Content development needs a strategic approach, a blueprint and a purpose. It’s permanent record, pretty much the moment your content goes live.
It is the “purpose” which defines the approach, as some content will have differentiating purposes on your website. For example, your contact and directions page has a different purpose than your author biography page or mission statement.
Purpose
This is perhaps the most important question you can ask yourself or team prior to penning a single thing. What is the “Purpose” of this upcoming content? And what is the blueprint to structure the content to best execute the agreed upon “purpose”? Is our purpose in alignment with our category, our parent page or our mission scope?
Material questions that are useful for defining your purpose:
- Are you intending to make a direct sale, a referral sale or a review of some sort with this content?
- Are you intending to open a debate on a subject, will this be living content, content which grows over time?
- Is this content supplemental to your cornerstone or is this a new direction?
- Is this content something which should be carefully timed with something? Future holiday promotion, election cycle or conference date?
Having a consistent blueprint for each type of content mission will be valuable over time, as readers and visitors recognize your consistency over time as opposed to your “habits”. It isn’t the content blueprint that defines you, it is the implementation and quality. A blueprint strategy will help your editorial process immensely, as well as your design and presentation.
Content Blueprints & Strategy
When developing a blueprint for your content, there are six criteria you should keep in mind:
- Content & length
- Structure & navigation
- Visual design
- Interactivity
- Functionality
- Overall experience
Instead of going on and on about content blueprints, I’d like to just say “You need a blueprint, if you need help ask me!”. I could write a hundred pages of nonsense about this, so in the interest of saving myself from blog brain damage, just inspire me to write up a section on blueprint development! On to my main purpose, the strategy itself on how to approach your content development.
This Content is the Strategy
What you are reading, how this content is structured, how you found it and what you do next is a result of my strategy. It begins with an introductory paragraph, styled a little with drop-caps and using some keywords I hope my website is developing a page rank for. I try not to keyword stuff my first sentences and I write with a casual style. A thesis statement, or informational contract with your reader, must be established within the first few sentences. If you execute this correctly you can expect a few things to occur: On page SEO, communicating with clear purpose and setting expectations. What more can an introductory paragraph offer? Design and supplemental strategic distractions which a reader will appreciate.
I regularly finish my opening paragraph last. As I write my content, I develop some talking points or key concepts, which typically work well in the introduction.
Content Strategy Point: Don’t spend considerable time on the opening words until you have written 80% of what will become your content.
My purpose, the result of my strategy, is to discuss approaching content and the various bones to such a process skeleton. In addition to my stated purpose, I want to develop an opportunity to link to other content which has added value to my purpose. I like to think about supporting images and typography styles, overall value of the topic (anyone care?), competition with search engine placement, market demand, longtail opportunity and perhaps the chance for follow up writing or the start of a content series.
Well structured, referenced and written content is king, not just any old content.
I determine the mission of my content, first and foremost. I don’t necessarily finalize my mission, it is always amendable until published without any consequence. This mission sets that stage for speculating about tags, categories, keywords, alternative titles, secondary headlines, hash tags for twitter, excerpts and meta descriptions.
While I write, I review what keywords were initially speculated about, what tags I intended to organize with, alignment with my category and opportunities to provide links to other useful content. In the end, when the content is published, it is probably the third or later version of whatever I had initially set out to do.