Browsing Tag 'content strategy'

Trying to bang the web content strategy drum from within an organisation is not without its ups and downs – rather like a game of snakes and ladders. There will be occasions when you believe the message has sunk in. But all it can take is a loss of key personnel, momentum, or courage to send you tumbling back down again.

When it’s your own website, blog or social media profile you can usually take as long as you need to publish something. Not always healthy but by and large the pressure (externally anyway) is off. It’s when you’re tasked with publishing content for an organisation with a far larger online reach and responsibility that the pressure is cranked up a notch or twelve and those self-doubting questions receive more airtime within the confines of your brain.

To bring the curtain down on 2009 I thought I’d share nine of my favourite articles and blog entries of the past year. Whether they’ve helped me learn new methods, question any pre-held beliefs or simply helped me to do my job better; one way or another they’ve all made an impact.

Publishing web content should work like clockwork, but an effective Content Strategy keeps those cogs moving smoothly.

Like a musical conductor a content strategy helps to bring order to a complicated task with highly irregular rhythms and frequent shifts in tempo by keeping everyone in time with one another, delivering a consistent sound across all content channels and providing the direction to deliver content in tune to the key user and business goals.

With so much to learn about the business, their market(s) and customers, no matter what the stage the web project’s at when they’re hired, freelance content creators still arrive at the table with so many burning questions.

It seems more people then ever are reading and talking about content strategy. In a recent search for content strategy articles on delicious I was struck by the graph showing a sharp increase in saved bookmarks since the end of last year.

Our clients or employers may think they need a social web presence – purely because they feel they have to. But it’s our responsibility, as part of the development of an overall content strategy, to ascertain whether they have the time, team, budget and heart to keep up such a public publishing strategy.

How do you balance the need for clear conveyance of a brand’s message and services but, at the same time, floating enough buoys in the sea of content to encourage high search engine visibility and traffic? An expert in SEO and marketing can help.

Content encompasses every living, breathing thing you’ll find on the web. If it moves, talks or reads: it’s content. Clearly important then. So why, when it comes to the organisation, creation, and administration of content, can it feel as though the pillars of the web project team are working independently of one another?