Content Strategy Planning for Authors

Your book is at the core of your content strategy, but there’s a lot more to it than just your book. In order to make connections with your audience, you need a cohesive content strategy. This includes your Web presence, your social presence, plus user-generated content and the data generated by that activity. All of these sources of content form a story about you—and they all need to work together.

There’s a lot of nuance to how you manage your content strategy, and that’s what I’d like to talk about over the next few articles.

You write to connect. The Web has reduced the cost of distribution to (nearly) zero. Anyone can propagate a message now. How can you make your message connect with your intended audience? It’s all about how you do it. Just because you now have a voice doesn’t mean that you’ll get heard. You have to earn that.

Here’s an overview of how you can make your content perform better by paying attention to small but important details. A lot of this comes down to style—though it helps to have a strategy, too. You have to pick what works for your own content and your own audience.

Presenting Your Content Clearly
How do you present your work so that it is the most clear and useful to others? The format, organization, length, and tone of your work will all make a big difference to how it is received. You are writing to connect with an audience; everything you do must be in service to them.

Choosing Your Channel
You choose your words carefully. You have to choose your medium carefully, too. The delivery is as much a part of the content as the content itself. Where does your audience want to hear from you?

Optimizing for Online Authority
Is your content easy to find? There are three factors you need to consider:

• Searchability. How likely is your content to show up in a Google search?
• Discoverability. Is your content in the right places so that it’s likely to be found?
• Authority. Will people trust you when they do find your content?

Timing and Frequency
Creating really good content is only the beginning. The New Functions of You require that you think about the timing of a piece, too. When do your readers want to hear from you? How often do they want to hear from you?

Forming Connections With Your Audience
What’s the purpose of creating great content if there’s no connection? How do you invite people to interact with your content? How do you start the conversation? How do you keep it going?

Creative Commons Considerations for Writers
Open licenses give you more control over your content and how it is used. You now have a lot more freedom, but that leaves you with some important choices to make. I’ll cover the pros and cons so that you can make good decisions about how you license your content.

Monetizing Your Work in a Digital World
It’s not easy to monetize digital content. But how can you set yourself up to earn money from your work? No matter what your goal is, it doesn’t hurt to build your content strategy with this in mind.

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I’ll dive deeper into each of these topics, so stay tuned for the next few segments of the Glass Box Project. In the meantime, is there anything that I’m missing? A topic you would like me to cover? As always, please let me know.

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