Content Strategy by Janine

Introduction

Welcome

Hi! I'm Janine Warner. Welcome to Creating an Effective Content Strategy for Your Website. Over the next couple of hours, I'll take you step by step through conducting a content inventory, developing a gap analysis, and ultimately designing a content matrix to track and manage all of your content development. We'll also delve into the complexity of managing content in many formats across many channels, and review the importance of wireframes, site maps, and metadata, as well as challenging your assumptions with A/B and multivariate testing.

Using the exercise files

Welcome to the Wisdom Pet Medicine website, the home of our fictitious but loving veterinarians. I created this website about pets because the subject lends itself to a wide variety of content types, including video, animation, timelines, and infographics. You won't find this site in your exercise folder, and you don't need it to follow along. But if you ever want to take a closer look, you can find the entire site online at wisdompets.com. You will find a few files in the exercise folder, a questionnaire that you can use to guide your interviews, and a few Excel spreadsheets to get you started on your content inventory, gap analysis, and ultimately, your content matrix.

Understanding content strategy

Search the web and you'll find a growing list of jobs for content strategists. If you're taking this course because you're trying to figure out what a content strategist is, let me start by giving you a quick orientation before we get into all the details. Content strategy is really just the latest term for something many of us have been doing for a long time: planning, managing, and developing all of the text, images, video, and other content that goes into creating a modern multimedia website. The best content strategists are part editor, part producer, part project manager, part information architect, part quality control, part content wrangler, and above all else, most of us love a good story.

That doesn't mean technology isn't important to us. It's just that some of us think it's about time that web designers put as much time into the front-end--the words, images, and multimedia on a website--as we put into the backend: the databases, HTML, and other code. I like to call myself a journalist turned geek.I spent the first part of my career as a reporter and editor, but I've beendeveloping websites and even writing the code for them for more than a decade now. And I truly believe that the best content strategists understand at least the basics of technology, as well as content.

Like me, many content strategists began their professions in print or broadcast. Formermanaging editors and producers make great content strategists, but you do have to understand what makes the digital world different. No matter what your background, one of the first challenges will simply be mastering all of the vocabulary. Terms like content matrix and multivariate testing can sound intimidating at first, but if you are a word person like I am, you'll catch up with all the buzzwords soon enough.

Getting Started with a Content Strategy

Setting clear goals and managing client expectations

The first step in any good content strategy is getting clear on your goals and objectives. If you are at the beach playing with a German shepherd, the goals are usually pretty clear: get some exercise, play a little fetch, and don't get too much sand in the car on your way home. Developing a website is a lot more complicated. But if you've ever watched a dog charge into the surf to fetch a stick, you understand how having a clear objective is a powerful motivator, and that brings me to the first question I ask any new client: What is your goal in creating or redesigning your website? Getting clear on your goals is a crucial first step, because every decision you make as you develop a content strategy should ultimately support your top goals and objectives.

If you're working with a very large organization, you may need to interview multiple department heads about their goals, and you may get different answers from, say, the head of sales than you will from the head of customer support or the head of research and development. On a big project, you may need to set separate goals for each part of the site specific to the key players responsible for that area and the specific audience they are trying to reach. On really big sites, you may need to treat each section as its own mini-site to manage potentially conflicting goals.

But it's still a good idea to get everyone thinking about the same goal for the entire site, so that everyone can get behind one clear objective and consider the big picture. Whether you're working with one client or many department heads, your ultimate goal should be the same. Let me give you an example of what I mean. If we are considering our Wisdom Pet Medicine site, let's imagine that our client, the veterinarian, has set three goals: attract new customers, promote services to new and existing customers, and educate customers about pets.

Pretty standard set of goals for somebody creating this kind of website. Now I always try to limit clients to three goals, only three goals. You can refine those goals as you go along, and you should refine those goals. But you really shouldn't ever let anybody give you more than three, or it won't serve the purpose of helping you answer other questions later. Even good jugglers usually can't do more than three things--okay, the best jugglers can do five. But with content strategy, three is really enough things to juggle.

Managing expectations and setting some limits on what you can and should do is an important first step in developing a good content strategy. After you've identified your goals, try to take this process a step further and get more specific. The more specific, measurable, and realistic your goals, the better they will serve you as you develop your content strategy. For example, if my goal is to educate customers about pets, it's a very broad goal, and one that could require a seemingly never-ending supply of content to fulfill.

