are not for everyone. But I do think as content creators/writers/bloggers, we need to think of how we write and present our work to people. It’s fantastic to get high numbers of page views but we need to think of how we can make readers engage with our content. And then come back for seconds.
The cat only gets the cream if she goes after it herself. That is how we need to think as digital content creators.
