The goal of this system is to give you a strong base to start from when creating a piece of content. That could mean an email, a blog post, a video, a podcast episode, a live performance, anything.
Whatever it is you’re creating, following these steps will help you connect with your intended audience—whether it’s one person or millions.
Here’s a checklist you can make your own edits to and make your own.
Goal Setting
The first step is to decide what your goal is with what you plan to create. Do you want to persuade? Just want to educate or transfer information? Something else?
Get clear about what your ultimate goal with this piece of content is so that you can build it from the beginning with that goal in mind.
Audience Research
Once you have a goal, you need to decide who your audience. When you know who your audience is, it’s much easier to build your content in a way that will deeply connect with them.
Here’s a checklist for this step.
- Choose your audience. Depending on the goal of your content, you might do this in a number of ways. It could be a demographic of people or customers of a business or everyone who believes a certain thing or likes a certain thing. You probably already have an idea of who your audience is, so start with that.
- Research audience psychographics. Demographics tell you who people are—where they live, how old they are, how much money they make, what gender they identify with, etc. Psychographics tell you what they believe. Thinking about your target audience, write down some of the more important things they believe and how they live their lives. Knowing this helps you create something that connects with them on a deeper level.
- Research audience locations. Once you know who your audience is, figure out where you actually need to go to get in touch with them. This could be a number of places like online forums, specific blogs, cities, etc. This will help you determine what kind of content you actually create.
Pre-creation
Before you start creating your piece of content, you should have a pretty good idea of what it will be when it’s done. Follow this checklist to make sure you’re successful with that.
- What form will the content take? Based on what you learned about your audience, what will the content actually be? Will it be a blog post? A video? You shouting with a megaphone in the town square?
- Write 20 titles. People will decide whether or not they’re going to interact with your content at all based on the title you give it. The best way to give it a great title is to write 20 of them before deciding which one will work best.
- Outline your piece. How will it flow? Get your ideas into a logical order and plan your transitions so that when you create your content, you can focus more on creation and less on organization. This will also reduce the amount of editing you have to do later.
- Find your source material. Need to make an argument based on facts and data? Get all those facts and data organized before you start creating or you’ll be in a tough spot later when learn the data you want doesn’t exist of what you thought was true wasn’t!
- Choose and place your action points. What do you want people to do once they’ve finished consuming your content? Be specific. This should come directly from the goals you set for the piece in the very beginning of this process. If you can, focus on just one action point.
Creation
Now it’s time to put it all together. Here are the steps to do that successfully.
- Create a first draft. Do not edit yourself as you create your first draft. In this stage, you’re building something from almost nothing. That’s hard enough without trying to get it perfect on the first try. Just get your first attempt created and you can edit and improve later.
- Simplify your message. Attention spans are short and it’s easy to get carried away. You don’t want to say more than you need to get your point across, so look over your draft with a careful eye and ruthlessly cut any information that isn’t critical to driving the actions you want.
- Get someone else to spell / grammar check. Even if you’re a very careful person, you’re too close to your work now to see the intimate details. Get someone else to look it over and suggest edits. You still won’t catch all of them, and minor errors are not the end of the world. But they slowly chip away at credibility if left uncorrected, so do your best.
Promotion
If a piece of content lands in the internet, does it make a sound? You need to get your work in front of the people it was intended for if you want it to do it’s job and have a chance to meet your goals.
If you did your job well in the first part of this system, then this part should come relatively easily.
What you need to do is gather your list of places where you know you can find your audience and take whatever measures you need to be a part of those communities.
This could look slightly different depending on the type of content you produce and what your goals are.
For the most part, though, it means getting “in” with the gatekeepers of those communities. Figure out who they are and what’s important to them. For instance, the editor of a popular blog that your audience reads is probably always looking for great content.
Some editors might republish content. In those cases, you could offer your work to be published to their audience. Other editors might only publish original material. In those cases, you might offer to create a unique version of your content for their audience.
And other editors still might only publish content they create themselves. In that case, you could offer all the high level bullet points they would need to write about your content easily and effectively.
In a way, this is another part of your audience research. Wherever you want to reach an audience, look for the gatekeepers of those audiences, figure out what is important to them, and find a way to make your content deliver that.