As you get more specific, your goal might look something like this: educate urban pet owners about the value of preventative care. Now you have a goal you can actually use to answer questions. So when somebody says, "What should we include in the educational section of the website?" you go back to that goal and you realize that if your goal is to help customers understand the value of preventative care, then things like information about regular checkups and vaccinations clearly fit that goal.

As you develop the list of content you want on your website, come back to your goals anytime you have a question, and consider revisiting those goals and making them more specific as you go along. So if somebody comes up with a question like, "Should we have information about elephants in the zoo? “you can say, well, we are thinking about urban pet owners. Remember that goal: educate urban pet owners about the value of preventative care. And you can see how the more specific you can get with your goals, the easier it will be to ensure that the content you create supports your key objectives.

Using interviews or questionnaires to identify content needs

I've been impressed by how many of the job descriptions I've read for contentstrategists include the need for good interview skills, so in this video I want to introduce you to a few interview techniques and talk about how using questionnaires and conducting interviews can help you define your goals, understand your audience, and ultimately develop a better content strategy. The first step in doing any great interview is one that you probably learned in grade school: do your homework. Like most things in life, if you take the time to prepare in advance, you will get better results.

There are two reasons why homework matters when it comes to conducting an interview. The first may seem obvious. You don't want to waste your subject's time with questions that are so basic you could have found the answers yourself with a little effort. There is this thing called Google, after all. But the second reason may be even more important. It's about building a connection. Before you can get the best answers from just about anyone, you have to build some rapport, and that's a lot easier when the person you're talking what feels like you have something in common and some understanding of who they are and what's important to them.

Taking the time to research the person you're going to interview before you talk with them can go a long way toward building rapport. How you do this will depend on whether you have one client with relatively modest needs or you're working with a big company full of managers with potentially competing objectives. But no matter how complex your project, the following tips and tools will help you with this first step: researching your subject and conducting a good interview. First, I suggest you go beyond Google's front page. Check Google videos and see if they have done a speech for an interview that you can watch in advance.

Check Google Groups and Google Blogs. Search for professional associations and don't overlook the company's archives as a great place to learn more about your subject's history with the company. Also look at Google News and search for recent trade publications. If you are designing a website for animal planet for example, you would want to know that one of their stars was doing a high-profile auction, like the one you see in Veterinary Practice News. This is an example of a trade publication and almost every industry on the planet has its own collection of trade publications.

Even if your subject isn't famous enough to make the evening news, they may be profiled in their alumni or trade magazine. And finding small details like this about a person's background can give you something to refer to during the interview and demonstrate you have taken the time to learn something about them. That can lead to a more productive and illuminating interview, but don't push the personal side. If your subject is busy and focused on business, you should be too. No matter what, remember that the most important thing in any good interview is listening. Ask the question and then remember, your job is to listen.

Here are a few questions to get you started. I always start an interview, again, with that top goal. Now this may seem a little repetitive because we just spent an entire video talking about setting goals. But it's a question that's worth revisiting, and especially on a big project where you may be talking to multiple stakeholders, you're probably going to be collecting different goals, so make sure you ask this in every interview. This entire collection of questions will be included as a PDF in your exercise files, and no matter what level of access you have at lynda, you'll be able to access this entire list of questions.

But let me just point out a couple. I like to ask people about questions and complaints they get, because that often leads to a great place to look for new kinds of content that should be added to the site. But also make sure you ask where they are getting compliments. People are quick to complain and slow to compliment. So if some of your content is getting good results, you want to seek that out too. Don't forget to ask in your interviews if there's content that's not on the website that should be. A lot of times the best stuff was either created too late or it just didn't get submitted to the right people to get online.

So there may be some wonderful pieces of content that are already created in the company you are working with and just haven't made it to the website. Finally, I like to ask about specific actions that you want people to take on the site. I always like to throw in a couple of wildcard questions like, if you are successful beyond your wildest dreams, what would that look like. That's the kind of question I like to use toward the end of an interview. When you have built some rapport, you've gotten all the basic stuff out of the way. If you're feeling a good connection, this is a great chance to just throw out a question that catches people off guard: your wildest dreams, what would success look like.

That can give people a chance to get creative and sometimes the best ideas stem from questions like those. As you finish, I always like to end with a question like, "Is there anything I've missed that you want to add?" Leaving an open-ended question towards the end gives your subject a chance to add anything they may have forgotten or you may not have even thought of asking. And finally, make sure you find out who else who should interview. They may be your best source for the next interview. A few more general tips that come from my own background starting out as a journalist. Keep in mind that asking the same question a few different ways is a tried and true interview strategy.

