 Oh, there we are. All right, I'm going to introduce Larry Swanson for today's copy of DIY Content Strategy. Larry is the host of the Content Strategy Interview podcast and founder of the DIY Content Strategy. Oh, DIY Content Strategy. What's your company? Uh, yes. He contributes to the WordPress project on a community team and his trainer on the diversity outreach team. Thanks very much. Well, that's a nice invite. Welcome to this nice Saturday morning at Seattle. So Content Strategy is, I'm hoping to make the case this morning that it's more important than you think and that you should care and worry about it more. More to the point. I'm going to give you some tools to actually do it. That's kind of the point this whole time. So anyhow, so stay tuned. Now Content Strategy raises a lot of questions. My first question is who the heck is here? As I've talked about this project, hey, I've come to discover this kind of three main audiences as we've expressed interest in this DIY approach to Content Strategy. So first are agencies and developer designs, people who make websites for other people. How many people here would identify like that and make websites for other folks? This is good. It's almost a majority. How many people are a website owner? Bloggers, publishers, people who publish a website to the public business? Great. And there's this other category I've identified. I think of it as accidental contest strategies. You have the project manager, the marketing manager, the UX person who's like, oh, David, he can do the website. He knows about WordPress. How many people would identify like that? You sort of passed on the fly with managing and wrangling content. That's good. So we've got a good mix of all the different types of folks who might be interested. I'm curious, are there any other people though? Anybody who would identify not in one of those groups? Way in the back. What do you guys do? Oh, okay. Education. Okay, great. Thanks. So why do you even need content strategy in the first place? That's the first question about this. There's a number of perspectives to look at. First, if you're a consumer of content nowadays, you're facing a fire hose of information. I mean, it's just coming at you from all over the place. And the content that you're putting out there is just adding to the fire hose. You want to be strategic and thoughtful about that, I would argue. Consumers aren't distracted. They've got a lot of other things to worry about. Plenty of other stuff they could be reading or doing. If you're strategic about your content, it's easier to catch their attention and grab and hold their attention. If you're a content creator, coming up with ideas can be hard. And having a good content strategy in place can help you with that. Also help you with having a good content... You know, editorial calendar is one of the features of a content strategy. Just having a plan and a calendar and reasons in place can help you kind of set deadlines and then, of course, that adds to a lot of stress, but at least things happen when you have deadlines. If you're a content neater, like if you're designing, developing websites for other people, the content can look like this giant obstacle to what you're trying to accomplish. It's like, where the heck is the client content? And it's that thing that keeps you up at night worrying about, oh, crap, we're launching in a week and I don't have the client's content yet. So what do you do? Lorems, right? I just want to put an end to that forever. I haven't read it yet. I just saw a headline this morning for a title, a blog for the title, The End of Lorems. I'm hoping it supports what I'm about to say. I want to practice this next slide by saying that this comes from a leading authority in the content strategy world, one of the original kind of founders of the discipline, an important person, a delightfully snarky midwestern kind of approach, which I appreciate and enjoy. But I want to say that this is like, I want to take everybody to task and think better about content strategy, but Christina Halverson in Brain Traffic has done, I think, the best look at it for people who build sites for other people. So what she says is like, typical web agency proposal, blah, blah, blah, discovery, design, development, blah, blah, blah, blah, client will be responsible for everything content. And she says, stop it! Do content strategy. It's not 2004. And what she's getting at is that it's sort of like, and then this gets into some of the concepts that we'll talk about later. But if you're doing a website, you guys all know this, you're doing a website for an intent, for a marketing intent or a business intent of some kind. And it's even if you're not just, even if you're not a content strategist, but are designing development or otherwise building websites for people, I would argue that you want to, you know, I'm not as vociferous about it as Christina Halverson is, but she's way more authoritative than I am, so trust her, anyhow. We should all be doing content strategy, even if you're the individual, like a solo professional, and use that one social media feed, you want to be strategic about that. There's a lot of business reasons to be strategic about content. So how many people in here have an unlimited budget, unlimited staff and resources to create content? Not a single hand. One guy in Vancouver a couple weeks ago actually raised his hand and I was like, what? I'm sorry. So you want to be a diligent steward, get shepherd of the scarce resources that you have, and by being strategic about your content, that's one of the main benefits of having a content strategy. You want to focus, I mean, having to focus to your content efforts is crucial, you know, back to that thing about the distracted consumer. You've got to be focused both on what they need, what you have to offer, and kind of content strategy can help you bring you, again, back to the distracted guy with corn, orange juice, and this bowl of cereal, you need to get that person's attention. One of the best ways to do that is to show your uniqueness. We all have something unique. You better have something unique or you