IS THIS BOOK FOR ME?

These days, everyone’s creating content. Your mum’s on Facebook. Your local five-a-side football team has a blog. Your boss takes pictures of every evening meal she eats, and posts them all online. Your neighbour’s pet probably has its own social media profile. Now that there are innumerable and cheap tools for taking pictures, expressing your thoughts, making videos and music, combining each of these in ever-more creative ways, and sharing them – everyone is doing it.

Similarly in the professional world, you can’t move for business intranets, CEO blogs, movies about what it’s like to work for Company X, and endless social media feeds for product news, business gossip and customer complaints.

In fact, so many of us are creating digital content these days that it’s hard to see the wood from the trees. There’s good stuff out there, but it’s drowning in a vast, dreary ocean of mediocrity. For every genuinely useful article teaching you something you didn’t know, there are almost always multiple alternatives that explain the same thing in a less helpful way, or that are badly put together, or that turn out to not be what you were looking for at all.

For content creators aspiring to reach out to digital audiences – whether to get themselves noticed, sell products, or win affection – this situation is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, all that noise makes it harder to be seen. But on the other hand, so much of the competition is so poor that it’s entirely possible to stand out – if you go about it the right way.

There are several ways to put yourself ahead of the game in this fast-paced digital world. You can be quickest – the first to adopt new technology and new platforms, for instance. Or you can be the flashiest – sparing no expense on your digital channels, and buying your audience’s affections with instant gratification.

It’s my belief though that the best way to stand out is, simply, to make your stuff better than other people’s.

So this book isn’t about how to make digital content. It’s about how to make your content better. Whether you’re chasing more customers, more fans or more influence, it will help you create content that keeps your audiences coming back for more.

This isn’t a cheat sheet or a short cut to great digital content. Taking short cuts (just like churning material out without thinking about it, or repeating what you do without learning from it), is only guaranteed to keep you flailing about in that ocean of mediocrity. The approach I suggest is about questioning more, being less easily satisfied, and working harder. So if you’re not up for that, then you should probably try another book.

But if you are, I’ll show you some simple principles, a helpful process, and the tricks of putting both into practice when it comes to the nuts and bolts of creating content. You’ll be well equipped to lift the quality of your output from average to awesome.

So whether you’re…

• a blogger posting about something close to your heart
• a start-up trying to carve out a niche
• the sole person in your organisation with a content production remit, or
• part of a team of multi-channel content creators

…this book will help you make an impact and achieve a result.