Content Creation Part 6

An Effective Content Strategy

In our last section, we discussed the importance of setting the correct style and tone of your content.

Don't worry about terms like "structure," "style," "voice" and "tone." We promised you earlier that you don't need to be a writer to create and publish great content on your website or blog on a regular basis. All you need to concern yourself with is that the content on your site has to feel authentic to readers and reflect the true personality and character of your business.

Say you were to publish a piece of content like an article or blog post on your site and put your name on it as the author. Now, imagine that someone then becomes a client because they liked what they read on your site. If the client was to meet with you in person or speak to you over the phone, they would expect to see some "congruency" between the way you speak and the way you write, and also between the way your business is presented to the outside world.

Some businesses are cool, casual, friendly or hip, and some are more formal or somber. The style of writing used to create your content has to reflect this.

This is very important, because even though this point seems blatantly obvious, this is where a lot of business owners run into problems. Especially when they choose not to write the content themselves, as you will see in some of our later training sections.

But... let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's start with the basics in today's tip.

Tip #5 - It Doesn't Have To Be Written By You

Web content written by people who have a vested interest in the business (e.g. the business owner) generally tends to carry the most authority, credibility and authenticity with readers. This is because business owners typically have the most intimate knowledge of their business and care the most about how their business is presented. Business owners see their business as a reflection of who they are, their values, principles, integrity, quality, etc. and don't want to see these areas compromised by information that lacks substance, or web content that is poorly-written.

Your website content, however, doesn't have to be written by you. It can be written by people who have expertise in your business, products, services or industry, professional copywriters, freelance content creators... even guests and content contributors!

There are a range of options available for helping you develop and implement an effective content creation strategy and these can include any or all of the following methods:

• Collaboration
• Delegation
• Outsourcing
• Guest Blogging
• Content Curation
• Ghost Writing
• Private Label Rights Content
• Content Rewriting
• Content Repurposing
• Autoblogging Tools
• Etc.

All of the above methods will be covered in more detail in future training sections. The important thing to understand for now, is that if you plan to get others to write content for your website, then it is very important that you learn how to establish clear content creation guidelines first, that you know exactly what kind of style and tone you want for your content writing and that you have an effective way to communicate this to those who are going to do the work for you. This will help you avoid wasting time when outsourcing your content writing to freelance writers, or wasting money on cheap quality, "thin" (i.e. lacking substance) or poorly-written content that will then require you to do significant (or complete) content rewrites, etc.

IN SUMMARY

The content that gets published on your website or blog doesn't have to be all written by you. There are many other effective content creation strategies available and we will look at many of these methods, tools and strategies later in our training series.

ACTION STEP

If you plan to outsource your site's content writing, here are a couple of useful tips:

1. Make sure that you have personally written at least one or two articles in the style you want others to follow. You can then refer to these when hiring, outsourcing or delegating content creation work to others.
    
2. Time how long it takes you to complete the entire process from researching and writing your content, to editing and publishing your article or post. This will help you understand and set realistic benchmarks when discussing things like pricing (i.e. rates) and delivery deadlines.

In the next section of this training series, we will review some basic guidelines for creating effective posts using WordPress.

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