Taking Months to Create a Piece Of Content is Your Competitive Advantage
How Personal Brands and Influencers Get Content Creation Right
That title is a kick in the teeth đŹ for most content marketers - including myself.
At a time in which companies understand algorithms, informational architectures, and can see that engineered mountain of content their competitors are working on - weâre all in a hurry to create more content.
And itâs probably an equally perplexing statement to read in the early months of the year such as January/February. You know - when us marketers are still holding onto those New Yearâs resolutions.
âA blog post a day for 90 daysâ
â2 newsletters a day for a monthâ
But this newsletter Iâm working on right now isnât asking you to consider the tactics you might take to strong-arm a âcommunityâ together.
Iâm strong-arming my way through Twitter quite unsuccessfully as we speak. Building an audience of linkbuilders and guest-posting, swap-market opportunists the likes you all have never seen!
Instead, Iâm asking you to think about the writers, creators, influencers, and personal brands you follow that you have mad respect for.
The ones that seem to have a real knack for hitting the nail on the head when it comes to identifying what their readers want to learn, want to say, or have thought before but never been able to put words to.
Discussions youâve been having for weeks, months, or years are your superpower pieces of content
You know that part of your career or hobby that you keep cornering people to talk about - the topic you will bring up multiple times despite the bemoaning groans of others.
Bingo! Thatâs your topical authority.
In my case, theyâre the things that I might incessantly bring up after a beer or two on a Friday night.
The ones that my wife so patiently nods her head to no matter how many times sheâs heard them - and how many times theyâve obviously been iterated upon as I learn new things.
For me, lately, the topics revolve around how to build content strategies, being an employee at an agency, and how to manage client expectations.
Let me illustrate how the content creation process plays out with âmanaging client expectations.â
Step 1: Get presented with a GENUINELY challenging problem
Clients in a niche like SEO Content often suffer the following problems
Little knowledge about what SEO content is or how it works
Little knowledge about what goals to set and how to set them
Little knowledge about how to set up a system that measures conversions/goals
Little knowledge about content distribution
And so theyâll present me with a respectable question that sometimes leaves me stumped.
Step 2: Internalize the problems and the hurdles to the answers
Most frequently I receive questions about how to track content performance all the way through the funnel/cycle to help clients understand if a piece of content helped generate a sale. Which is a part of micro-managing for exact ROI on content spend.
Iâll start thinking about:
What technology would be needed to acquire that information?
Can I actually build that or does someone internally need to own something like that?
What are the important tripwires set up both on and off a website that would be able to tell us how readers are moving?
Is anyone I know really able to do this?
Am I even within my project scope anymore?
Step 3: The first verbal vent
Then comes the first verbal vent.
It usually sounds a lot like, âI donât know how they expectâŠâ - âI donât know how anybody would evenâŠâ - âThe problem with doing that is that it requiresâŠâ
Step 4: Simple investigations
Now that Iâve said it out loud to someone and perhaps gotten some questions or corrections from the listener, I can start with my lazy problem-solving skills.
I start by Googling and searching blogs by other content agencies.
In this phase, Iâll rarely find something useful, but Iâll typically get a sense of simple ways that people are tracking attribution. And Iâll likely learn who is selling classes about this type of information.
Step 5: The second vent
Now Iâm equipped with a slightly enhanced vocabulary and other peopleâs opinions about how itâs doneâŠ
âŠor why it canât possibly be done.
So I speak (again, probably to my poor wife) more confidently about the matter while also being able to reference a few people whose material Iâve read.
I essentially have a broad scatterplot of takes and opinions that make me optimistic that there are ways of âprovingâ content value but still donât have the ideal solution that my clients seem to want.
Step 6: The connect and forum search
Then, an emboldened me will move to a deeper, more personal part of the investigation phase.
At this point, Iâll connect with new people on social. Iâll shoot them DMs, comment on related posts, and create my own public posts requesting help.
Additionally, Iâll usually find myself on forums like Reddit or in some âdark socialâ channel like Slack or Discord.
I now have a tighter scatterplot of my ideas - perhaps a few live conversations and connections with people willing to support my (pronounced âourâ) conclusions.
Step 7: A publicly educated vent
At this point, I can begin to assemble my resources and an outline.
Iâve begun to talk about the hurdles with the client to create a 100% attributable/visible funnel.
And together we work out a subjective way that we believe will work for both of us in interpreting the success of the content program for them. And we can then back into goals and further strategy.
Step 8: Mull until you can either point out the problem with finding the solution or you have the solution
Iâll eventually form a conclusion from all of this interaction, discussion, and mulling because Iâve lived the experience.
I evaluated the problem.
I found resources.
I connected to people about the problem.
I built a solution of some sort.
A realistic timeline for great contentđ
The above process can very honestly take me 2 months to 2+ years (possibly more). This isnât because Iâm working on it 8 hours per day. Itâs because a lot of the time I have other projects and a full-time job to concentrate on.
Itâs running in the background, being worked, reworked, theorized, and philosophized upon.
You can definitely shave down some of that time if itâs all you focus on and you pretty readily know who to go to for help.
Here is my overall timeline for the most ideal, well-thought-out, well-researched content:
Whatâs the competitive advantage? That Iâm slow? Is that the competitive advantage?
Apologies for my possibly obscure headline joke from I Think You Should Leave.
Brands and companies are often working off of KPIs and goal numbers that require consistent growth.
Or, at the very least, that requires content teams to be able to show that theyâve been working and creating via the ever-elusive âdeliverable.â
This means that theyâre hiring out for agencies and writers who are creating 10 - 20+ pieces of content per month. Thatâs writing a piece of content about a topic youâve perhaps never thought about - every working day of the month!
Will that content work for SEO? Probably.
Will that content receive amplification? Probably not.
Your competitive advantage is having time to build something meaningful for people.
On platforms in which readers have enough to see and read to last them multiple lifetimes, amplification requires respect, admiration, and an emotional response.
And if youâre a good person who isnât trying to piss people off, getting well-informed, educational content amplified means giving people a weapon to show their friends, clients, and colleagues.
And to put together a resource like that requires time - months of time.
So while you might not be able to compete with a content millâs pace, you likely can compete with their reach given enough time and enough âGreatâ content to prove yourself.
And donât despair the long timeline, youâre likely working on a few great pieces like this at the same time - right now.
My inspirations for this post: