When one of your responsibilities is to create content to market and promote your small business or consultancy, creating boring content can be a death knell.
“That is a thing that I think a lot of us worry about, we don't have good enough content, we aren't that interesting, who would care about what we have to say, who would care about what we have to do,” says Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse in a recent livestream.
If you want to banish boring content, keep these things in mind:
1. It’s Not About You
2. Turn Your Content Upside Down
3. Slow Down
#1 It’s Not About You
The first thing you need to remember is that it’s not about you.
“It’s not about you. It’s really about your audience, the people who care about what you’re doing,” she says. “You have to really get in their head, you have to really understand the people that you're trying to reach.”
You can do this through entertaining or educational means, “but it has to actually be relevant” to them, she admonishes. “That’s the bottom line.”
“You need to be a student of your audience, or the student of the people that you're trying to reach. You have to spend a lot of time with them, like real time where you actually talk to them and you ask them and you hear what they have to say,” she explains.
Rather than talk at people, “you want to be talking to people in a way that they hear themselves talking.”
#2 Turn Your Content Upside Down
The second thing you need to do is turn your content upside down, in other words change how you’re presenting content to your audience.
“You don't want to necessarily always do the same thing that you've ever done before,” says Kami. “You want to think about ways to talk about it that's different, that's like a little bit off center, upside down.” In other words, “to make content stand out it has to be kind of counter to what people think they're going to see.”
#3 Slow Down
The third and last thing you need to do is slow down. It may sound counterintuitive, but “sometimes less is more,” says Kami. “So, we want to take that time to slow down the roll and think about what it is we want to say to people.”
She loves the following quote by Carl Honore, author of The Praise of Slow and voice of the global Slow Movement: “Your best ideas, those eureka moments that turn the world upside down, seldom come when you're juggling emails, rushing to meet the 5 P.M. deadline or straining to make your voice heard in a high-stress meeting. They come when you're walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock.”
She recommends slowing down wherever possible. “That could even mean slowing down the cadence of your content,” she explains. It’s something she adopts in her own work. “I talked to my team the other day and we may actually be moving this live stream to be two weeks instead of every week…. We started to think about how can we stretch this out a little bit more and then use the content that we make during this live stream in different ways.”
Beyond cadence, slowing down in general is also important. “You can't come up with really deep and cool ideas that aren't just a list of everything that somebody else has already heard unless you take that time to slow down,” she says.
To hear more from Kami, along with specific examples of these three points in action, watch the livestream replay.