might as well not be on the web because everything is so much more difficult now. And so having a good content strategy in place can help you demonstrate that unique set of skills, attributes, values, and things that you bring to the table that will get people to appreciate your business more. Finally, from a business perspective, content strategy is like this Swiss army knife of business intent. Like, if you're running an SEO campaign, that's all about content. Now, content marketing obviously is all about that. If you're trying to serve your customers better, anything that involves serving your customers probably has, or almost certainly has a content element to it. And so having a content strategy mindset to do this nice little Swiss army knife you can pull out whenever, whatever it is you're doing and bring that to bear. Another question that comes up about content strategy all the time is just this word content. Like, I'm an old school publishing journalism guy and it's just content, it's so demeaning and kind of vague and generic. I've come to peace with the term content and for a few reasons. First of all, it's a good label to identify the unique kinds of words and images and recordings and search results. Whatever the content is the information you're dealing with content is a good label for this kind of digitized stuff that we're dealing with now. And the ensuing kind of complexity and interconnectedness of that content is really what makes this feel like content strategy necessary. When I was in publishing 20, 25 years ago you didn't need a content strategy, you just published books. And similarly, journalists did their thing radios did their thing. Now we're all multimedia on the channel publishers because we need a content strategy. So it's that digitization of it and the complexity of it that makes that term content. That's why I've come to peace with it. I'm not cranky about it anymore. The other way to look at content is Karen McGrane, the other godmother in sort of the original godmother of the field of content strategy Philadelphia based content strategist she says that content is the gift. If you're publishing a website unless you have a code repo or a design portfolio people aren't coming to your site to admire the code or the way that thing works or to admire your design they're coming to learn something to do something to achieve an intent and content is what does that. So content is the gift inside of that beautiful website you're designing and that beautiful functionality that you're crafting. Finally, content is that message and this comes out of marketing communications, just top-level communications in general. It's both the top-level messaging of what you have to say again how you convey your values and your unique value proposition to the community. It's that and it's also all of the individual messages that you have to say. That manifests in a gazillion ways. You have a website, you have a blog, you have your YouTube channel your podcast feed your social media feed on Facebook or Twitter. So again those are a few ways to look at content. It's like this digitized complex thing that needs to be strategized about. It's a gift that you're giving to your customers and it's a thing that manifests in a bunch of different ways. Now that's at least the question of what the heck is content strategy? I set out about a year, just over a year ago I've been a digital publisher for 23 years and I got tired of explaining to people what a publisher is and what a publisher does. It's like forget, I'm done with that conversation. Don't ask me about that. No, actually I'm having to talk about it but just not to explain my whole professional existence around that. We identified as a content strategist and the first thing I discovered was talking to a bunch of people and everybody thought of content strategy as a different thing. I was like, uh oh, is this like community or wellness? These other words are just like these vague acclamrative things where you can dump a bunch of stuff and I thought, no I have a feeling there's something more to this. So I pulled out my reporters note but my original training was as a journalist so kind of put on my reporter hat to kind of demystify and understand what that content strategy is. So what I just got, I read every book I could find I looked at every online reading list that was out there I listened to every podcast that was out there then I created my own podcast, the content strategy interview. Is Andrea Zolder in here? No she's not. Andrea was my 34th interview. I did 34 interviews last year on content strategy. I took a bunch of online courses lynda.com has a great course on content strategy. There's a bunch of other ones out there. I went to CONFAP, the definitive canonical content strategy conference and a bunch of other events. I joined the local content strategy meetup organization and just immersed myself in this. And I looked at every chart diagram. If you want to be a professional content strategist there are a gazillion ways to understand like as a professional practitioner how you fit into the enterprise and the projects that you're working on probably best exemplified by this, this is from Christina Halberson's Outfit Brain Traffic in Minneapolis this is their famous quad which actually has five elements but that's another thing but the elements of content strategy. So if you want to be a professional content strategist you can do what I did spend six months or a year just go out explore, take some classes, do a bunch of reading and I feel through those interviews I realized one of the things I would do in these interviews is that everybody comes to content strategy from a different angle, perspective, background and so I was typical in that way of people who identify as content strategists I have this kind of weird publishing digital media but anyhow everybody has a story like that as they come into content strategy. So that left me with the question like great if I can figure this out well actually at the end of that process as I was figuring this out I was like well this is fine and dandy but as I started talking to my friends I