the value of consistency

The traditional wisdom regarding content creation is that you should be posting content with some degree of consistency. I agree with this advice, but maybe not for the usual reasons given by digital marketing gurus, which typically revolve around SEO and algorithm hacking (i.e. spamming).

While ultimately your content should match your offering, here are three reasons, rooted in value creation rather than capture, that posting regularly can be a useful approach:

meta-value

Creating content consistently keeps you thinking about your business at a deep level on a regular basis, which should mean that you are steadily growing and improving your ability to deliver value to your customers through your offering. Doing this publicly by publishing content demonstrates this steady growth to your customers.

expectation management

If part of your content strategy is to provide a vicarious experience of your offering, posting consistently means that customers can be fairly certain the vicarious experience of your offering will be consistent with the actual experience. Less frequent updates can create dissonance when it comes to the purchasing phase.

ritual

Depending on the kind of value that your content offers, providing it in a frequent and predictable manner can potentially increase its effectiveness by transforming it into a habit or ritual for the audience. Educational or personal development offerings are good examples of content that may benefit from this approach.

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Each of these benefits of consistency is predicated on a fairly high-touch method of content creation. When high-frequency is combined with outsourced or automated generation, there’s a good chance the underlying motivation is exploitative.

how to achieve content consistency

It’s all well and good to decide that you should be posting content consistently, but when you’re in the day-to-day of a busy season in your actual work, keeping up the content can be challenging.

So how do you maintain momentum?

Here are a handful of considerations:

make it a habit

The more frequent you make the habit, the less likely you are to drop the ball. This is a daily newsletter because it’s pretty easy to remember that every day I need to post something (although that doesn’t necessarily make the actual content generation any easier, tbh).

self-queue triggers

This would involve thinking of events that happen on a regular basis that you can use to “trigger” you to make new content.

For example, you might decide that every time you get back from a job site you need to post an insight of what you learned or something interesting that happened. That way you don’t have to think about posting content until you’re out in the field and are in a proper context for developing insights.

seasonality

Don’t feel like consistency necessarily means non-stop. You can fluctuate between periods of high- and low-intensity publishing, the key is keeping these period rhythmic and, if not predictable, then at least clearly communicated to the audience when you’re taking a break or start publishing again.

create a content plan

This is the most strategic approach. It means not posting any content for a period of time during which you can decide on a high-level communication goal (say, you want to change your customer mix, so you need your communication to resonate with a new demographic).

Once that goal has been defined, you can plan out the kind of communication you want to develop (form, context, etc) and start gathering the materials (photos, video, graphics, etc) which can be turned into content and more easily posted on a regular schedule, or even scheduled to be posted automatically if it’s all pre-made.

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The great thing about creating content based on value rather than algorithmic optimization, is that you can take the time to get creative and decide a publishing schedule that makes the most sense for your personal voice and for your offering, without stressing about hitting a quota based on attention-maxing.