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Creating lean content is not about having lots of flashy, interesting clips that use dramatic narrative. It’s not about creating big-ticket products with spectacular features either.
It’s not even necessarily about producing short videos or blogs more often than not. Some of the most successful lean publishers out there are actually very structured and process oriented.
What is lean content creation? It’s keeping your messages focused and practical. it’s delivering them through the right medium at the right time. And it’s investing in materials and resources that help you keep up this speed.
There are many ways to create lean content, but none of them look like anything else.
This article will discuss some easy tips for developing your own lean publishing strategies.
Creating lean, efficient content is very important to your business’s success. The amount of time it takes to create quality content has become a major cost in our digital age.
Many businesses have their own internal editorial team that produces content for them, but how much value they bring to the organization is often limited by the deadlines they give themselves.
Content marketing isn’t just about throwing together random pieces of fluff around with the hope people will click on something – it’s investing time into creating high-quality, well-researched material that adds significant value to your company.
And we're talking not about giving away what you have paid hard money for, but rather offering valuable information others don’t have -- unless you are paying for a similar service yourself!
By keeping content production costs low, you can spend more time focusing on other parts of your business, which are probably spending too much time at the moment.
The second way to make sure your content is engaging and well-written is to make it through the process of creating content as efficiently as possible.
Content marketing isn’t just about writing good stuff and putting it up online, it’s also about developing strategies to produce that good stuff more quickly.
You can start by defining what type of content you want to publish, and then determining if there are any components of that content you can eliminate or reduce.
For example, instead of having an article with a headline and body, you could simply have a headline and put a link in the body. Or, you could write a short summary rather than an elaborate one.
There may be something better you could do with this information elsewhere, so try to assess whether these changes would improve the quality of the content without affecting the intended purpose too much. If they don’t, then go ahead and edit the content, but keep its overall structure the same.
Now that we have an understanding of what lean content is, let’s talk about how to create it. First off, you need to know that not every idea you have will make sense as lean content.
This could be due to time constraints, no clear audience, or even poor quality material that would work better spread out over several days or weeks.
The key word here is “quality.” If your idea doesn’t look good, don’t waste your time trying to transform it into something more attractive. It won’t help its chances of becoming lean content.
Instead, choose a half-hour topic, media, or situation and see if it can be adapted to fit our definition. If so, great! You've got lean content gold!
If you're struggling to come up with new ideas, use the tools mentioned above to determine the value of old ones. These resources will take into account the effect they had on you as a person to assess their worth.
You may also want to consider whether this information is truly valuable to someone else. Are there other studies that prove the same thing? If so, then investing in original research is a smart move.
Sometimes, after spending hours creating an article you realize that it is not working and you have run out of ideas. This can be frustrating as you want to get some inspiration from other articles but they are all closed for editing or plagiarized at this stage.
The best way to avoid running into this problem is to test your content idea first. If you feel motivated to write about the same topic then that is good! You may just need to rephrase what you planned to say to make it more interesting.
Alternatively, you could try writing about something different than what you originally intended. For example, instead of trying to write about how to do ________, you could try and talk about why doing ________ is important.
In fact, one of our favorite ways to define lean content is “information with value”. Information that is not connected to something more important in your business or life is probably not very productive.
Content that has no practical application is usually ineffective. It will not help you achieve your goals, it will simply distract you from what you should be doing.
That is why we have so many blogs out there, they are just distracting you – me know how to do this thing called writing! 😉
We also have lots of social media accounts, these take up time you could use for other things.
But none of them bring us long-term benefit unless they contribute to our success in some way.
Your audience can tell when you are trying to force content onto them instead of offering it as an option. So make sure your health and wellness website offers helpful information, but don't feel like you have to produce large amounts of content to get people's attention.
It doesnt really work like that.
Running a successful lifestyle site takes work, but it is totally worth it. You will enjoy it, and your followers will appreciate you and your efforts.
A well-crafted article with content you are passionate about will attract comments and shares. The better your writing, the more people will want to comment and discuss it.
If you write solid articles that appeal to others, you’ll earn goodwill through likes, comments, and shares. Your success will depend on your ability to maintain an average level of quality without too much fluctuation.
You can gain some valuable insights into how to improve your lean content by looking at the blogs and sites in the marketplace that succeed in attracting readers and comments.
Their secret is not something unique or fancy, but instead their use of engaging content they feel strongly about along with frequent interactions with other bloggers and online users.
Another way to create lean content is linking your content with other media or tools. You can use this as an article teaser, link-out material or even direct competition for some of these resources.
By producing high quality content that teaches people something new, you’ll eventually get linked to or mentioned in another site’s article. From there, your original work will spread viral via social proof.
Over the past few years, content marketing has become one of the most important strategies for business growth in any field. More businesses are investing in this area to increase their online presence, grow their audience, and earn revenue from it.
Most people agree that having lots of quality content is integral to successful content marketing. But there’s an annoying trend occurring among some content marketers: They seem to be producing too much low-quality content.
I call these out-of-the-box ideas, thoughts, statements, and descriptions “lean content.”
Lean content isn’t just something you would say about a product before buying it — it’s also what entrepreneurs and bloggers produce when they’re trying to launch a new site or program.
It’s got rid of the unnecessary fluff that sometimes gets in the way of your messages being heard. And it’s worth calling out because it can actually hurt your brand.
What is lean content?
The term was coined by entrepreneur Sean Stephenson in his book The Power Of Productive Procrastination. He uses it to describe anything that aims to eliminate nonessential material from a piece of writing.
Procrastinators will probably know what he means when he talks about how easy it is to add, remove, or change things like bullets, illustrations, and quoted phrases to make his points stronger.
