content strategy

May 2, 2007 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

If you’re a solo professional service firm (psf), your content should be a top priority. However, Seth Godin raises an interesting issue around the subject of how much, and how surprisingly little, people will read. From his post:

True story: I was doing a speech for a bunch of twenty-something campus reps for a clothing company. One young lady raised her hand. She pointed to Purple Cow (about 160 pages long) and said, ‘If we only have time to read twenty pages, which twenty pages should we read?’

However you feel about it, and regardless of the reasons behind it, people not reading is the way things are. So I think its important to have a content strategy to guide what you produce. One approach is to use yourself as a case study. If you have a framework to map your own content and attention (or whatever criteria makes sense to you), and if you write for people like you, you’ll have a barometer for providing value through your content.

Here’s what mine looks like. (I’m a mature, creative, solo psf who once read a ton of business books but now feel lucky, to find one or two that really make a difference for me, over a five-year period.)

content_attention.jpg

Do business books work?: “

Every year, more than a thousand new ‘business’ books get published in the US. Not textbooks or manuals, but general interest books about how to do business better.

Some sell a few hundred copies. Some sell a few hundred thousand. One or two might sell a million. Out of a potential audience of 30 or 40 million white collar workers in the US.

Do they work or are they an utter waste of time?

(Via Seth’s Blog.)

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