This article follows on to my general introduction to Incentives which you can read here

If you offer a competition it is important to structure it in such a way that it minimises the hassle of running it, and maximise the positive effects to your blog. The following are some of the common tips given by many websites (for a more in-depth guide to competitions see Problogger)

Sane (KISS). As I have alluded to before in many blogs on designing content for the net, the average surfer is a person of very short attention span. This is no insult to you, constant reader, it is because of the information overload on the web, the Human Brain makes sub conscious judgments millions of times a second, and the gestalt effect of ideas, images and sounds all determine in a short space of time whether or not our brain deems something important enough to read. This has always happened but the coming of age of the information superhighway has multiplied this effect tenfold.

Therefore anything which at face value appears too complex or time consuming to be worth the effort will be edited by the brain, and clicked away by the finger. Simplicity of design is a beautiful thing, think about the old business maxim of ‘build a better mousetrap.’ Simple questions followed by a A) B) C) answer style is fine, and about all that needs to be done, remember you are not challenging the intellect of your reader in the competition, if they want a challenge then they will apply to Mastermind (I don’t know if the Americans have an equivalent of this program, answers on a postcard…) Remember to KISS.

Maximise the Potential

If you are running a competition, it is important to remember that you expect to gain some benefit from doing so. The use of a competition as marketing tool is not a new thing. It has been happening for many years. With a ‘hard’ product, an item or similar that is physically purchased, the incentive is simple, ‘buy me, and you will get the chance to win this.’ With promoting your blog or website, the incentive is to read me, or subscribe or click these links. Effectively it is the same ploy and there are a number of ways with which you can maximize the effectiveness of this. Make your competition open to new RSS subscribers, or for those who leave a comment or URL link on your site. If you are after content, make the competition a writing competition or similar. A highly cunning, but bordering on transgression of the above KISS rule from ProBlogger is to hide clues in archived posts and holding a treasure hunt (increasing page views at a stroke)

However you do it, and whatever method you arrive at for your competition, think about the inputs and outputs carefully.

The time has come to change your content, either there has been a fundamental shift (these happen all of the time on web and related topics) or you are experiencing little or no growth in traffic. As well as reappraising Mission Statement (see here) and content innovation (see here), you have decided on a bold new direction, and completing the Cost Benefits Analysis (see here), it is time for Change.

Change is a difficult area in all business, especially on the web, as a readership may not always react well to a shift in direction. All of the information on change management can be found here and it is worthwhile doing a lot of research on change. There is one tool, however, that I have found to be invaluable when contemplating any form of change, and that is the Do Nothing analysis.

In effect it is a simple mind tool which asks you to list all of the things you want to change, and then to consider the question what would happen if I did nothing? It is designed to weed out things that do not need to be changed (because the old adage remains true, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.)

Begin by defining the direction of change broadly, again to utilize WonderWidgetsAreTheBest.com the problem is as follows

“Traffic has not increased as planned with the hiring of two content writers” Therefore, the webmaster has decided to change the following things

• To Include comparative products to the WonderWidgets, namely the OrdinaryWidgets and SuperWidgets, on the site.
• To Fire one of the writers and to start writing content himself.

In ‘Do Nothing Analysis, both of these options are analyzed thus. If I do not widen my content will my readership increase (to answer this a value judgment needs to be made on why traffic has not increased, is it a content problem, or is it a design problem, or is it a marketing problem) Assuming that the value judgment has been made and it is decided that content, and specifically the lack of other Widget products reviewed, is the reason for the poor traffic, the answer to the ‘do nothing’ is that traffic will not increase, therefore this is a change that needs to be undertaken. The second change is to fire one of the writers, in looking at the problem from a do nothing perspective, the webmaster realizes, because of the metrics on the articles that both writers generate similar traffic, therefore it is likely to say that they are being viewed by the audience, and that their writing is not to blame for the poor growth of traffic. If the webmaster does nothing, he will still be free to market the site, and not have his time taken up writing content, so in this case it is wrong to change.

It is important to remember that Do Nothing Analysis is a subjective decision making tool, it emphasizes the alternatives to change, but care should be take in deciding the ‘value judgments’ that form a part of the analysis.

Ok, so you’ve decided on which way to capitalize on your blog (see ‘The Pros and Cons of Blogging for Money Part one’), you’re comfortable with it and you have thought about all of the negative aspects and have developed a strategy for dealing with them (see ‘The Pros and Cons of Blogging for Money Part two’) Now you’ve found your gig, or developed your website and the money has started to arrive. Kudos to you!

Money is the most obvious Pro of Blogging for money; it is the payoff in terms of financial reward. There are many other payoffs though, some less obvious than others, here is my list of non financial pros of Blogging for Money;

Responsibility

Whether it is your site you are blogging for, or someone else’s, once you have committed to a project the onus is on you to deliver. This has, for me at least, a positive effect on output. If I am blogging for pleasure, I am far less motivated than if it were for money, the ‘ah, it doesn’t matter if I miss one today’ mind set can be a real creative turn off.

Publicity

Shameless self publicists that we are, it helps if the responsibility for ad revenue lays at your door, as you will need to be promoting your blog as much as you can. Likewise if you are paid to blog you will be posting on a site which is already established and accessing a wider readership than you ordinarily would. All publicity is good, the more well known you are the better the pay off.

Self Satisfaction

I belong to the Macgregor Theory Y type of person, I am motivated to do well by the very fact that I want to do well. I believe that being paid to blog or generating revenue from blogging in other ways means that I am doing well, and I feel good for it.

This is the last Pros and Cons article, and I would love to hear your ideas on the subject, have I missed anything out? Leave a comment and let me know.

Once a Mission Statement has been developed to guide content creation (please see the previous article) it is well worth taking the time to perform a cost/benefits analysis. CBA is a simple tool used to map all of the costs and benefits involved in a new project or even an existing one. It is a table with all associated costs on one side, and all benefits on the other, and should produce a breakeven point, or an idea of when extra costs will be met by increased revenue.

When developing a Strategic Content Plan it is important to consider all of the costs and benefits involved, as content can become an expensive area. Whilst it is important to include as many dollar amounts as possible in the analysis, some items, such as time or hits an be difficult to estimate. The important thing is that you try to provide as accurate as possible figures, as it would be a disaster if your figures were off and an action seems more, or less, profitable, than it really is. Also do not underestimate the intangible costs and benefits (again time is often one of the most important.) Here is the cost benefits analysis for www.wonderwidgetsarethebest.com, which is hiring two content writers who will provide 2 articles per day and will also post 50 posts in the forum each day.

Therefore we can see that the costs are $41, and the benefits are $40.51, however, one important benefit has been left out, and that is the values of the increased content in generating more traffic, which will increase both Adsense and Sponsor revenue in the future. I would make a judgment call here (and of course my time freed up would be spent on marketing my site as well) and deem that hiring two writers would benefit me over all.

For more details on CBA see Mindtools

To help guide you and your writers on developing innovative content, it is a good idea to build up a crib sheet for your particular topic. This is a document which contains all of the salient keywords, as well as the themes which need to be held in mind when writing, as well as what I like to call ‘The Important Questions. From the Mission Statement (see here for the previous article), and the Cost Benefits Analysis, the webmaster will have a clear idea of where he is going in the near future, but to achieve this he needs an effective communications’ tool to keep everyone on track (writers, editors, forum posters etc.)

To this end I developed (under a different pen name) the Content Crib Sheet. Again taking the example of www.wonderwidgets.com, here is a guide to how to develop a working crib sheet

Wonder Widgets Are The Best

Crib Sheet

All articles should include these Key words, as well as paid submissions to the forums.

Key Words

Wonder Widgets

New Products

News from WonderWidgets Plc

Development

Product Innovation

All articles should bear in mind these questions whenever possible

The Important Questions

Is this new information?

What are the consequences of such news?

What does the future Hold for the subject of this articl

Obviously this is a very simple example, and crib sheets are a good way to communicate the Strategic Content Development for your site, as an aide memoir for yourself when writing article, but also for others who contribute to your content. It is fairly obvious stuff, but with the amount of content generated in a short amount of time, typically on the web, it is easy to lose sight of the goals and objectives. There are loads of other articles on developing content, such as ProBlogger, and this article on copy blogger , but this system does help with keeping it all together.

Image by chambar

The Mission Statement (MS) is a powerful tool used by almost all modern business as a means of communicating the core beliefs and competencies of an organization to its own employees and the outside world. It is capable of, if it is well written and thought out, of providing a number of quantifiable goals and objectives by which future performance can be measured. For a good, and concise introduction to Mission Statements in general, see Bplans’ Developing a mission statement specifically for content development requires a few specialist touches.

First the mission statement should focus on the niche, for the purposes of this series of articles I am going to develop a Strategic Content Development Plan for Woder Widgets , a fictitious product review/ discussion site dedicated to the eponymous Wonder Widget. As such my MS should begin with a General and then Specific focus on the product my site is dedicated to.

“Woder Widgets provides information and discussion on the Wonder Widget. Further it strives to provide up to the minute information on the current run of Wonder Widgets, Wonder Widgets of the past and those still in use, and the future of the Wonder Widget.”

Then, as the MS is concerned with content, details should be given on what is being done to provide the best possible sources of information.

“WonderWidgetsarethebest.Com strives to provide up to the minute content by searching the news, linking to the management of Wonder Widgets, and encouraging discussion in its forums. If it is about Wonder Widgets we want it on our site first.”

Notice the last sentence, as it provides an important yard stick which is useful when developing the aims and goals. Aims should be simple how we are going to achieve our mission statements, goals should be simple yardsticks used to measure the effectiveness of goals. Using the above statement we derive the following aims and goals

Aims

· To add new content daily on all of the topics outlined in our SEO and Keyword areas.

· To Break all of the News relating to Wonder Widgets on our website before anyone else

· To promote discussion and feedback in all of our forums and articles.

Therefore the following goals have been identified.

Goals

· The articles published on our site will maintain our Page Rank (or associated internet metric of choice) and focus on our Keywords

· Our Site will be the first to publish all content on Wonder Widgets

· We will achieve 5 comments per article as well as 100 new posts to forum per day.

And so, we have a full Mission Statement for all content on our site. This can be give to all authors writing for the site to focus attention on the content, as well as used to judge the effectiveness of all content on our site.

A website lives and dies by its content; the articles need to be focused on niche and innovative enough to pull in the share of viewers searching that niche. What generally separates the winners from the losers is the quality and originality of the content. It has been shown that the bulk of the attention goes to the writer who has developed the idea. Also it helps to build links to your website as many other commentators will link back to an original and well written article in their own work. Developing a strategy toward content development is an important job for the webmaster, and as the job of writing is becoming increasingly ‘contracted out’ to other writers as webmasters become more embroiled in the day to day running of their sites, and the need for a volume of material to help with page ranking and keywords (or, as it is collectively known, SEO.)

Image by chambar

Innovative content is the be all and end all of this process. In creating a ‘conversation point’ in the blogosphere, not only are you ensuring that people are coming to your site for new ideas, but you are also marketing your site in one of the most successful ways possible. It is said that 90% of effective marketing on the internet is generated by word of mouth (look at the success of viral marketing and you begin to get an idea of the level of success.)

This then, is the introduction to a guide on developing a strategy for content development, aimed not only a writers but also at webmasters who are hiring writers for their sites. It will cover the tools which are needed to plan successful content, as well as a guide to developing the content itself. Over the next few days I will cover the following

· Developing a ‘Content Mission Statement’

· Cost/Benefits analysis of hiring writers

· Innovative Content, a few suggestions

· Change management, including a ‘Do nothing analysis

· Managing Feedback

Any business of a certain size takes time and expense to plan change and innovation, and yet the basic tools are relatively easy to use. It is well worth the effort to take the time to implement some of these ideas.