On a daily basis, we preach the value of “creating content” to our clients. A fair amount of the time, we get the look of (oh great, one more thing for me to do in my day-to-day). Clients who have seen  the “content light”or are just tired of hearing us talk about the importance of content and just want us to stop talking – have started to do some neat things to start the process like; creating an editorial calendar for blog posts, determining in advance the pace and cadence of Facebook posts and using services like Hoot Suite to manage their content. We are very encouraged by this uptick in interest and will continue to beat the content drum so long as people continue to listen.

I ran across an article titled Queen of Mommy Bloggers in the NY Times which tells the story of of how Heather Armstrong uses content to power her blog – Dooce.com.  The article is a fun read and features some pearls of wisdom about the importance of content. A quick summary about statistics for Heathers blog and insight into a her content driven life.

• dooce.com gets 100,000 visitors daily (keep in mind “she writes about her kids, her husband, her pets, her treatment for depression and her life as a liberal ex-Mormon living in Utah”) – amazing traffic numbers!!!
• she is the only blogger on the latest Forbes list of the Most Influential Women in Media, coming in at No. 26. Same list shared by Oprah and Tina Brown.
• she got fired “because her former company didn’t like what I had expressed on her blog / web site.”
• the most popular content on her site is about everyday things like; poop, spit up, stomach viruses and washing-machine repairs. And home design, and high-strung dogs, and reality television, and sewer-line disasters, and chiropractor visits. And countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life.
• “Nielsen estimates that Dooce sometimes has as many as six million visitors a month.”
• hundreds of thousands of visitors check in, regularly, to see what she is up to and read her blog.
• content insight 1: Develop your voice. Heather wrote in her voice,  a personal narrative – how much fun is that? The takeaway – write about your passion and find your voice.
• content insight 2: Keep writing and when your tired, keep writing. Be consistent with your writing/postings.
• content insight 3: Be human – your readers are people too. So when you write, write to them as if the person reading it is actually a human.
• content insight 4: Write the Truth – good writing is about telling the truth. Take it from Heather  -  “say what others might have thought, or feared, or wondered, but had kept to themselves.”

The bottom line – when you write – try and connect with your readers as one person to another, keep it conversational in nature. Even when you are supposed to be writing about your law firm, your restaurant, your business – give people a sense that your business is a living, breathing entity run by real people. Share the personal narrative of your business!

PS – If you get stuck on what to write we have developed a great short list of 20+ tips and topics that will help you you can write about. If your interested, drop me a line and I will send it along email me at: jeff [at] berkshiredirect.com