Today, creating lasting connections with your audience means sharing your story, philosophies, lifestyle, and frameworks through the content you distribute daily. However, creating content in real-time is too late to get ahead of the curve. So, how can we create a content strategy that gets us months ahead?
Blog Base Planning
The first thing we need to consider before I get into the content mapping strategy is that it starts with blog base planning. Because I’m an information entrepreneur and we’re all looking to teach, this is very important to me. This process involves using blog posts as the foundation for all of your content creation. Once a blog post is written, it can be transformed into anything else – a script for video and audio, quotes and captions for social media posts, graphics, and so on. Starting with long-form written content is the best way to get the most out of your time.
Define Your Topics – Frameworks, Philosophies, Counter Concepts
The second step is to list down your frameworks, unpopular opinions, industry secrets, or any other information related to your topic. This list should be around 10 to 15 items in total. For instance, if your area of expertise is branding and business model design, your unpopular/original opinions could be that hustle culture is an offshoot of drug and tech culture perpetuated by men who use it to validate themselves. Your framework can be People, Product, Position, Process, Partners, and Price.
This works for most industries. For something like a travel entrepreneur, you can list your favorite places, experiences, your wish list and even your little known secrets or uncommon opinions.
It’s important to talk about things that you think are in opposition to the industry that you’re in. Of course you can talk about what everyone sees as normal but your unique perspective or industry additions help you to stand out and attract the audience that is for you, looking for the information that they haven’t been able to find anywhere else.
Listing these things is essential because this is what you’re selling. If you’re the expert in your area, which I’m assuming that you are, you probably have a framework that you use to coach, consult or meet your audience at their problems to provide a solution – that can be used too. Once you’ve made a list of these things, you can start asking yourself questions about each item and use those questions as the descriptions for each blog. Alternatively, you can go to Google or something like askthepublic.com and type in the topic to see what populates for commonly asked question. Google provides suggestions for what people have similarly been searching for in relation to what you’re typing. You can grab those questions and have a list of content questions to ask. Boom!
Need a little help writing? You can use an AI tool like Notion or ChatGPT to help you write a first draft. While I love them for the first draft, these pieces still need to be edited for fact, context and voice so I suggest either hire someone to do that or take the time to do it yourself. Having your brand philosophies (Mission, Vision, Values, Voice, etc) defined prior to this process will help you to write or edit with a voice and cadence that actually sounds like your unique delivery. This is very important. If you want people to know your voice, you have to use it in all of your content.
Content Topics and Buyer’s Journey
The questions you’ve gathered from the previous step are now your content topics. These topics also have the added bonus of being somewhat SEO-ready. If you create a large piece of content once a week, you can break it down into smaller pieces and spread it out throughout the week. Lastly, define what part of the buyer’s journey this piece of content is good for – Discovery, Nurturing, Loyalty/Upsell.
In conclusion, creating a content mapping strategy is crucial for getting ahead of the curve in today’s fast-paced digital world while helping yourself to manage your emotions in the process of building your vision. By using blog base planning, defining your frameworks, and gathering content topics, you can create a content calendar that keeps you months ahead. Remember to define what part of the buyer’s journey each piece of content is good for, and you’ll be well on your way to creating authentic, lasting connections with your audience.
