I’ve come across some interesting (to me) patterns in what I write about, prompting me to note holes in my thinking I have to fill in, holes in my writing where I have done the thinking but didn’t write it down to make it more clear. I’m also able to see more clearly what content feels weak, low value, or unpersuasive.
For example, I have terrible post titles (subject lines) like, how audience-based businesses might handle initial success. As an article title and email subject line, can it even get worse than “how <ambiguous group> might handle <ambiguous topic>”?
You could ask 100 people what that content was about based on the title and they’d all be wrong.
I also noticed I have more habit type posts than I thought. They fall into two groupings of weighted more toward personal experience with habits or toward common problem habits of experts with content and related habit solutions.
My articles about habits are more likely to get email replies and I’ve found some holes in my thinking and writing there. So I jotted those down.
Further, I found that I have three types of solutions I commonly recommend:
- process-based change (changing habits) – often a related goal of convincing experts with content to build content quality control or organization into work processes
- mindset change (correcting cognitive biases)
- tactical recommendations (implementing tools)
A better overall framework for strategic growth that covers those three buckets and can be adapted to your situation could be a powerful unifying theme on a consolidated site.
It’s also become clear to me that
- I make weak or indirect points, or sometimes can’t find the point in something I wrote. It’s like I’m turning over rocks and nothing of substance is there and then I’m just leaving that rock turned over hoping no one finds it.
- I offer recommendations without clearly defining what outcome can be expected from those recommendations
- I get lots of similar questions, very little of that is addressed in my existing content, but when it is, it performs a little better (using “performs” loosely there to mean email replies.)
How to organize more tangential posts?
I have 6 published and 11 unpublished posts that are primarily about personal habits. I can consolidate all my personal experience with habits posts into a bigger “lessons learned doing x” type post, and migrate it to Medium or shop it as a guest post somewhere worthwhile.
For experts with content habit driven problems and solutions, those more writing process type posts are less straightforward. There is some good stuff, but a lot more effort would be required to make it useful.
There is a lot of “Organize your content” type posts that seek to be persuasive using this approach.
But that doesn’t mean it should be a category – it’s simply a motif and it’s okay to let it be just that, and be cognizant that when I’m talking about habits and processes, that I have a persuasion goal with those posts, and keep an internal label so I can see if that ends up being more correlated with something useful down the line, like a group coaching program curriculum.
Here are more thoughts I wrote on habits looking through some of those ‘on personal habits’ type posts. Warning: it’s long.
Below is my organizing a section of a work/writing habit series:
On compound effects
In general
- Two ways people go bankrupt – Imagining the compound effects of what you do daily will show you where you are gradually headed.
- Superpower or curse, you choose – how pain plays into a willingness to change daily processes
Related to content
- Are you doing content one way? – the idea that as you have a way of doing things, that compounds over time to you having a very lopsided, not diverse, body of content.
- What determines the rate your content improves? Compares rate-determining step in chemistry to bottlenecks in improving your content processes
- building a moat for bigger competitors in search – by focusing on raising up one authoritative page on a topic at a time, you can make it unappealing for others to try to outrank you for it