Page 84 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

But not even once have I, or you, shared a piece of another brand’s content
because it was “Tuesday at 2 p.m.” or because it was a picture with 10 percent
text on Facebook. People share emotions. When you evoke that, people react.

The surest way to create the one emotion that doesn’t lead to sharing content
—apathy—is to send out content because you “should.”

“Never take the audience for granted.”

– Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes and

Content Rules, Chief Content Officer of

MarketingProfs

I think of my fans and audience in terms of a kind of value exchange that
expresses itself in two ways:

First: Is what I’m delivering of value to them? Is the content I’m publishing
something useful that will resonate with the people I’m trying to reach? (Or at
least … some of them?) Will it help them? Make them smarter, more informed,
inspired, or perhaps entertained?

Second: Is it something that they, in turn, will want to share with their own
audiences? Will the value I’m providing delight them enough that they’ll want to
share what I’ve shared, in other words?

Inherent in this is an idea that’s core to what I believe about any content more
generally: That publishing is a privilege and should not be squandered. I started
my career in print journalism. And that sensibility from my journalism school
days of “No one has to read this,” continues to influence and inform what I
publish to this day.

“Connecting content, people, and conferences.”

– Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing

A key strategy for converting weak social media links to strong connections for
me is attending conferences. I try to get involved as deeply as I can in
conferences I attend, even creating unique content for and about these events. I
want to create a positive, intelligent and creative experience for the people who
are involved so they come to know, “That Lee guy, he does this interesting
thing.” You know what, in six months or nine months, that turns into something.

The content moves through paid channels, organic channels, through
networking, through personal inspiration because we’re all creating this really
neat thing for a conference that we’re all a part of. It’s not just some sort of