have a lot of ton of friends who like run small development design you know kind of marketing agencies people who run their own websites people have small businesses that have a website associated with it they're never going to have an extra six months to go out and learn this stuff they're never going to have the budget to hire somebody like me to do this for them so I was like the next thing I discovered was like wait a minute as I look at all this stuff I've learned it's not rocket science there's a whole string of activities and that's what I began to wonder about is there a way that I could string these activities together into an actionable list of executable steps that anybody with kind of a modicum of business sensibility could do and it turns out the answer is yes the content strategy is not this mysterious amorphous thing that I first thought it was a year ago it's a totally doable activity that anybody can do so I'm going to do a whirlwind tour of how to do that I can't teach you the whole thing right now there are people who spend you know there are people who have jobs doing one little tiny aspect at this full time but I'm going to give you an overview of it but the other thing is that it can be executed in any number of levels you can spend an afternoon at your kitchen table sketching out a content strategy and be better off for doing that using these same steps as like a big enterprise like Airbnb they have like 80 people in their content strategy office just here in Seattle and that's a branch office so this scales nicely and that kind of gets at the point that one of the things that several of my interviewees and I discovered as I talked to other content strategist is that everything in this world is bespoke all custom tailored to your individual you know to whatever wherever it is you're applying your content strategy it's going to be unique so as I go through these steps that are coming up just realize that some of these will be things you can tick off in two minutes and some of these will be things you have to take a deep dive on you might do in a slightly different order in your organization some of the work we already have been done in your organization but I want to show you sort of like the stages that are involved in a typical content strategy so let's get to that oops the first stage is discovery we're going to go into more detail about these in just a minute but I just want to quickly outline and over here the process of content strategy first you have a discovery phase like everybody does this like who are you, what are you doing, what's your business intent what do your customers need what kind of resources do you have to spend on this the culmination of that is you figure out what your content mission is then you take that information, figure out a plan, a strategy forgetting from where you are and that desired state that you've imagined in setting out your content mission then you want governance it's one of these terms like it seems like documentation but you want to have a plan in place to make sure that this beautiful strategy you articulated actually happens then you get into the fun stuff design your content now content design is way different from graphic design or information architecture or other disciplines we'll talk in more detail about that then you build your content creation system and then you publish I want to point out here this is like with the famous five minute WordPress install you can six minutes from now be publishing I hope I can make the case that you want to do these other five things before you get to that stage so anyway one of my interviewees called that kind of activity random acts of content so let's come in we're random acts of content and then finally you need to manage the whole shoot, the whole process so let's go through each of those in a little more detail there's sort of several steps to each of these and these are articulated by the way I'll point that at the end but don't need to take notes, these are all articulated as a checklist on my website www.contentstrategy.com and you can grab this and that's licensed like with a creative comment share just like the GPL you can take it and do what you want with that checklist as you incorporate it into your stuff so the discovery stage, as a number of steps the first thing, and this came up over and over again as I researched the field content strategy is about 90% about people there's a lot of stuff, a lot of writing to be done a lot of content to be created, a lot of things to be done but it's all done by people and you need to be attentive to them at every stage in your content strategy so the very first step is you want to get connected with your stakeholders people write the checks for your budget people who are going to be creating the content there's a whole bunch of, and again this is going to be different in every organization but you want to figure out who is affected in any way by or can affect in any way your content and get it hold of them you want to discover your why why are you even doing this and that's sort of like a very high top level if you're thinking of the business group who's the good to great guy anyhow there's a business group that, pardon me Jim Collins, thank you but I think you're asking about the other guys getting to your why Simon Sinek Simon Sinek is the classic everybody's seen that video Simon Sinek did the second most unique 10 talk of all time it was filmed right here in Seattle it was recorded about 10 years ago and Simon Sinek says people don't buy what you do or how you do it they buy stuff because of your why he's an example of that this is a great computer and we do it this way because we're craftspeople whatever and he goes, no this is the correct way we're Apple you think different just like us you want to buy one of my computers you can glimpse the power of why right in there so you want to discover your why and you can do that with values, clarifications are you talking about the stakeholders why so this gets a little tricky and we can do more questions about this again but in terms of this it's like an initiative now this gets into the