You don't want to waste your subject's time, but often after someone has had a chance to consider a concept, a challenge, or an opportunity, they come back with a better answer the second time. And especially if you are interviewing somebody on camera or you are trying to record them, asking them the same question a few times can give them a chance to come up with a better, cleaner, more concise answer that will work better in broadcast. As you're doing a research, don't be afraid to ask the obvious questions. Most of us get so caught up with the buzzwords in our own industries that we forget that visitors to our website may not understand things that seem very basic to us.

As the content strategist, if there is something you don't understand, you can pretty much guarantee it needs to be better explained on the website. Taking the time to conduct good interviews early in the process can help you identify these kinds of challenges and suss out the resources that you can count on later from your key stakeholders. But remember, you can't always do all of these interviews at the beginning; in fact, it's often best to schedule them at key stages throughout the process. If you're working for a big company, you may want to start by interviewing a couple of people and then go back and conduct more detailed interviews with more people later.

Similarly, after you complete the content audit and the gap analysis that I’ll cover in later videos, you may want to circle back and do some of these interviews again once you have more information. If you're working with just one client, you are probably going to hold a series of meetings along the way and you will have many chances to revisit content strategy. But if you're working with a big company, you may need to create a content strategy team made up of representatives of each department, and meet with them regularly. Ultimately, good interview skills may be just as important as technical skills when it comes to developing the best content strategy.

But no matter what you do, here is a final tip to put all this in perspective: GI-GO. Yeah, garbage in, garbage out. If you don't collect good intel from the beginning, you'll never be able to produce great content in the end.

Identifying your target audience

Before I begin creating a content strategy or analyzing the existing content in a website, I try to get as clear as I can about who is in my target audience. If you're thinking that your website should appeal to everyone in the entire world, you haven't narrowed things down enough yet. Trying to reach everyone is not only impossible, it can make it a lot harder to reach the people who matter most. If you work for a big company or an organization, you probably want to start this process by talking with people in the marketing department, the sales team, customer support; these folks have thought a lot about the audience.

But if you are working with a smaller company, you may need to do some of this research yourself and help identify the best audience to target with the content you are going to create. Either way, the tips and suggestions in this video are designed to help you appreciate why getting as specific as you can about your audience can help ensure that your content is effective and well received by the right people. Here are a few of the characteristics to consider as you define your target audience. The first one is demographics. That's a big word that represents many things to many people, but it's generally used to mean things like gender, race, age, mobility--whether somebody is in a wheelchair or they are a marathon runner--economic status, employment status, location--meaning where they live, if it's an urban or rural setting--those kinds of things.

As you identify your target audience, you may also want to consider some more specific elements, like language requirements, what education level or reading level they are likely to have, whether they've ever used a computer before or they are very experienced with computers. If you are developing a website for people who are gamers, for example, you can probably assume a high level of experience-- other audiences, maybe not so much. Similarly, computer equipment and bandwidth can affect not only usability issues, but what kind of content you create, whether you can have multimedia and other formats.

So all of that comes into identifying how you decide what kinds of content, things like what reading level you're going to write for, what formats to use, again, whether you are going to use video or animations. Does your audience have the bandwidth to support that? And again what languages to use, what cultural references, thingslike that. So the more specific you get on that demographic information, the more you identify what kind of audience, the more informed you are as you start to make decisions like these. For example, if I'm designing the Wisdom Pet website for veterinarians--maybe like this woman who is studying for her veterinary license exam-- I would probably use far more sophisticated vocabulary than I would use for pet owners.

I will give you an example of that at the end. But before I do, I want to show you that much as we saw when it comes to setting goals, the more specific you can get about your audience, the better. So what else can we learn about our pet owners? Again, much of it comes down to asking the right questions. Are the customers of Wisdom Pet's big commercial ranchers with herds and pigs and cows, or are they city dwellers, more likely to have companion pets such as cats, dogs, fish, birds? Also consider what you might know about your own community, and do some research on what other people know about your community.

If for example Wisdom Pet was in Silicon Valley, California, you'd probably know you are in the heart of the dotcom world, and you could probably assume that most of your audience was computer savvy and had relatively high bandwidth. If you were on Miami Beach in South Florida, a little research might reveal that most people who live on South Beach live in high-rise condos, and most of those condos restrict their residents to pets that weigh no more than thirty pounds. That kind of detail can help you determine, for example, that you might want more content about small dogs than big ones. As you research your audience keep asking yourself, what makes my visitors different from everyone else in the world? Some designers go so far as to create what they call user personas.

