Business

Creating Content - Hitting Homeruns Everytime

Written by Trick on June 16, 2008 1:01 pm EST

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What would it be like to be the man who couldn’t hit anything but a homerun? Every time you stepped up to the plate you knocked the ball out of the park and got to take a saunter around the bases. It’d be pretty rad right?

Baseball, for all of its faults, fascinates me for its sheer volume of metrics and statistics. If you wanted to know how many home runs Barry Bonds had hit on Saturdays when the temperature was above 75 degrees and the wind came out of the east, you could find out. Seriously.

Creating your own content is like hitting in baseball. You want to strive to knock every one out of the park, but sometimes you settle. You take the bunt, flop it into the outfield. Maybe you pop it up and just utterly fail in all senses of the word. It happens.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. People remember your best better than your worst, and your worst better than your mediocre. Consider my Magic the Gathering Podcast, ManaNation. We put together a video podcast every week on various topics and sometimes we knock it out of the park hitting all the right notes while other times we fall flat and hear about it all week.

When I first began putting together the show a friend came to me and said, “If I give you one piece of advice, you need to understand that people will harp on your failures and expect your successes.” He was 100% correct. If you fail, everyone let’s you know you did. And if you succeed, well, that’s to be expected; you are doing whatever it is you’re doing so you should get it right.

I laugh whenever I watch the NBA with my dad, he gets so angry when a player who normally hits shots from the foul line misses a couple in a row. I try to calm him down by pointing out that it happens and the player will bounce back, but his inevitable response is “They’re paid to do this, they need to make those shots.”

Isn’t that rough? I mean, as writers / content producers we all miss the proverbial free throws. Maybe life is interfering. Maybe research didn’t come through in time. Maybe you’re swamped with freelance work. Or maybe, you know, you just lost interest.

ManaNation is an interesting gig. It doesn’t pay the bills, I do it for fun, but I take it very seriously and even though I try not to let the negative feedback stick with me, it’s tough because I want to be the one hitting homeruns everytime.

So five ways I try to come up with content for ManaNation:

Skribit.com - This widget lets your viewers/readers tell you what they want to hear about. From the mind of popular blogger Paul Stamatiou They can make their own suggestions and vote for their favorites from what others have suggested. It took me a while to find the best setup and sometimes I seed the list with ideas to see what people vote on, but it proves quite useful. Tip: People are much more likely to vote than submit their own ideas.
Find what people like and do it again. For ManaNation we’ve discovered a few types of shows which have proven quite popular. We do “Overviews” of different parts of the game. We do discussions with Pro players. We discuss different strategies. The format and concept are the same, we just change up the content. You can do the same thing for your topics, lists, howto’s, interesting links, commentary on what others have said, etc.
Follow the news and innovations. The game ManaNation covers has an active, though niche, following and online we have several outlets for news and changes. Recently the game makers announced a few core changes to the game and so we have been able to get multiple episodes and articles out of talking about these, all to the satisfaction of our fans.
Let your readers tell you what they like. I recently implemented a Ratings tool for ManaNation, allowing viewers to rate episodes and articles. From this I can see what they like and what they don’t like, what authors they enjoy and who they don’t. The biggest issue here is getting people to use the icons. You have to make the obvious without being directly in the way.
Track how viewers are finding your site. If you can follow their searches, or what sites are referring to you and why, then you’ve found content which interests readers AND helps capture new audience members.

In short: Keep your eye on the ball, and swing for the fences.

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