Page 85 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com
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plastic manufactured thing. It really is kind of cool and organic and crowd-
sourced. That moves content but I’m also really amazed at how it strengthens
connections with the people I get to meet. That has been instrumental in building
my audience.
“Don’t take the party line.”
– Dorie Clark, columnist for Forbes and Harvard
Business Review and author of Reinventing You and
Stand Out
As a former journalist, I try to provide readers with “news”—though instead of
the political reporting I did in the past, it’s more in the “news you can use” vein.
I want to make sure each piece of content has interesting takeaways and that
people feel like they’ve learned something from it. I also try to focus on what I
find genuinely interesting.
In everything I write, I try to find the part that’s most fascinating and unique,
and that’s often not the party line, but instead the mistakes and the aftermath and
how we grow from them. That’s the case with my writing, too, and I try to
mention setbacks that I’ve experienced, like getting turned down for some
fellowships, or even how I got started on my book because I was laid off and
needed to reinvent myself professionally. This honesty builds trust and audience
bonds.
“Connect the community.”
– Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich14
The community magic doesn’t happen when you begin to get comments on your
content. It happens when those people begin talking to each other. This isn’t
something that can be created or forced. It happens organically. But there are
things you can do to help the community grow and encourage members to begin
building relationships with one another.
If you spend some time online talking to the people who can influence
purchase decisions, you can provide the foundation for your community. And,
when you do it this way, it becomes much more than engagement.
You build a virtual sales force that isn’t on your payroll.
You build goodwill.
You build trust among a group of people who will go to bat for you in a
crisis.
