Content Strategy Checklist

inspired by Ahava Leibtag and her wonderful Creating Valuable Content Checklist

While trying to explain how content strategy can be applied to personal branding, I have continued to be inspired by Ahava Leibtag and her wonderful Creating Valuable Content Checklist.

I originally wrote a post – Content strategy for personal branding checklist – organizing content strategy by tasks. Your content strategy builds valuable organic content (text posts, photo galleries, storytelling video, audio/podcasts, etc.) so that people can discover awesome things about you and your company.

Building your personal or company’s brand with content strategy means introducing yourself with content that tells people exactly what you’re passionate about. How do you tell great stories consistently?

Research the best places to find your content, build content hubs to anchor your content, create unique, nimble and usable content, then curate and share your ideas.

Hope this takeaway is helpful. The Content Strategy Toolbox for constructing each piece of content will follow.

Download the Content Strategy Checklist

Content strategy for personal branding checklist

Photo from The Library of Congress - Build the right content hubs. They will be your anchors.

Build your personal brand with content strategy. Introduce yourself without a business card or resume with content that tells people exactly what you’re passionate about. Tell me a story. Your content must be three things to tell your brand’s story effectively:

• Friendly
• Honest
• Consistent

Research the best places to anchor your content, build content hubs to anchor your content, create unique, nimble and usable content, then curate and share your ideas.

Research

Introduce yourself in social media, listen, ask advice, and comment on others.

• Calibrate (Practice engagement, build your tribe)
• Realize usability (How do I read, act on content)
• Keywords (Note how people search)

Anchor

Place your content online where people will find it.

• Build the right content hubs (Facebook, blogs, LinkedIn)
• Become an active member of groups and networks
• Use analytics for benchmarks (Insights, Hootsuite)

Create

Build different kinds of content for different people.

• Unique stories (background detail, anecdotes)
• Quick and nimble (brevity, people scan)
• Usable info (thank you, I’ll be back)

Curate

Weed and feed. Give your precious content life.

• Revise and improve (How can more people discover this?)
• Share and circulate (Does my idea mesh with others)
• Keep building (Don’t stop creating)

Continued to be inspired by Ahava Leibtag. Thinking of ways to make her wonderful Creating Valuable Content Checklist better.

What would you add to this list?

Social Media’s Role in the Search for Employment and Employees

Social Media Breakfast Toledo brought together Don Leith, Kevin Cesarz, Patty Wise and Brandon Croke to examine Social Media’s Role in the Search for Employment and Employees at Thread Information Design in Maumee.

Leith, a National Sales Executive with CareerBuilder.com; Cesarz, the Director of Social Media at Thread; Wise, an attorney at Niehaus and Associates; and Croke, a consultant at Career Bull, shared ideas and strategy on smartly navigating a dramatically different employment landscape.

This is the first in a series of chapters from this panel discussion that will include detail on building personal brand, smartly editing social profiles on LinkedIn, Google, Twitter and Facebook and the risks and benefits to employees and employers.

Building personal brand with Johnny Cash

Welcome. Johnny Cash zone.

Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.

Don’t you wish you had an intro like that? Simple, stern and elegant. As the text fades you can hear the baritone, smell the menace, and feel the swagger of that calling card.

That’s a brand . . . built with content, experience, reputation, and style.

Build your personal brand step-by-step so that you can deliver your message in as few words as possible.

• Your content cache details your professional passion. Your blog is your main thought leadership platform. Express yourself. Tell me in detail how you think, how you build, tell me of your successes, your failures. Analyze and critique the ideas of others. Be playful in tone, shift gears, be the angry God and vent in a thoughtful way. Be honest. Find a fresh way to describe what you love to read, talk and think about. Practice often delivering your message in long form.

• Your outposts are social media platforms that you maintain like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. You share great ideas and links here and maintain themes and ideas from your content cache. You engage others with a similar interest. You build them up and challenge them – this makes everyone better. You’re a good neighbor. You share your power tools. Practice often sharing your message and ideas in shorter form.

• Your elevator speech is the condensed version of your reputation, experience, and goals. Prepare a 90-second, 30-second and one-line version to share your brand. Don’t be a billboard. Create a fresh but serious sliver of what makes you unique in your category. If it’s not reTweetable, try again.

If you’ve developed your content cache and your outposts then this shortest delivery is backed by that same ringing baritone.