This post is a sample of the intro content from our NEW, 4-week course, Run Your Business Like a Magazine. Enrollment for the first live round closes the evening of Sunday, April 17th. Join us!

What is Content Strategy?

So here’s the thing: in this creative business realm we’re swimming in, we see terms like ‘content strategy’ fly by on Twitter and we think to ourselves, Yeah, I probably should have one of those.

Or our eyes glaze over when we see yet another jam-packed blog post on Pinterest from some software company full of tech bros dressed in content marketers’ clothes telling us why we need to be writing what our ideal clients and customers want to read, awing us with their brightly colored infographics all the while.

Content strategy. It’s a buzzphrase.

It’s important. It’s essential. It  . . . sounds kind of boring, doesn’t it?

The word ‘content’ just sounds so dry.

The word ‘strategy’ just sounds so . . . strategic, maybe even in a game-y sort of way. And gaming your Right People is exactly what you don’t want to do.

And yet, our attention, as industrious creatives, keeps landing again and again on this idea of having a content strategy. Our curiosity is piqued — because we know we need it. We sense that if we could just wrap our mind around how a content strategy could work for us, in our own brand, with our own intrinsic style applied, it could change everything we’re doing in the realm of words and work.

If you’re thinking along these lines — you are right.

A pragmatic yet inspired content strategy can cause the stars to align in your business and brand.

When you’re writing about what you love and feel deeply inspired by, in a way that scaffolds your Right People’s journey with you — not only their buying journey but their internal journey as a human being — you can rest assured that you are Doing It Right. You’re HELPING people, all the while doing work you find meaningful — and you’re writing about it, or photographing it, or making videos or podcasts about it!

A content strategy is nothing more & nothing less than a really cool roadmap for the journey on which you want to accompany your Right Person reader, client, or customer.

The course we just made, which starts its first live round on Monday, April 18th, will teach you what the world’s great magazine editors have always known: how to craft a compelling roadmap that turns ambivalent passengers into fully awake and aware drivers on the road to becoming your buyer and your lifelong brand ambassador.

Do you want that for your business? If not now, then when?

Now let’s talk for a moment about the editorial mindset.

The Editorial Mindset

The editorial mindset is the perspective on content and audience engagement that an editor has.

Yep, some people are just born with a keen editorial eye — they’re naturally able to spot trends, to predict what will be hot next Fall, and to perceive whose star is on the rise before THAT PERSON even knows.

But if you’re not born with this gift, you can cultivate the skill set within yourself.

This course will teach you how to cultivate the skill set of thinking like an editor about your own content.

When you hone your editorial mindset, you learn how to be be selective, be discerning, develop your intuition, follow your hunches, take risks, do more of what works, kill what isn’t and doesn’t, get the best work out of your writers (even when your only writer is you), and hold people accountable (including, yep, yourself).

If you want a keen content strategy that defines your brand’s point of view in the marketplace and turns your Right People’s brights ON, not off, every time they see a headline of yours fly by on social media, Run Your Business Like a Magazine is made for you.

If you want to think like a magazine editor and rely on a dangerously effective balance of strategy and intuition to create a great product ‘issue after issue,’ Run Your Business Like a Magazine is made for you.

The only question now is: will you join us?

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

What’s your relationship to your the editorial mindset? Do you feel like you were ‘born with it’ or is a skill set you’ve developed or would like to develop?

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[Hey there, it’s Katie, taking over the blog for today to share a few of my thoughts on content strategy. And grasshoppers. Keep reading, we’ll get there.]

Last night, my daughter asked me to read “The Ants and the Grasshopper” to her before bed.

If you’re not familiar with the story, pull up a chair.

So basically, there’s this grasshopper, and he’s having an awesome summer. Going swimming, dancing, having margaritas (I may be embellishing a little here). Basically, living the life. Good for him! But all the while, he keeps seeing these ants, working like a bunch of suckers. He manages to convince an ant to call in sick and take a beach day, but he gets caught by the boss and ends up back at work. Rough summer for the ants.

Then autumn comes, and the grasshopper breaks out his favorite sweaters, spends a weekend upstate doing one of those fall foliage walks, drinks some cider, plans a big Halloween party. None of the ants can make it though, because, as usual, they’re working through the weekend. Again.

