#003: Content Strategy Session

(Updated on )

This is an audio recording of a Skype call between Erin Kissane and myself. Erin wrote the book on content strategy so I was lucky to get her help and analysis.

By starting out with content strategy, the things that we learn here can help inform visual design choices later to come. We got a lot more from this than that, but it’s good that this got to happen early in the process instead of late.

We talk about:

  • Starting with inventory, goals, and a survey to understand the readers. Here are the survey results.
  • Diving into analytics and why going in with something to prove is best.
  • Figuring out engagement through analytics / User expectations
  • Topical browsing and internal search by topic.
  • The problem we have with blog post analytics and the current URL structure.
  • Google AdPlanner Tool == useful. We use it to compare similar sites to CSS-Tricks.
  • Difficultly in getting from certain types of content to others.
  • Crosslinking, starting with the most popular.
  • Outbrain. What you might want to read next links.
  • Yoast’s tagging tool.
  • Weekly posting schedule.
  • Curating conversations, “what’s hot”.
  • How Almanac isn’t a great name (sorry Erin!)
  • Pre-posting checklist.

The file below is the result of a shared Google Doc where Erin and I worked back and forth while doing the content strategy work.