If you are a local small business, chances are your content is only one part of your lead generation process, and maybe not a very big part.

Maybe most of your leads come from referrals or warm network outreach.

If that’s the case, your content might even end up being an afterthought that you have to force yourself to remember.

Maybe you force yourself to post on social media to stay top-of-mind for past customers and those who already know you, even if those people aren’t looking to buy right now.

Maybe you force yourself to post on social media frequently so those who have been referred to you will have something to look at and know your business is still running.

But maybe, if your content is an afterthought, maybe it’s not being as effective for those critical mid-funnel prospects as it could be if you took the mental energy from that forced posting routine and put it towards strategically developing one or two quality pieces of communication that clearly express what a prospect wants to know when they are in the act of shopping for your offering (i.e. when they are on your website.)

And maybe—just maybe—your social followers who aren’t actively shopping for your offering wouldn’t even notice you took a few months off.

One way (but not the only way) to develop interest in your content is to formulate it as a story.

Now, a lot has been said about story in the world of marketing in recent years. Usually these focus on the posturing of the customer to the company (as hero/guide respectively) and the framing of customer need/desire (“you want x, y stands in the way, z product or service can help you overcome y and obtain x.”)

But there is a more basic element of story that is important to remember when formulating content. A story has a beginning, middle, and—maybe most importantly—an end.

As Aristotle puts it:

Consider the difference between these two content headlines:

Join me as I trade this penny up to the most expensive thing I can get – Part 1

Or:

Trading a penny up to a house – Part 1

One of those headlines is a story because it has a clear ending. Once the penny becomes a house, the story will be over. The first headline might be interesting, but it’s not a story because has no definite end. It may be a story at some point, but it’s a lot harder to follow along with something in progress if you have no reasonable expectation of an ending.

Story is not the only way to develop content, it has a ​linear structure​ whereas perhaps a ​circular structure​ may be more appropriate for your offering, but if story is what you’re after, find a way to set expectations by defining and constraining the scope from the outset.

Back in the 1920s, a group of efficiency engineers wanted to figure out if they could increase factory worker efficiency by improving their working conditions. So they went to a Western Electric factory called Hawthorne Works and did some improvements to the lighting and various other aspects. As expected, the workers’ efficiency increased.

However, when they returned the factory to its original conditions and observed performance again, the efficiency increased again.

This study has become pretty well known in the social sciences for describing the “observer’s paradox,” the phenomenon wherein the act of observing an event changes the unfolding of the event itself. In this case, the fact of engineers observing the workers increased their efficiency regardless of what changes were made to the environment.

Now, could you use the Hawthorne Effect to your advantage?

Creating content for your business is like having an ever-present efficiency engineer watching over you. If you felt that the work you were doing would be seen by anyone online, it might change the very way you do your work in the first place.

This is another result of the meta-value of content.

We all know that the best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else.

Well, teaching also happens to be the best way to prove what you know.

Afterall, prove means both

to give evidence for

and also

to test or learn by experience

So . . .

If you market your business on a claim of expertise . . .

Prove it.

If you want people to buy your product or service, people who might find that offering valuable first need to be aware that you can provide it to them. This is where your first impression content comes in.

Next, they need to understand both the offering as well as who you are. The more they understand the person offering a solution and find similarities with them, the more likely they are to feel that a solution which worked for someone like them will also be useful or desirable for themselves. In your content, this relates to the way you are perceived and the comprehensiveness of your offering through the guided discovery phase.

And finally, the customer has to believe that what they have understood about you is true, and that what you have to offer can actually help them. This is conveyed through the authenticity of our content, i.e. the belief that the way things seem is aligned with the way things are in reality.

All this is to say, in slightly altered words, what the old sales maxim asserts:

People buy from those they know, like, and trust.

Where do most of your leads come from?

Word of mouth?

SEO?

Algorithmic recommendations?

A person will have different questions about your business depending on which of those avenues they are coming from.

How can you strategically position content which answers those questions in the places the leads you’re already getting are most likely to be looking?

To wrap up our discussion on organization, for the time being anyway, I wanted to share a handful of tools that I use to keep myself organized. This is not a specific endorsement for any of the particular tools mentioned, but each represents a principle that you can accomplish using a tool of your choice.

Obsidian is my notetaker. I use it to collect articles, copy quotes from books, capture meeting notes, and draft and archive this newsletter every day. I don’t use it for raw thought development or journaling because I prefer to use pen and paper in those instances, but if any of those raw thoughts become sticky, they usually end up in Obsidian. There is also a very useful Chrome extension for saving entire articles as notes which I use frequently.