fractal nature of content strategy I would argue that every organization now should have a chief content officer who's looking at everything from website, micro copy and app alerts to the knowledge base that's just my perspective on this but content strategy can manifest at a whole bunch of different levels it can be an SEO campaign it can be a content marketing campaign social media campaign you want to figure out the why for your current scope does that make sense the intent of the the client if you're working with the client yeah exactly in the perspective page you're talking to your client you're trying to get audience or if you're your own client then it's your why the why, the intent of the content effort that you're doing and then you want to get clear on your business model I think I've been doing this a long time and this day I'm still there's kind of like three main business models you can be a publisher, you can be publishing content for its own use you can be a merchant a commerce site, selling stuff you can be a marketing provider there's a variety of flavors but you just want to be super clear on what your business model is and also what your business goals are what's your current and this kind of gets back to your question about the scope what is your current mission what are the current business goals you're trying to get there and how is content going to support that and this, it's number five here but it should really be number one all the time is identifying your customers needs and there's, you know and that's different from what they say they want most of the time so you have to do some work, some research some cogitation, trust your intuition there's all kinds of things that go into that but like we never would have had these iPhones you know it's Steve Jobs I make a better way to listen to music or take pictures or something so being a little bit visionary about once versus needs but at the same time if you're just satisfying stakeholders anyhow being clear on what the needs of your customers are are it's going to make any content ever better and then at the end of this stage this is where you can say here's my intent, here's what I want to do with this content the strategy phase is where you turn that into a plan for realizing that content vision so taking those goals that you these goals you have assign specific business goals to your content effort and then you want to, I would argue there's other ways to do this but I would argue you want to set KPIs does everybody know what a key performance indicator is a KPI if you've done it too just google it it's a great little tool for focusing your management and tracking efforts but it gives you just a few specific things to watch for to see how you're progressing towards your business goals then the classic thing you want to do is then you inventory what you have, you kind of have this vision then you take a look at what you have if you're building a site from scratch that's nothing so you can build it out from the get go but most of the time you'll have some existing content that you're trying to build out then you audit that content against those goals and then the KPIs ask like how does it do it you know are we achieving or you know during a little secret content strategy everything happens in spreadsheets so you have this audit spreadsheet that you've done and then you just add columns basically with what it is you're looking to to measure your gaps then you look at the gaps between what that audit reveals what your goals are and then you come up with a plan you know a concise content strategy there's a whole bunch of a sort of mad live looking stuff out there for crafting a content strategy kind of like you know you see this in the business startup world where they you know write like a there's sort of a number of templates you can do to get to that to articulating your content strategy and then the governance plan like I said before this is like used to manifest like this like a row of binders on a shelf guessing it's probably going to be digital these days but again remember your content strategy is 90% about people so the first thing in the governance stage is you want to identify your owners and the people who have the end authority so that you hit an obstacle or need a decision made you know who these people are at a time I've seen people get bogged down with like a clarity around that but being clear on who the important people are is an important step there I'm going to create your guiding documents you've got an idea by this stage of you know why you're going to do things you have policies run so how are you going to do it how are you going to do features manuals and things like that you want to articulate your style and this typically manifests as like both a grammatical and a usage kind of guide and there's tons of those like you can just adopt like the AP style guide or the Chicago manual but there's tons of online ones like 18F and companies like that that you can just grab and adopt for yourself the other thing you want to have is like a voice and tone guide and this kind of goes with here it's like MailChimp is the classic example of that you know when you're on MailChimp you just have this distinct way of communicating and that comes right out of their voice and tone manual I don't really like the way I phrase this but I couldn't come up with a better language but established compliance standard this basically just means getting the people who have agreed to what you're doing to do what they said they were going to do and so having a way to take yourself and your team to task if things get stuck and just referring back to yourself your guiding documents this should be a hopefully a motion free thing and then you want to just gather up your governance documents having some place where people can now we get into fun stuff designing your content and like I said before designing content it's different from other kinds of design you might have done like graphic design, information architecture or relational database design and things like that it starts with a messaging architecture and this goes right back to