Then winter shows up. It’s nice at first, I assume, because winter usually is. First snow, nice and white, icicles glistening. But before long, the grasshopper realizes he may have made a mistake. It’s a lot colder than he figured it was going to be, and he forgot to stock up on milk and bread and now the store is out of everything but that weird sprouted stuff that you could build a wolf-proof house out of, if you were in a different fairy tale.

So he goes to see the ants, and they’re having the party of their lives. Huge feast, probably a little too much drinking, big fire going in the ant-sized fireplace. Because this was the Disney version we read, the ants decide to take pity on the grasshopper and let him stay there for a few months in exchange for playing his fiddle and keeping the party going. Aesop is probably spinning in his sarcophagus over the kinder, gentler ending, but I’m glad I don’t have to explain to my daughter what happens to grasshoppers when they freeze to death.

The moral of the story, of course, is simple: If you don’t plan for winter, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Anyone who’s been self-employed for any amount of time knows that business is cyclical. (If you’re new to the party, welcome! Lesson One: Business is cyclical.) Generally speaking, most online businesses, especially service-based businesses, find that the summer is pretty quiet, and things pick up again in the fall.

Maybe it’s because the kids are back in school and you can actually get things done without someone spilling orange juice on your laptop or dangling from your sleeve or asking, “Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Can I go [insert the thing they can totally do, later, once you’ve finished sending this one email seriously please go entertain yourself for five minutes]?” Maybe it’s just the natural progression of the year. Either way, summer = quiet, fall = suddenly not (generally speaking).

So why on earth did we choose to launch our new course, Run Your Business Like a Magazine, in mid-April, just as we’re heading into summer?

Good question.

Producing interesting, informative, entertaining content on the regular is an amazing way to connect with your Right Person (that’s the person who loves what you do, who advocates for you, who buys your services and is a joy to work with).

By giving them something worthwhile to read, you’re not just saying, “Here’s something to think about,” you’re saying, “…and think about me every time this crosses your mind.”

Figuring out what YOU love to write about, what interests you and is relevant to your brand conversation, what your Right People readers want to hear — that is how you set yourself up for success. It gives you the foundation and the framework to write and write and write, all year long, without it feeling like work, and it gives your readers something to look forward to. To bookmark. To share online. It creates a bond between you and your audience — a community. And when it’s time for them to dust off their credit card come those first red leaves of fall? You’re the one they’re thinking of — the expert who entertained them all summer as they sat on the beach with their margaritas, the virtual friend they’ve connected with and want to know better.

As a magazine editor, I had to come up with a lot of content every year, and there were days when I definitely felt like an ant with the worst job in the world while my grasshopper friends were relaxing at the beach. Right around press time, I worked a lot of late nights and weekends. I won’t lie, sometimes it sucked.

But in the end, creating a solid editorial calendar allowed me to gather a lot of really amazing content over the course of the year without scrambling every month.

I got great reviews. My sales went up. People started recognizing me at car shows. (Okay, not super exciting as a non-car-person, but still pretty cool.) Friends and relatives all over the country would find my magazines on the racks at Borders (R.I.P.) and text me pictures. I felt like a celebrity. I mean, not Anna Wintour or anything, but still. And I owed it all to putting out really good magazines, month after month, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring.

Creating a content plan is even more important if you’re in the midst of shifting your brand conversation.

This might be tied to a new direction in who you’re serving, how you’re serving them, or how you’re presenting yourself — basically, if you sit down at your computer (or your workbench or your phone) and aren’t jumping for joy at the prospect of another day of work, there’s a pretty good chance a rebrand is churning around in the back of your mind. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, even if you haven’t admitted it out loud yet. But there is something out there that will light you up again, and figuring out what that is and how to start talking about it is the first step in changing your brand conversation.

Planning how to talk about it regularly is what’s going to build the bridge from where you are now to where you want to be — and make sure your Right People (either the ones who already know you or the ones who are about to discover you) can follow.

Don’t get me wrong, Run Your Business Like a Magazine — or any content strategy planning — takes some effort on your part.