User personas give specific examples of what key customer types might be like. Having a specific user persona with a name and a backstory can help you humanize demographics. So for example, for our Wisdom Pet site we might create Michaela, a 10-year-old girl who has her first puppy and can't wait to train it to do tricks. But even then, remember that we might be marketing to her parents more than to her. Other user personas might be someone like George, a small business owner who dotes on his white cockatoo that he keeps in his office.

Creating user personas can be fun, but I have to warn you: as helpful as it can be to personify your audience, creating user personas can become a distraction all by itself. If you are working on a pet site and you find yourself imagining what paint colors your customers might choose for their dining room, you're probably getting a little too specific with your user personas. As a content strategist, you should know that lots of marketing people, user interface designers, and others love creating user personas.

And many writers find it extremely helpful to have a specific person in mind as they write. Just don't get too bogged down at this stage in the process. Ultimately, I recommend you define at least the basic characteristics of your audience and you use those to guide the content development. For our pet site, let's assume we've done some research. We've interviewed a few people, we've studied the demographics of our neighborhood, and we've come up with the following. Our audience is made up of urban professionals. We don't have to get more specific than that, but we could.

Our target language is going to be English. We may want to change that in the future, but for now, that's what we've identified. We are going to assume most of them have at least some college, based on where they live, that they are relatively computer savvy, and that they are most likely visiting our website on a desktop computer, although increasingly we're seeing traffic on smartphones and tablets, and that will also influence some of our content development. As you will see in a later video, sometimes you need to target very specific content to something like a smartphone. Once we agree that our website is for urban pet owners and not veterinarians for example, then we can start to agree that we should use simpler vocabulary, not big fancy scientific terms.

So let's conclude this by putting it into action. On the Wisdom Pet site we have a section where we have this video about how to brush your pet's teeth, and the first time the writer took a stab at describing this, she used this: You know the importance of dental hygiene for humans, but did you know that dogs and cats need regular attention to their pearly whites? Now, that's not bad, and I rather like the use of pearly whites instead of saying teeth again, but dental hygiene for humans? If my radar is focused on pet owners, not veterinarians, then words like that are going to jump out at me. That's a little scientific.

It's a little impersonal. Wouldn't it be better to simply say, you know the importance of brushing your own teeth, but did you know? It's a subtle change, but clarifying your target audience can help you better design content that they can relate to, and ultimately, that's what may make the difference in their choosing your products and services.

Creating a content inventory

As I prepared for this course, I reviewed a number of job listings for content strategists. In many cases, the job descriptions had phrases like this one: "medical website with 3,500 pages of text seeks content strategist to help make sense of it all." That job description didn't actually say "make sense of it all," but believe me, that's a lot of what's involved with content strategy work: taking inventory of what you already have. The first thing to consider as you do a content analysis or take inventory is whether you are going to do a quantitative assessment, where you are going to focus on the quantity, the amount, and type of content you are dealing with, or if you're doing a qualitative analysis, where you are focusing on the quality, relevance, effectiveness, the value of the content.

Ideally, you should do both, but how you manage the details depends on many factors. A good content analysis can be as simple as looking through the pages of a website or as complicated as managing a team of people for taking inventory of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages. To help demonstrate what goes into a content audit or analysis, I designed this very simple, very text- heavy version of the Wisdom Pet's website. I'm sure you'd agree that it's badly in need of being updated, and over the next several videos we will work on modernizing and improving the impact of the site by adding, videos, infographics, and other rich media.

But the first step is to make sure we have an understanding of what we already have. Whether you are working on a really small site like this one or a giant website, here are a few things to consider as you start your content analysis. The first one is that you need to make a list of all the pages in your website. I find that Microsoft Excel works very well for this. Content inventories are by nature something that work well in a spreadsheet. You've got a row of IDs, so I have a unique ID for each piece of content, the page URL, the title, the headline. These kinds of things go into a good content analysis.

You can save yourself a lot of time by starting with a computer-generated list of all these pages. If you've only got a few pages, it's pretty easy to put together. You can even use something like Microsoft Word. But if you are working with many pages, there are a number of ways to generate a list of URLs and pages. Any good content management system-- WordPress, Drupal, any of the other CMSes-- should have some way of creating a sitemap or generating something like a site that you can use as your list of pages. Even if you are working with a website with static pages--something that was created in a program like Adobe Dreamweaver--you can still use an online site- mapping tool to generate a sitemap for you.