that why you did a new discovery phase like why are we doing this what's the top level message again kind of like it kind of tracks right back to that why exercise and that often you'll just have a list of adjectives that is or about like describe what you're doing but you have a clear kind of framework to hang all of your subsequent individual messages on then you want to figure out your distribution channels this is here for the web it's like you publish the web page you promoted there's a whole bunch to that and then the meat of this stage of the design phase is first you design your content you design the types of content you're going to do for your users and I would argue this is best done just in good old fashioned HTML you just create semantically meaningful outlines of what it is you're trying to get across then you want to model your content to understand the relationships between it just like your kind of mind map kind of thing on a butcher blog paper on your kitchen table or that and then you want to structure your content from multiple uses and this has more to do this gets down in the technical need of it but you want to kind of another thing that Karen McGrane that the original got on their content strategy says she's articulated the difference between chunks and blogs that like in content strategy always want to be thinking about chunks not blogs of content but you don't want to get too chunky then you get often the nerdy world of Ditta and things like this but you want to have just the right size chunks so you want to give that some thought to how you're going to have the typical example would be like this looks great and this two column layout on my desktop but how does it fold into a one column thing you want to structure content so that that and similar activities are needed to what do you do by model you just define that term sorry model just modeling the relationships between them so it's like a diagram of how your content fits together then you want to build your content operation like if it might look like a movie studio it might look like a radio station it might look like a newspaper it might look like a multimedia mix whatever kind of content you're creating you build your operation and this again we're at word camp talking about WordPress and we're pretty far down in here where we're talking about this is where you pick your CMS at this point you have an idea what you've built, what you've designed and how it needs to be put out to the world pardon me oh I'm sorry there I go content management system and WordPress would be considered a content management system there's dozens of other ones out there but WordPress has a lot of work to share that's why I focus on here but there's others at Drupal there's a whole bunch of other open source ones there's a zillion proprietary ones things like Wix and Wean Squarespace and things like that and then you assign publishing roles again we'll say about people you figure out who's going to write the content who's going to make the content assignments who's going to write it who's going to create it who's going to edit it who will be the subject matter who will do your final production on it all that stuff you want to assign publishing roles and then you want to stitch those people together in workflows figuring out again a lot of this stuff you can design this and plan this ahead of time but you'll often find a lot of this stuff is pretty iterative you'll go back and go yeah that's not working right we really need the subject matter expert to look at it before we have whatever your considerations are but these are things you want to do and then at the end of this you'll have a content calendar you'll have a publishing plan you'll say what do we want to do now when are we going to do it now let's publish so in the publishing world the first thing you might have if you're doing redesign or a project where you're taking information out of an old content or another CMS or even another WordPress installation you'll have a content migration so that may be a consideration you might have old content that you can just dump in and start with but the main ongoing activity in publishing is you'll create your content or you might repurpose it you might source your content in a lot of different ways you want to end up with your content then you produce it you get it gussied up through the and this gets back to that digital and complex nature of content you want to have it stitched together with taxonomies the way you designed it but you want to have your production team make sure you're doing it right before it goes in there and then you distribute it once it's in there and approved and ready to go you can get it out to the world and it's really not done until you promote it in this distracted noisy world your job isn't done when you get published it's just starting to get published if you build it it has never been true and it's never been less true than it is right now so I would argue that it's incumbent on you to promote your as a steward of your content and that may mean back to the stakeholder thing making sure you have a good relationship with the social media team or whoever handles your social media for you to make sure it's out there or your email whoever gets a different group does the email marketing stuff just making sure that the word is out about your content and that goes on way back you want to make sure you've done everything to optimize and go in every stage of the game that's one of those things that should be baked in any project accessibility or SEO should be the two things that are baked in from the start in any project and then you need to manage the whole enterprise you want to look at your content performance like how's it doing against those KPIs that you set up there's also like a qualitative element to a lot of content publishing that can be difficult to communicate like with people who are writing checks for budgets and things like that and you want to be aware for example things like SEO and content marketing are really long in place and it's hard to measure you can't measure click for click a relationship between the