This is part 2 of my “Content Strategies As Systems For Success in 2014” series and it’s not even 2014 yet. Looks like, I’m doing pretty good so far. As a I stated in part one, it’s not about setting goals, it’s about creating a system. I’m not setting some arbitrary goal of a certain number of posts a week. Instead, I’m developing a system where I share cool new things I learn. It drives me to learn cool new things, and discourages me from learning things that I’m only going to use once and can’t write about.

Making It About You

The system that I’ve been developing for a while now is to write a tutorial about every cool thing I learn to do and either sharing it here or making it into one of my posts for WPMU. This isn’t just a good feedback loop, but it means that many of the things I do can serve a dual purpose. Each task fills its original purpose and creates content. I need to improve the system by documenting the process while I do it, instead of writing about it after words. The documentation will serve as a first draft for the tutorial making it easier for me to write it. It will also make it easier for me to do the process again, or outsource it to someone else.

For example, I just started adding opt-in forms so you can subscribe to this series. Stay tuned for the post about it.

The advantage of creating documentation is a key lesson I learned from Work the System by Sam Carpenter. That book is a valuable resource that I recommend to anyone who is looking to embrace the systems approach. Carpenter advocates taking each component of your professional work and personal life apart, analyzing it as a separate system, and optimizing it. This is what I’m doing now, taking apart my content strategy, bit by bit and improving it. I’m making changes to my site as I go, in order to better suit the system I’m refining.

As great as these two advantages to this system are, they are not my favorite advantage. My favorite part is that it means I’m blogging about what I do.

The point of this after all is to prove my expertise in what I do and reach people who need what I do. I’m not faking anything in an attempt to sucker anyone out of their money. I’m sharing what I do.

Serve Your Audience On Your Terms

If you were creating a content strategy for a magazine, it would be driven by what sells the magazine’s product, which is advertisements or subscriptions. On your personal blog, your product is your authentic self.

Your blog’s content strategy is a core component of your marketing system. The content strategy doesn’t build your whole marketing system for you, but if done right it is responsible for two key components of the system that if you don’t have in place, the whole system doesn’t work.

Your content strategy allows you to get the attention of your target audience and proves your authority in your field to them. Nothing else you do, from choosing a color scheme for your brand, to deciding on the best size for your business card, to ensuring your server is fast enough to get the page load times you need matter if no one knows who you are and believes you can do what you say you can do. These things are all important, and I will cover them in time, but they are secondary concerns.

This also means that if your content doesn’t show who you are authentically are, and what you can do, then no matter how many people you reach, your system isn’t working. I could probably get more clicks by writing about the latest iPhone 6 rumors, but how many of the people reading would need the kinds of WordPress services I offer? While my ability to get inside information on the iPhone may be impressive, how does that prove my expertise with WordPress?

My Challenge

This is a challenge for me, as I’m not marketing myself as a developer, but a lot of what I write about is pretty technical. I’ve been working recently on a new theme switcher plugin for creating theme demo sites. Instead of just writing a straight tutorial about how I created it, which isn’t that exciting, I’m writing a post for my non-WordPress site. Instead of talking about the technology I will be talking about the possibilities for increased efficiency when moving away from proprietary IP. It is the start of using that site to show how my experience in the WordPress ecosystem, and educational background studying ecosystems give me a unique expertise and value I can offer to the world.

In 2013 I didn’t do a very good job of proving that to the world. That’s why I’m working on creating success for myself in 2014 with new content strategies. It’s time to start thinking about what unique value you can provide the world and what content strategy will create your success. If there is anything I can do to help, send me a message or leave a comment.