You'll find several of them if you just Google "generate sitemap" or "create sitemap." Here is a quick overview of what you should do as you go through any good content analysis. Start with a list of page titles and URLs, read or at least skim all--or at least a representative sampling=-- of all of the pages on the website. Obviously, if you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of pages, this may not be practical, but the more and the better you can understand what you're working with from the beginning the better you can manage the process of adding, editing, and updating the site.

Make sure you are paying attention to all of the content on the site, not just the text. And make sure you are taking inventory of what's not on the site but may have already been created. In those interviews you do with people and other research you are doing, be on the lookout for content that may never have made it to the website but still could be valuable to. And think about categorizing that content by file type, format, and other criteria. I'll give you some ideas for that in a moment. As you think about the different kinds of content on a website, pay attention to things that are easy to overlook, like the photos on this.

In this old version of our Wisdom Pet's site there are only two photos, and it would be easy to dismiss them as not very good images that should simply be replaced. But if I didn't ask about these images I'd be missing a chance to learn something. It turns out that this photo of the kittens on the front page, this one of them in a cage, it's there because the veterinarian's office rescues kittens, and it keeps them in this big cage in the waiting room where they try to get their clients to adopt them. That's a great story. It's a terrible photo.

The photo says "kittens in a cage"; it doesn't say "adopt me and take me home." But if I hadn't asked about the photo I'd never have learned the story. Here’s another example put into action: on the About Us page the only photo is this picture of bunnies and parrots. Again, not a great photo, but an opportunity to learn something. Interviewing the staff, I found out that one of the vets have bunnies, and that this is her picture, and that's part of what led to the idea on the About Us page in the new site of having pictures of each of the vets holding their own pets.

If you are working on a website where you don't know much about the content and you are still trying to understand what these people do, asking questions about things as trivial as photos can often reveal great stories. In the next video, we will explore how you create a gap analysis, which is just a fancy way of saying a list of all the gaps in your content, the things you need to add. But it's more than okay, even as you are doing this inventory, to start brainstorming that list of new ideas. So anytime you're looking at something in the old site and it makes you think of something new, at least jot it down; at least capture it and start working toward that gap analysis.

Here is a second version of a content inventory that has a few more fields, just to give you an idea of how far you can go with this. We're still looking at four pages, but notice as I scroll over to the right that I've added images, multimedia, metadata, and even the author of each of these documents. Keeping track of where content comes from and how you can find the original versions can really help you later. As you are doing this initial inventory, remember, you are not just looking at what's there; you are creating a map to how to get back to it when you want to revise it, update it, or put it on the new site later.

Here's a list of some of the most common things you might include in a content inventory. This is really just to get you started, and I have included this in your exercise files so you can refer to it. But remember that in addition to the quantitative elements--the number of articles, et cetera--you may also want to include categories for things like the qualitative value, whether this has been written for the web and it's scannable and has subheads or bullet points. Whether the contents terribly outdated and should either be removed or updated. Those kinds of things can also be fields.

And again, you can see how your spreadsheet could get very long and very complicated. If you're working on a really large website, especially if you're working with a team of people who are conducting this inventory together, you may need to spend a fair amount of time just developing the categories you are going to use to record this inventory. If you are going that far, I definitely recommend that you take a little bit of time to test those theories before you complete your entire inventory. Sample a few pages from each of the main sections of the site and then come back together with your team and make sure you haven't gotten too far ahead of yourselves before you know that you're doing the inventory consistently enough that it will all feed in to one good content matrix in the end.

As you go through this preliminary process, remember, most big projects go more smoothly when you break them into manageable parts. At this stage, your goal is to assess the current condition, location, and status of existing content. Don't get too far ahead of yourself. Tempting as it may be, it's generally best not to start fixing or creating new content until you've completed your inventory, then the gap analysis I will discuss in the next video, and prioritized your ideas into that great content matrix. The whole point of content strategy is that you want to be strategic.

You want to be strategic about how you edit and create content, and to do that, you need to make sure you take the time to do these preliminary steps first.

Creating a content gap analysis

A good content gap analysis is part wish list, part list of missing pieces, partanalysis of what's working and what's not. Ultimately, it's designed to identify the gaps, the places between what you already have on your website and what you need to have to achieve your goals. At this stage it's okay to ask for the world. This step is all about exploring the possibilities and brainstorming new ideas. As you create your gap analysis, it's a good idea to review the goals you set earlier, as well as who you've identified as your target audience.