content you've created and the impact it has on your business so you want to be aware that there's both quantitative and qualitative things to evaluate then you want to review those results and report to your stakeholders and this is where those awkward conversations are not awkward but just the conversations about ROI will come up over and over again there's these two competing things I see all the time tight-tested budgeters over here and SEO and content marketing experts over here saying you need to be doing 10 times as much as you're doing right now if you don't have any impact out there and I'm like how do you reconcile these if you guys have secrets about how to reconcile those on all the years and then these insights and these evaluations you'll want to revise, remove maybe some content one of the guys I interviewed for my podcast was Jerry McGovern does anybody know who he is? he's a real super nerdy guru about he originally came to my attention about 10 years ago when I was doing a lot more SEO he talked about customer care where a teen hour focuses on key task accomplishments so he works with like big Fortune 500 really Fortune 50 companies and anyhow a lot of times his work resulted in removing as much as 90% of the content so that's one of the outcomes that can come from this kind of review and then ultimately this whole thing is a big cycle you need to come back and revise and review your whole content strategy and your planning plan I want to stitch this together a little bit differently as a list it's just like blah blah blah list list list list list so let me put it together in a little different way if you take the discovery, strategy and governance stages that's sort of your strategy phase where you're figuring everything out what you're going to do the design, build and publish stages that's where the implementation that's where all the rubber gets thrown you're actually doing stuff, you're acting on your plan and that's the implementation phase and then the management that's just your ongoing administration like how do you run things in your business or with your clients or how do you manage stuff but once you've got it mapped out like this you see that the first two parts of each of those first stages are typically more like projects like one-off things that you'll do here and there whereas the second stuff, the governance and publishing that's just your ongoing kind of day-to-day operation and over time that governance stuff shifts into the background just a little bit it's just something you refer to and mostly what you're doing is running a publishing operation so this is comes right back to me trying to get away from publishing I'm like oh crap, I'm right back in it so does that model make sense? does that help you because to me as I started looking at this I was like there's a lot going on here and all the people who've written about it to this point it's been sort of like I know if I had a job doing this I'd know how to do it but if I didn't know how to do it, how the heck would I get it accomplished that's my intent of this whole project is to hopefully help you guys incorporate content strategy and so that gets into the next thing I want to talk about is the application of this like that checklist that I created is at diycontentstrategy.com and like I said you can just go grab that do what you want with it, kind of intermesh it with here the way you operate and everybody has and most of you are probably doing 80-90% of this already you know like I'm looking at Mark Krupp why would I say that I know from talking to him I'm like I don't know but I think even he would have some appreciation for looking at it this way and so anyhow you can just grab that checklist do what you want with it they're kind of incorporated into your things and like I said you can take that checklist and if you're a small business person that has no time, no money, no budget but you know you just kind of feeling you need to be doing better stewardship of your content if you're dining at a table for 2 hours 3-4 hours and come up with a sketch just like a cocktail lap and sketch of your content strategy kind of consider each of those considerations each of those stages that I set out you don't have to go into all the detail and a lot of times you realize oh yeah I thought about that I know my values and my why and all that kind of stuff there's a lot of work that may already have been done but in any case even just giving a few hours of attention to it you can kind of sketch out the content strategy and I want a workbook that I'll probably sell to the folks as like sort of a I don't know exactly how I'll manifest but because I need to prototype it with some people first which kind of gets back to this this whole idea of DIY content strategy is only 3 months old in my mind so apologies if it's not completely fleshed out yet but anyhow any of you are welcome to just take those steps and create a workbook that you can hand to your clients or whatever if you want to jump on board I think we're entering kind of the golden age of content strategy the more I talk to like I mentioned I joined the content strategy via organizing team as I talk to people in that world and just content people in general there's this sort of growing sense of excitement and enthusiasm about the field and the discipline people are actually getting budgets people are getting higher interest content strategies appearing all over the place not always call that by the way they have a role called UX writer which looks exactly like the job description for a content strategy is the Facebook so anyhow there's kind of a and you can also apply it as a consultant that's probably the main way that happens in this world so you could hang on your shingle as a consultant or partnerships I've talked to a ton of agency people this is my fourth word of campus where I've talked about this and every time I've ended up talking to agencies we're like yeah we could anyhow there may be opportunities there for me or other people who are in content strategy to partner with agencies and help them incorporate like a content strategy practice inside their