[Issue 37] Creating Content IP
How to create high-impact content that delivers results again & again.
[Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash]
Get Off the Content Hamster Wheel
(Note: I’m experimenting with a different newsletter format for The Odysseus Files. Let me know what you think!)
The Idea: Approach your content like an investor, not a creator.
Don’t create because you have to feed the content machine. Create with the strategic purpose of building assets that will continue to deliver value to you over and over.
Want to explore this deeper? This essay explores the philosophy of approaching your business like an owner-investor rather than an operator:
The Problem: The single biggest challenge creators face is standing out in a noisy market.
They try to do so by competing for attention (instead of sidestepping the competition by optimizing for differentiation).
But this leaves them scrambling to produce more and more in an effort to keep up, when really they just need to better use what they already have.
The Application: When you approach your content like an asset instead of a one-and-done creation, you are creating IP.1
Conceptualizing content as “intellectual property” reframes its role in your marketing ecosystem. It’s like a book versus a collection of blog posts, or a name for a systematized process versus a blend of random, undocumented operating procedures.
Intellectual property for your brand provides a centralized theme from which the rest of your messaging and content flows.
Here’s a model for applying the idea:
The rest of this section is pure how-to. Interested? Click below to keep reading.
Credit to Jay Acunzo and Jay Clouse for introducing me to thinking this way about IP. The topic came up multiple times at Content Entrepreneur Expo last May. I believe the mindset shift represented by this concept will be a critical part of our journey post-Web 2.0 (where effective organic social & search get washed out by AI & the algorithms, and the loss of third-party cookies will force us to reevaluate where we get our data from).