In 2013 I started blogging again, and built this site to share helpful information about WordPress and promote myself. Over the last few months I’ve struggled to define a clear message for the site and I have not provided regular content. These are both big no-nos for any site and I know I need to do better in the future. They are not the problem though, the real issue is a lack of a coherent content strategy.
So, in 2014 I’m going to be sharing my experience improving my own system in hopes that it can help others and keep myself focused on the task. In this ongoing series of posts I will be covering both the content and technical aspects of creating and executing a content strategy on a WordPress site. The process isn’t going to be easy, and can’t rely on tricks like SEO hacks that Google will punish or by just sharing tons of pictures of my cats–no matter how adorable they are.
Why?
The Problem I Want To Solve
Here is a graph from Google Analytics of my daily visits and bounce rates for the last month:
The problem is not just that I don’t have a ton of visits, but that I’m not doing a very good job of keeping the visitors I have here. The hypothesis that I am working from is that my site lacks a coherent message of what type of value I can give to visitors. Beyond that, I’m not doing a very good job, from a design perspective, of keeping the viewers I do have on my site.
The Actual Reason Why
The actual reason why I’m doing this is not so I can feel good about having lots of traffic–I want to get more work. I want to accomplish this by giving back to the community, but I need to focus on serving my own target audience as much as possible. It’s not just because I want work, but because I want to be seen as someone who can write about WordPress well, and leverage open source systems like WordPress to create a successful business.
This may sound selfish, but the only way I can do it is to provide real value to the community, rendering the selfish vs altruistic argument moot, which is one of my guiding principles and something I will be writing about a lot more this year.
One of my favorite blogs I’ve been following this year is the one being written by Alex Turnball of Groove. Alex shares the lessons he is learning as he works towards their goal of $100k of monthly revenue for Groove. Alex is proving an invaluable resource for anyone interested in creating a successful startup–for example, me–while at the same time driving a ton of traffic to his site. I would guess that a large percentage of that traffic is coming from people who are looking for a support system for their own startup, which is what Groove sells.
A System Instead of Goals
I was originally going to set an arbitrary goal of a thousand page views a month or lowering my bounce rate to 30%. It would have allowed me to create a catchy title for the series, like “Journey to $100,000 a Month” like they have over at Groove, but then one of those perfectly timed Twitter posts showed up in my timeline.
Curtis McHale, who is writing a great series of posts on his blog about how he became a 6 figure WordPress consultant, shared an amazing article by James Clear on creating systems instead of creating goals. This article excited me as systems are what I focus on. Clear writes that instead of creating goals that stress us out, and prevent us from being happy as we work towards them, we “can keep things simple and reduce stress by focusing on the daily process and sticking to your schedule, rather than worrying about the big, life-changing goals.” More importantly goals only work through the fear of failure, the insanity of which is another thing I intend to write about a lot this year.
A proper content strategy is a system that keeps content focused on what serves the intended audience best, and therefore contributes to the success of the site’s author. Systems, as Clear points out, are powered by feedback loops. The feedback loop I am looking to create is the one that will hopefully exist between this site and those who I am trying to reach. The more value I provide them, the more they will come back to my site and the more they will share my content, bringing more viewers.
This system is based on an amazing talk I went to at WordCamp Birmingham 2013 by Tammy Hawk-Bridges. Since I saw her talk, I have always started thinking about content strategy starting with these simple questions:
- What is your unique value you can offer to the world?
- Who needs this unique value you provide?
- What free content can you provide to the people who need what you can offer?
All systems are made of smaller systems, which I will be breaking down in the future, but they all start from these questions. Sure, I need a clear call to action, but before I redefine mine, I need to break down exactly what value I can offer. In 2014 I will be sharing how I answer these questions myself and what systems I create based on these answers to improve this site and myself.