Here at Passle we are looking to walk the walk when it comes to content production and it made me think about the barriers that come with regularly creating content. Looking across our client base, there are several key themes that often dictate whether a content programme is a success or not.

Below I have shared 4 key points to get you back into the habit of creating content on a regular basis:

Understand your why

If you are creating insights for the sake of it or because you have been told to, the likelihood is it won't be successful in the long-term. Understand why you are doing it and who you are trying to influence. Picture one person, several stakeholders, or a firm you are trying to engage with and use this focus to provide content which will resonate with their interests, motivations, or challenges.

Set yourself a target & gamify the process

This might be to create one insight a fortnight, month, or even every couple of months but it has to be specific to you in order to hold yourself accountable. If you tie this to how active you want to be online, for example, at a minimum I need to share two insights a month to LinkedIn, then you can work out how much of your own content you need to create in order to achieve that goal.  

Adding an aspect of gamification means that you are not only accountable to yourself, but also those you are competing with/against. 

Create your own plan 

Map out the people you want to influence this month, quarter, or year and create content relevant to them. Alternatively, you can plan any upcoming announcements/updates in your field and schedule to write a piece of content to summarise. You can also use webinars to the same effect. The gold standard would be to write a post summarising a webinar hosted/delivered by one of the contacts you want to influence.

Measure the outcome 

Monitor who has been engaging with your content. You can look at who has been liking/commenting on your articles. Write to these contacts directly to see if they would be interested in learning more about the subject matter or if there are any other topics that would be useful to them. This way you can more proactively convert interest into conversations. Without losing the personal touch or overly pushing your agenda.