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 😬 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 - we’re all in a hurry to create more content.
And it’s 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 Year’s resolutions.
“A blog post a day for 90 days”
“2 newsletters a day for a month”
But this newsletter I’m working on right now isn’t asking you to consider the tactics you might take to strong-arm a “community” together.
I’m 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, I’m 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 you’ve 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! That’s your topical authority.
In my case, they’re 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 she’s heard them - and how many times they’ve 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 “managing client expectations.”
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 they’ll 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.
I’ll 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, “I don’t know how they expect…” - “I don’t know how anybody would even…” - “The problem with doing that is that it requires…”
Step 4: Simple investigations
Now that I’ve 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, I’ll rarely find something useful, but I’ll typically get a sense of simple ways that people are tracking attribution. And I’ll likely learn who is selling classes about this type of information.
Step 5: The second vent
Now I’m equipped with a slightly enhanced vocabulary and other people’s opinions about how it’s done…
…or why it can’t 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 I’ve read.
I essentially have a broad scatterplot of takes and opinions that make me optimistic that there are ways of “proving” content value but still don’t 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, I’ll connect with new people on social. I’ll shoot them DMs, comment on related posts, and create my own public posts requesting help.
Additionally, I’ll usually find myself on forums like Reddit or in some “dark social” 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 “our”) conclusions.
Step 7: A publicly educated vent
At this point, I can begin to assemble my resources and an outline.
I’ve 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
I’ll eventually form a conclusion from all of this interaction, discussion, and mulling because I’ve 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 content👇
The above process can very honestly take me 2 months to 2+ years (possibly more). This isn’t because I’m working on it 8 hours per day. It’s because a lot of the time I have other projects and a full-time job to concentrate on.
It’s running in the background, being worked, reworked, theorized, and philosophized upon.
You can definitely shave down some of that time if it’s 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:
What’s the competitive advantage? That I’m 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 they’ve been working and creating via the ever-elusive “deliverable.”
This means that they’re hiring out for agencies and writers who are creating 10 - 20+ pieces of content per month. That’s writing a piece of content about a topic you’ve 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 you’re a good person who isn’t 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 mill’s pace, you likely can compete with their reach given enough time and enough “Great” content to prove yourself.
And don’t despair the long timeline, you’re likely working on a few great pieces like this at the same time - right now.
My inspirations for this post:
