Do you remember the Rubik’s Cube craze of the 1980’s?! It was the ultimate puzzle to solve, and the kudos you got when you made all those little coloured tiles match up! I still remember people coming to school with their completed puzzles, all smugness and ‘look at me’, while the rest of us (yes, that’s right, I’m not a Rubik’s Cuber, but I’m not bitter…) would examine the cube for any sign that the stickers had been tampered with.
If I’d had the patience (I had a very short attention span…) to crack the Cube, I’d have put it in a perspex case and given it pride of place on my mantlepiece. Not so my middle sister, and all the other smug puzzle geniuses! No, they’d bask in the glow of admiration for a few milliseconds, before scrambling the puzzle to the sound of startled gasps (how clever they must be!), and starting again. Nobody likes a show-off, just saying.
So I don’t know what made me think of the Rubik’s Cube after all this time, but it did strike me how alike it was to creating content. Except of course, consistently creating great content is a lot easier, once you know how!
In order to create a great piece of content that works hard for your business, and pays you back for whatever it took to arrange those words, in that order, to make your point so well, you need to have all the bits of the puzzle facing the right way. Having even one part of the puzzle out of alignment could mean that your content’s not as great as it could be. And of course, once you’ve solved the puzzle and created a great piece of content, you can’t stand back and bask in it’s glory forever: sooner or later you’re going to have to do it all over again.
Luckily, you don’t have to be a great solver of puzzles in order to create consistently great content. You just need to remember to follow the POSTS framework.
People: write for the people you want to help, creating valuable content that they’ll find informative, interesting, or entertaining. Show them that you understand them, and how you can help them solve the problem that you solve.
Objective: make sure your overall content strategy is aligned with your business objectives. And when you’re creating individual pieces of content, decide on what you want the outcome of your post to be: your reason for writing it. Keep that objective front and centre when you’re writing, so that you stay on point.
Story Cupboard: keep a Story Cupboard full of things to write about that will speak to the people you want to help. Use it to ensure you never run out of things to say, cover a broad range of subjects, and keep your readers interested. You can get a free Story Cupboard template by signing up to my newsletter.
True To You: write in your voice. The ideal is that people who meet you, get the same impression of you in real life as they do from your content. Use the words you would use if you were telling your story to someone in person, and read your piece of content out loud to make sure it sounds like you.
Share: your content’s not going to work very hard if nobody is reading it. Build marketing of your content into your content strategy, and be sure to implement it. What’s the point of expending all that effort to create content if you’re not going help people find it?
I may not know how to solve the Rubik’s Cube, but I do know how to create great content. If you’d like to find out more about how I can help you do the same, please either comment below, or email me on sam@samdounis.com 🙂
Featured Image supplied via Creative Commons and created by Booyabazooka (Based on Image:Rubiks cube.jpg) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons