Rules for Responsible Article Creation

These rules apply to any advertiser creating media, whether it's articles, blog posts, or video blog entries. But I'll write it to apply to responsible article creation for Adam Schultz, my WebSourced colleague.

For the advertiser seeking to create articles the rules are fairly simple: know your strengths and know your audience. It may help if you think of your current clients, and potential clients, as your audience. I will refer to clients as audience for the rest of this article.

Know Your Audience
In particular, know what issues plague your clients from day to day. If you sell pizza ovens then consider who's buying your ovens. These are people who run kitchens.

Knowing this you know that they also manage employees and money. They also face market pressures such as low carb. They also have to clean their ovens, which is tough in itself.

All of these issues that the pizza joint manager faces would make great articles. Here's a list of titles that this little brainstorm suggested to me:

How to Motivate Your Employees to Upsell Pizza Sizes
When Success Hinders Growth: Making Time To Expand Your Pizza Joint
Getting Expansion Loans for Your Pizza Business
How One Pizza Joint Rode the Low Carb Craze and Prospered
How to Make Your Pizza Ovens Sparkle Like New
10 Tips for Cleaning Burnt Cheese Off Pizza Pans Faster Than Ever Before
15 Crazy New Gourmet Pizza Recipes

Understanding your audience's buying cycle can also help you in creating content.

Know Your Strengths
As a pizza oven seller online you might not know much about upselling from a medium pizza to a large. But you do - I promise - have some lodes of information that can apply to the pizza business. Hunting out where your experience and expertise converges with the pizza oven business is a matter of:

a) knowing your personal strengths
b) having conversations with your customers

Conversations with your customers will reveal many many ideas for more articles/blog posts/tools (yes tools - especially web based - are some of the strongest link builders out there... so watch for tools your audience might need.)

Develop a series of questions that will uncover the vacancies in your audience's current media. WHAT?? I mean uncover what questions your audience/potential audience has and create media (write articles/blog posts/video blog entries) that answer these questions.

So What's A Responsible Article?
A responsible article is one that focuses solely, completely and entirely on solving a particular problem your audience faces. This article, while intended to influence the audience by suggesting behaviors or strategies that might help them, does not seek to influence the audience in a way that will benefit your company.

An irresponsible article is one that is intended to sway the audience into an action that primarily benefits the advertiser.

So How Does this Benefit My Bottom Line?
If you're writing responsible articles (creating responsible media... remember this applies to all advertiser created media) that aren't intended to sway the audience into buying your products then what the hell are you doing writing articles?

You're proving, through your free sharing of valuable information, that:

a) you're trustworthy
b) you're an industry thought leader

So how does being found a trustworthy thought leader affect your bottom line? It lays the foundation for a long and successful career, no matter what the industry.