Coming up with an effective content strategy is not as complicated as you might think. Once you identify your audience and your message, your topics will flow naturally.

Let’s go through the process step by step:

Identify Your Target Audience/Market

It’s great to think of your target audience as a broad market and then categorize it a bit further. The more specific you get now, the better you’ll be at strategizing engaging ideas and developing content that vibes with your audience.

For example, my broad audience would be

People interested in Online Reputation Management and Personal Branding

But if I were to break it down further, I might come up with:

Young professionals and entrepreneurs who understand the value of a personal brand but don’t really know what they need to do
Recent college grads without a strong career direction who are trying to develop Identity Capital along the way and showcase themselves positively online
The Connected Generation -- 18-34 year olds who are active on social media, particularly Twitter

→ Identify your target audience, both broadly and specifically

Develop Your Message

Think about your industry, your target audience, and the types of things that you want to write about generally. If you have a clear sense of these aspects, your message should start to naturally take shape on its own.

Here’s what I came up with:

Managing your online reputation and developing a personal brand are critical because they influence your ability to get a job, get clients, and even get a date. ORM and Personal Branding are not as difficult as many think. I will be as transparent and engaging as possible in an effort to help the Connected Generation learn how to effectively promote themselves online.

→ Develop a rough message for your content

What Are Some Topics You’d Like to Cover?

Now that you know your audience and your message, you might already be thinking of some of the articles you want to write. Write those ideas down! The last thing you want is to have some awesome topics and then forget them in 3 weeks when you’re looking for something to write.

Need some help coming up with effective topics?

Write down some trends or innovations in your industry that are making you excited, worried, angry, etc. Look up some news articles and see if there are a couple you’d like to comment on or take in a new direction.
Write down some challenges in your industry. This is the birth of the How-to blog post.
- The idea for this 28 day challenge came about because I wrote down the problem, “people don’t know how to tackle ORM themselves”
Think about a personal experience recently that you can write about. Did you just close a particularly challenging deal? If so, what lessons can you teach others about it? Did you just give a great speech somewhere? How did you prepare for it and what advice would you give to others?

An effective tool throughout this process is BuzzSumo. You can look up a topic to see what kinds of content are being shared the most in your industry. You can use that knowledge to inspire your own content and come up with brand new content altogether.

→ Come up with a list of at least 8-10 ideas to fuel you going forward.