If you want a content plan that you’re going to love in a few months, you need to put some thought into what that will look like. But we’re talking red ink, not blood — this doesn’t have to be painful. And it doesn’t have to keep you from having a nice, relaxing summer. In fact, you’ll probably have a better time if you spend the next few months connecting with your clients over something you really want to be talking about than if you try to muster up enthusiasm for something that’s run its course.

Imagine you’re sitting on your porch, soaking up some sun with a glass of water…but what you really want is an icy-cold glass of mint tea (or that margarita we’ve been talking about — can you tell I’m seven months pregnant and craving something I can’t have?). Yeah, you have to go all the way inside to get some from the fridge, but won’t you be glad you did?

Your content determines your conversation, and your conversation determines your clients. If you want to be intentional about the work you do — whether that’s something new or just more of what you’re doing now — you can’t just put yourself out there and hope for the best.

A content strategy is a business strategy.

I guess if you’re a really great fiddle player and don’t mind low ceilings for a few months, you can cross your fingers and hope the ants have a spare room. But if you want to build your own place, you have to be willing to put in a little work when things are slow and the beach is calling. And right now, heading into the quiet season, is a great time to do it. You can establish what’s really lighting you up, make an easy, actionable plan to talk about it on a regular basis, and build your community. And then, when the cycle shifts, you’re not frantically searching for your next client, because here they are, right here, talking to you on Facebook, checking your site, waiting for your next blog post — or product launch.

Run Your Business Like a Magazine kicks off on Monday, April 18th. We’d love to have you join us. (Margaritas are up to you.)

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

What’s YOUR relationship with content creation — do you wing it or plan ahead? Have you seen a change in your business’s cycle based on how you communicate with your readers?

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Let’s talk about branding or rebranding an existing business.

This is one of my favorite topics within branding because I like starting with what the client already has, rather than starting from scratch.

Fair warning: I’m about to stuff this post with a passel of unrelated metaphors. I often think in wild and elaborate metaphors. I find them immensely useful when explaining a concept that’s unfamiliar to my reader. Hopefully they’ll work for you here!

Is it time to rebrand your business or reposition your brand?

They say all change starts from within and when it comes to branding or rebranding a business, it’s true!

Before you choose a new color palette, commission a new logo design, or start overhauling your service menu, there’s some connective tissue [pulling a metaphor from the hallowed pages of Grey’s Anatomy — the medical tome, not the TV show, though I adore it and Shonda Rhimes, too] that must come into place first to cushion those newly growing bones.

Initiating a rebrand starts, in my view, with shifting your brand conversation.

What is ‘brand conversation’?

The first layer of a rebrand is a shift in the brand conversation. What is a brand conversation? For the purposes of a business that markets itself online (or even offline), brand conversation equals the subject matter your business takes on, the topics you address under the subject umbrella, the motifs you lean on, the themes you use, and generally what the brand is about.

This is the part of branding I find most satisfying. It’s identifying the threads of an ongoing conversation that feel like they have the most electricity in them. The tripwire, so to speak, that cracks everything open. If you haven’t found your tripwire yet, it’s OK. I think that’s, like, a twice in a career type of thing.

If you want to rebrand or reposition your business, start on the level of content — the words on your website, the words in your blog posts, the affect of your video editing (yes, I mean affect with a hard emphasis on the first syllable, like in Ben Affleck, not effect, though the former influences the latter), the styling of your Instagram images.

Rebranding with content allows you to reposition your business from the inside out, rather than visually from the outside in.

When you know that you want to shift your positioning in the marketplace or start talking to a different market or segment of the market, the first best way to do that is to write about it. You can shift your brand quickly or you can unfold the shift slowly over the course of a year. You can accomplish a repositioning in a 3 to 5 blog post series or in a 10 to 20 post series. 

The first step is to find the link or the connection (the connective tissue) between the thing you have been talking about and the new thing you want to talk about.

There is always a connection.

I repeat: there is always a connection.

How do I know? Because these (maybe) seemingly disparate things — your ‘before’ topics and themes and your ‘after’ topics and themes — both originate in you and with you and your experience. It’s not that they have to be personal, and the connection you make for your readers doesn’t have to be a personal one. (You don’t have to write the post that starts, “So I’ve been blogging and teaching about X for the past 3 years, but one day I realized it’s really Y that matters! And so now, I’ll be talking about Y!”)

