Greg Ferro - Work to Live

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A Content Strategy For Biggest Audience or the Best Audience

The thing about writing content for the largest possible audience is that you must write intentionally for the majority of readers. As the audience grows, you have to write content to that is simpler and plainer. The largest number of people will now include a majority who are not seriously engaged with you as a person or what you stand for and your content must be easy to consume.

For technology blogging, this means writing dumber and stupider content that appeals to a large technology audience. If you want a “large audience” then write about introductory topics that every new engineer needs to learn. Write about passing the lowest vendor certification, write about dumb everyday things that people should know.

But if you want to the best audience in technology, you want to target the people who make decisions, who initiate projects, the people who are advisors, investors or executives. These people have skills and motivation to work in senior roles. Reading about the basics has no value. They want analysis, perspectives and/or deeper knowledge. Its not enough to write “6 Things That Will Change Your Technology”.

These people make choices that change the market, spend the money, influence colleagues and workmates.

These people are busy and often rely on trusted sources for information and advice. They don’t have time or energy to read dumb content for a large audience.

My Content Strategy

These two approaches are radically different. If you write for page views then the path leads to low intensity, low brow, low value that people can easily consume or ignore. If you publish for influence, then you write about  real information about high level topics that are harder to read, you publish topics that are of value to smaller audience but who have real influence and impact.

And, frankly, writing dumb content isn’t interesting. But it took me five paragraphs to say that.

Damn.