Recently, my friend and colleague, Jennifer Beaupre Glynn, wrote an interesting article on four things that you can do to make your content “king.” They are:
- Make your content easy to understand.
- Put some effort into it.
- Be proactive.
- Market your content.
I definitely agree that making sure your content is easy to understand is a critical aspect of great content. You can put boatloads of time and energy into your writing. However, if you don’t focus on readability, you will lose most of your readers early on. I know people who feel the need to show off their amazing Ivy League vocabularies whenever they write. These vocabularies might look impressive on the outside, but to the average reader, they do nothing for understandability of the content itself.
Putting effort, forethought, and research into your content is also very important. I like reading posts where people have done due diligence and have enough background to form an opinion worthy of attention. Jennifer is one of these people. She knows a lot about understandability and the value of quality content.
Being proactive will get your content out there – but I’m not so sure it will be “king” if you haven’t done steps one and two. There is so much content on the internet these days, if I waste my time trying to read a post that is poorly researched and difficult to read, it is highly unlikely that I will spend time looking at the author’s content again in the future. By the way, don’t waste a lot of time making crummy content searchable.
And for step 4, again, don’t market crummy content. How do you know if your content is any good? Well, it is certainly a subjective opinion. You might think that all of your content is perfect. After all, you know who wrote it. However, I would suggest that you have a few people read over your content before you market it far and wide. This is particularly true if you are in the beginning of your content creation career and/or if you are at all unsure of the value of what you’ve created. Also, make sure you’ve done step 2 – put effort into it – before you ask anyone to read it.
Beware: if you undertake these steps in the reverse order, you will not be king. You will be the court jester.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
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