One of my early forays into the WordPress world wasn’t as a developer, it was as a marketing and brand strategy coach.
I rented out meeting rooms and presentation venues, and invited professionals from around the area to attend seminars and workshops about content creation. Shorter sessions were just 2-3 hours and you usually left with a few bullet points about your brand’s character, tone, and at least 2 article ideas.
Longer sessions were all day, included lunch, and had you walking away with no less than 3, fully-fleshed-out articles.
All of my sessions included homework: the 30-days-of-blogging challenge.
The Challenge
Unlike my current aims of blogging every day, this challenge was not about publishing content on a consistent schedule. It was about producing content.
Every day[ref]I usually selected 31-day months so my students could each take a “day off” during the challenge if they felt burnt out.[/ref] you would sit down and write something. It could be a 100-word memo about a product, a 400-word summary of a sales meeting, a 1600-word description of your core business model, anything.
Then, the next day, you’d write something else.
None of this needed to be shared on your corporate site or published under your own name. Actually, I often helped students set up new accounts on Blogger or WordPress.com under pseudonyms so they could write anonymously. The aim wasn’t to take anything to market, it was to produce content and have your peers review it.
Our sessions consisted of explaining in detail your business, core competencies, and overall marketing strategy to a group of strangers. Then you pieced together the persona you wanted your brand to embody and the tone with which your writing would convey that persona.
Doing this as a group exercise, and allowing the same group to follow your work, established a certain level of accountability. It also gave you instant access to a group of people who could give you feedback about how genuine your brand felt through your writing.
Usually, after the 30 days were complete, you’d have maybe 3 articles that could be further refined and then published publicly to help establish your brand’s voice. After that, the trick was to keep writing regularly – even if not publishing – so you could maintain that voice.
https://twitter.com/anthonydpaul/status/531967949561921536
If you’re strategically building content, a large part of your strategy must be consistency. Not consistency in your publishing schedule, but in your means of communication.