The connection you explore with your readers through your shifting content might be related by topic, by industry, or even by energetics, by the unseen forces that tie these things together.

You can also start your rebrand by hinting or suggesting on social media. I don’t suggest you be overly quiet about it, though. There’s no need to tease your audience, unless that’s your bona fide style; maybe it is if you have a high Playfulness, Power, or Love Voice Value, all of which could inhabit the energy of teasing, though in very different ways.

The key is to release some minnows into your already well tended pond. (Last metaphor of the post, I promise.) Let them start feeding on your pond’s algae. (Couldn’t resist getting that in there.) Let them adapt to the ecosystem you’ve already created. (Aaaaand there’s that.)

Before you book your designer for a visual rebrand, outline a new service offering, or even change your title, consider what it is you want to SAY through this retooled brand of yours — and let content lead the way. It’s the most organic way to start shifting the brand that speaks for the business that contains the work you do.

Our new 4-week course melds practical content strategy with ephemeral brand voice to help you craft a brand conversation that really sings. (Ooh, one last metaphor.)

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

Have you ever rebranded or repositioned your business? How did you start the process? What did you do, content-wise, to support your brand shift?

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In the spirit of our new course, Run Your Business Like a Magazine, I thought I’d lay out 10 observations on how great magazines (paper and digital) get it right, & how you can apply these insights to your own business brand.

How to run your business brand like a magazine — a primer:

1. Be bold. Notice the trends (or patterns or fresh insights) coming down the pipeline in your industry. Precipitate them. Name them. Show them off. Leverage them. Invite your Right People to try them in the context of what your business does.
2. Realize that you can’t do it all alone. You may need (you will need, if you scale your business past teeny-tiny) to hire an assistant, a VA, staff, subcontractors, or an intern or two. This is good. This is growth. This is collaboration.
3. Be true to your vision but make room for other people’s gifts and strengths. In truth, The Voice Bureau probably still wouldn’t be operating today were it not for Katie Mehas. I’m not saying this as mere flattery. Katie came into the business in 2012 and since then, has been like the master.
4. Get a plan for success. Work the plan. If the plan doesn’t work, get a new plan. Planful endeavors are successful endeavors. Don’t be afraid to reinvent, but do it incrementally.
5. Get a signature Thing. Be known for something. Be an original. In our business, it’s our Voice Values paradigm for branding.
6. Know what makes you different. Get clear on what sets you apart from others in your industry and niche. There’s a reason your Right People select your ‘issue’ from the ‘newsstand’ [sorry, couldn’t resist].
7. Know your reader. Magazines are a great example of a Right Person-focused business. They have to be, because every issue, and every page of every issue, matters. Home in on what piques your Right Person’s interest, and beyond that, understand why it does.
8. Be about something. Meaning: have a keen focus. You can be a lifestyle magazine or a special interest magazine, but either way, own your subject matter, your take, your strong stance, your point of view. No matter which path you choose — generalist with a POV or specialist — own it.
9. Have fun. Every magazine has its own sense of zeal, of play, of wonderment, of fascination, of obsession. Whether you’re reading Kinfolk, Science Magazine, or Elle Decor, you probably read it because their take on their topic lights YOU up in some way. They couldn’t do that to you without their being lit up first.
10. Embrace your preferred medium while being mindful of multimedia. As major magazines learned in the mid-aughts, when the world changes, you have to change with it. With the ubiquity of social media, no brand can afford to be missing from the online conversation. Find a reason to be there and get on it.

Today’s brands exist on the web through content, and content is the currency of any magazine — paper or digital.

In our new 4-week course, newly minted Creative Director Katie Mehas (yeah, we’re going to announce that officially very soon!) is leading participants through the ins and outs of creating a compelling content strategy that’s both intuitive AND planful. Learn to meld your personal interests and passions in the context of what you do with the needs and curiosities of your Right People. Make a plan, work your plan, and love it, too.

ALL THE DETAILS ON RUN YOUR BUSINESS LIKE A MAGAZINE ARE RIGHT HERE

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

What’s your favorite of these lessons from the world of magazines? 

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