agency or just even in your development and design practice however you articulate it one last thing I want to talk about oh perfect with my remaining five minutes I think I can do this in less than five minutes if you're tired of listening to old white people like me you can help us on the speaker training and diversity outreach team that's one of the things I do in the WordPress community work with Jill Binder up in Vancouver and we're doing so anybody in here organized work camps or meetups I see one meetup organizer so anybody who organizes meetups or work camps or any kind of event where you're gathering people together we've got a bunch of resources about how to encourage just get more voices into the community and like I said there's more information about DIY content strategy if you are out so thanks much any questions can we use the mic can we use the mic over there because I know they're recording this for WordPress.tv so that way people can hear your questions and not rely on me if you could line up by the mic do you want to pass it across do we have a room for so are you volunteering I guess I am thank you so I was wondering about architecture in relation to content strategy were you including that in your thoughts of you mean like information architecture I'm talking about navigation oh yeah I would love that in information architecture to me that's a subfield of that navigation I mean like things about labeling usability findability discoverability findability usability accessibility part of the content strategy it should all be baked into your content strategy absolutely any other questions I see one right in the back thanks for the vibe I just thought I'd get five ten thousand sales don't exactly know how to phrase this but I really like your methodology it seems to play well with slightly larger companies that can have a management process I don't know if there are any other solopreneurs in the room but as I've been watching the world of content over the past five years I've realized we're going under because there are so many opportunities to be strategic and get your message out but we also have a job to do and we're the only ones doing it so is there a way that you would adapt your methodology in dealing with micro businesses absolutely that's the top that's the very first thing on my agenda because all my friends are like massage therapists and psychotherapists and independent web developers and that's the very first thing and that's sort of been my from the get go I've always hung out with the guys but I've always and all my friends have always been the little guys and so figuring out how to funnel those practices into actionable that's the whole point this checklist is the first draft and like I said the first product I created the first manifestation of this in sort of an actionable way will be exactly addressed to that to the small solopreneurs independent professionals and I think you can hit each of those I think it's important to tick off each of those activities but you don't need a staff of 12 you're not going to have 12 UX researchers or content researchers right well if I was coaching someone I would probably say based on my own experience add a category of materialists called take away half of it because we end up with no time and feeling so super stretched because all the things that we could do are marvelous but somebody has to speak reality to us I push back a little bit on this because I think each of those I thought a lot about this list before I created it I think it's important to at least consider to say I know enough about that or as an overstressed solopreneur you know tax to the limit I got no time for that but I've given it a microsecond of thought so I would argue that you still want to consider those things but you're absolutely right like I said that's my first project is to get this down to like what's the minimum viable product what's the minimum viable content strategy you can come up with do you need a quick one? okay one more quick question yes it's not really a question as much as a suggestion with what you're doing as you're doing this I would say it would be really nice if we could look at your site and see a list of people who know how to do your methodology that we could contract with okay but I just made it but you're making a workbook I'm saying down the road you're making a workbook it would be a really great option yeah and that's something that if any of you grab this and run with it let me know I'll promote you all over the place on my website and my talks and stuff absolutely I love that idea and that kind of goes back I hope you're all at Bridget's keynote this morning this is a community and that's my intent with this I just made some discoveries sharing it now and I want to solve it connect with one another connect the dots figure out better ways to do it can I have oh that's a good idea she said you can charge us and then I'm like can I have one other thing the one thing I didn't see on there I work both paths as a micro-entrepreneur and I also work with a team at my day job and you don't have anything about planning for sunsetting or how you get the content off and I think that that's really important we'll talk a little bit about that and Jerry McEver is thinking about 90% come out and that's something to be hard if you're a content creator it can be so hard to let go there's this saying in an editorial we're kill your darlings it's like that famous novelist has this beautiful term of praise and he goes that doesn't have anything to do with this story and that's a I propose what you're just saying if it's not helping your customers accomplish what they came to your website for we'll note to end on it should be a separate person from the content creator and that is the executioner we should go out there looking at the strategy and saying we will now execute these many things I think Jerry McEver would gladly accept that label for what he does, the content executioner you've said she somebody oh she has content officer I'm making this up, I mean it's a role that exists this is often that's the part you guys let go yeah exactly