The process of developing content (at least if you want to do it well) works exactly the inverse of what most people would expect. You start from the end, and then work backwards.
Most folks begin by collecting everything they know about their subject. For example, if they have a duck farm, they start by collecting every single thing they know about ducks — how to feed them, where they shit, how to collect the eggs, what happens then they get sick, how to keep them from eating your flowers — it goes on and on and on.
And once you’ve collected all this crap, you feel obligated to use it. (“We spent all this time getting all this stuff together, dammit! So our customers can just damn well wade through it!)
While the “Steinbeck” school of content was popular at one time, it has fallen out of favor. Nowadays, people are looking for just the bits they need (and want) to know. And they will determine what that is, not you, buttercup. So that’s why we do it backwards.
We start with defining how we’re going to measure if our content “product” is successful. (Yup, you can measure content. What a concept!) One simple way you may have seen are those little check boxes in online help that say “Did this answer your question?”
You might also have a metric of how many customers purchased your widget after reading about it on your web page. Or how many visitors stayed on your site for ten minutes or more, reading about how your AutoMaticBabyWash machine eliminated diapers and kept those little rumps clean and sweet smelling.
But you must have some kind of measurement in place before you write a single word, or begin to gather any information at all. Because it will make your job so much easier and more effective.
Let’s go back to the example of the duck farm. If the measurement is “Number Of Web Site Visitors Who Book A Personal Visit To The Duck Farm”:
- We know we don’t want to talk about duck shit
- We know we have to talk about how easy it is to find
- We know we need photos of happy people visiting
- We know we need pictures of cuddly little ducklings
- We know we don’t want to talk about sick ducks
So we’ve just made our job much, much easier. And we’ve also made it much, much easier to show our boss how well we’re doing our job. “Look, Mr. Cranston — we booked 200 people to come to visit the farm this week, and all because of the content on the website!”
Maybe you won’t have to keep wearing that big “Quacky The Duck” suit all weekend, now.