Post Haste is a very simple folder structure template software. For every media project I begin, I start by creating a standard set of folders and project files which are stored as templates in Post Haste.

TickTick is my to-do list app of choice. Anything I need to do that has an action associated with it gets logged in TickTick. I like the ability to add robust notes and even files to tasks so everything related to that action can be referenced in one place until it is complete. The calendar integration is also quite helpful.

WinCatalog is a new addition to my arsenal, but it has already become fairly indispensable, although not everyone will need it. WinCatalog takes a “snapshot” of your harddrives so that you can easily reference what data is stored where even when the harddrive isn’t connected to your computer. This probably isn’t necessary if you don’t have nearly two dozen external harddrives lying around, but having some way to quickly search through files to find old data is still a good idea. (I have not researched a Mac equivalent for this, but I’m sure it’s out there.)

I also suggest looking into some sort of bookmark manager for web hyperlinks. A few years ago I cobbled together a solution that works great for me (also Windows exclusive), but the idea is to manually index the parts of the internet that you want to access or recall and detach them from algorithms, which are great at serving up new info, but not so great at specifically retrieving old info.

~ ~ ~

Let me know if you have any favorite tools, or if you have come up with any processes to help in your content creation and organization! And if you have any questions about these particular tools I’d be happy to answer them.

Yesterday’s message was about the importance of organizing the raw materials for your content, so today I thought I’d spell out a handful of principles for going about that organization.

innoficiency

First of all, remember innoficiency, the idea that, in general, you cannot increase efficiency without decreasing innovation, and vice versa.

This is important because I’ve found that large projects do not often start out very organized, mostly because they don’t know what they are yet–that is, they are in a very innovative phase. However, as the form of the content starts to solidify, the priority shifts from figuring out what works, to maintaining what has been proven to work as efficiently as possible. This is the point at which you want to start optimizing your organization.

intake

The first phase of organizing is having dedicated channels for receiving material. Ideally, you want to consolidate these intake channels as much as possible. This is the difference between having a single mailbox where all mail goes in a neat stack, and letting the mail carrier throw each individual letter toward your house from the street and letting the envelops flutter down to the lawn where they will.

But the key is to look at these consolidated inboxes regularly and process information out so that they are almost always empty.¹

archiving

But where does this information go once it’s been processed out? This is where archiving comes in.

I broadly think of archiving in two categories: specific and general.

Specific archiving is for information that has a single dedicated purpose. These materials should be as closely related to that purpose as possible.

For example, in the creation of a video project, all videos, photos, audio, etc, for that specific project should be grouped together in a single project folder and organized accordingly.

General archiving applies to information that may have many future applications.

So if, for the aforementioned video project, I have captured video of a business or product that I know will be useful again for another project in the future, I may process and save those clips into a separate general archive folder to be pulled from next time they are needed.

In certain circumstances I am also a proponent of what might be called messy archiving. This means that if the information you’re archiving is searchable (e.g. emails, articles, or other items with robust text or metadata), then you can lump a lot of it together in broad categories and rely more on searching to quickly retrieve it rather than spending enormous amounts of time creating intricate sub-folder systems.

~ ~ ~

I’m sure there’s more to say, but that’s the broadstrokes of my organization thought process.

Tomorrow I’ll give some specific suggestions of tools that I use in my daily workflows. If you have favorite organization tools or resources feel free to send them my way!

1. As some of you will undoubtedly have noticed, I am a big proponent of David Allen’s Getting Things Done as well as Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. ↩︎

If you plan to create content on any kind of regular basis, one of the most helpful things you can do for yourself is to create a system to organize the raw materials that make up your content. Depending on what you’re creating, this might look like: a chronological storage of photos & videos; a database of articles, documents and personal notes; transcripts of past podcast/interview recordings, etc.

One of the most valuable things about long-term content creation is the ability to recall old information or material which can be interrelated and built upon in the future, and the best way to save yourself a lot of time and headache making those connections in the future is to get organized early.

As someone who created weekly video content for a single client three years in a row and was constantly needing to very quickly dredge up material referenced many months or years ago, trust me, you’ll thank yourself later.

If your content had a community–a group of people who would say to each other, “Hey, did you see the latest thing that so-and-so posted the other day?”

Who would those people be?

What would those people be excited to share with each other?