If I’m 100% honest I was more blown away by Joe Pulizzi’s book – Epic Content Marketing, which turned me on to a whole way of looking at content, and framing it in a greater narrative that has content marketing traced back to Guiness’s Book of World Record and Michelin’s stars. It also showed how companies would do well to acquire media companies and start the engine of a great content machine inside their organization. This book rehashes some of that but then goes into steps to create that content model and tries to cover new ground:
To find and harnass your organizations content machine:
- You need to find the sweet spot, which is a blend of your expertise and your passion
- You need to find the angle – so what makes you different than the competition.
- You need to figure out how you’re going to harvest the audience and expose new people to the publication.
- You need to figure out how you’re going to diversify revenue streams and streams for getting the publication out to the world.
- You want it to make money in it’s own right and those models need to be formed and capitalized on if you want a particular content center to continue.
Other things in the book include ideas for larger organizations and those responsible for content in them and smaller organizations who may be trying to get a fledgling content strategy off the ground. Even though I personally felt like Epic Content Marketing was a little more… well, epic – if I hadn’t read that one first I might have been more blown away by this one. The truth is I just need to soak up ideas from all angles about how to run a content strategy, and there is tons of stuff in this book to feed that need.
Joe Pulizzi’s brand of evangelicalism for content marketing is around to stay, because it works
If you’re in a bubble pretending the amount of content you create and share doesn’t matter you’ll pay out the nose for traditional advertising without building anything of long term substance.
Focus on quality AND quantity. If you can only focus on one – spend time on really targeting to your core demographic and get that sweet spot and that angle correct before creating tons of content.
But start now – It doesn’t do you any good to hypothesize for months about this, once you get you’re angle down – get started right away and serve your core demographic with vigilance.
I definitely strongly recommend Content Inc., however if you read just one of Joe Pulizzi’s books it should definitely be ‘Epic Content Marketing.’