Similar to the content inventory we created in the last video, it works well to use an Excel spreadsheet to create a gap analysis. Some people like to simply turn their content inventory into a gap analysis; others prefer to create two separate documents. Either way, here are some of the categories you might want to include in a gap analysis spreadsheet: a topic and title so you can identify everything as you go along, brief description, the goal and objective. You can look at what is the objective of this piece of content or how does this piece of content serve my objectives? You can start thinking about formats, although we'll revisit this later, and you may want to do more of this as you get into the content matrix. But if you start with a vision of, hey, this new piece of content would be perfect as an animation or an infographic, it's okay to put that in here, even at this early stage.

It's also okay to start thinking about timeliness: Is this new piece of content something that's evergreen or something that will have to be updated regularly? And you can look at the current state of content. You're not just looking at things that are missing completely; you may also be looking at things that are already on the site but need to be updated or weren't done very well from the start. So how do you know what's missing from your website? How do you know what should be added? There are lots of ways to create a wish list, but brainstorming is one of the tried-and-true ways to develop new ideas.

It's also a really good practice to study the websites of your competitors, and even to look at unrelated websites. Sometimes the best ideas come from places you wouldn't expect. Ask your customers or your clients what they want to find on your website. Sometimes being direct is the best way to find the holes. Sometimes it's better to do a survey or to do A/B, or multivariate, testing, which we'll cover in a later video. Sometimes your customers don't even know what to ask, but if you watch what they do, you'll start to understand what works best.

Also keep in mind you should be able to study the traffic analytics of the current site to see what's already working on the site, what areas seem to be getting attention, where you might want to focus your energy to develop new content. As you develop a content analysis and you are brainstorming with the team and conducting interviews, make sure that you clear the stage of the process that this is just about coming up with new ideas. Why is that important? Well, most people are hesitant to suggest new content ideas if they are afraid they'll be the ones that have to write or develop the new content themselves.

If you can reassure people at this stage that the goal is just to create a wish list and that later on you'll work out what the priorities are and who will write, edit, shoot, or otherwise produce the content, you're likely to get much better answers when you ask what content is missing. For more suggestions on what questions to ask, review my earlier video on interview techniques, or check out the PDF of suggested interview questions in your exercise files. Remember, it's never too early to start thinking about new ideas and working on your gap analysis, and you can develop some of these documents simultaneously.

You don't have to create the inventory before you create the gap analysis; you can do them together. Also keep in mind that you can spend a little time or a lot of time creating a gap analysis, but you can also come back and add to it later as you think of additional types of content you want to add to your site. Ultimately, creating great content for your website should be an ongoing process. At this stage, your goal is to create the most comprehensive list of content you can and not worry too much about how you're going to create it.That's your really big goal at this stage: to help your client or key managers to see what's possible, to see all of the ways that creating great new content can help take the website to the next level.

Expect them to push back. Expect to be forced to prioritize your wish list based on the constraints of time, budget, and resources. But don't start prioritizing before you've collected your best ideas. That part comes soon enough. In the next video, we'll explore how the content inventory and the gap analysis form the basis of a content matrix: the most important document in your content strategy, the one that will guide you and your team through creating and integrating all of the new content on your website.

Managing Content Production

Developing a content matrix

Much of the work we've done in the previous videos will come together in thisone, as we combine our content inventory with our gap analysis to create one big content matrix. Think of it like putting together all of the ingredients you need for a pizza. First you make the crust, then you put on a little sauce, then you top it off with your favorite toppings. So what's exactly is the content matrix? Well, not unlike pizza, that depends on which toppings you prefer to use and how big a pizza you are planning to make. Think of the content matrix, which some might simply call a content project plan, as the central document you'll use to track and manage all of the content in your website.

You can create a new file to serve as your content matrix or you can do what many of us do, which is to save a copy of your inventory and turn it into your gap analysis and ultimately create a copy of that that becomes your content matrix. Each time you're just adding more fields to your spreadsheet. Stir, bake, add a little seasoning to suit your taste, you get the idea. Here are some of the types of additional fields you might want to add as you create your content matrix. Perhaps the most important one is the prioritization field.

I like to use a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being assigned to content that must be completed and 5 being reserved for things that might be nice to have some day. I'll give you a quick sneak preview of the content inventory that I have created for Wisdom Medicine, just to show you how using a priority scale of 1 to 5 allows me to sort this document based on the priorities, so all of my 1s come to the top then the 2s and so on. It just makes it easier to keep track of what I have to create before I launch versus things that would be nice to have later.

If you're working on a really big project, you may want to manage the prioritization steps separately and only include content that you'd categorize as a number one priority in the content matrix itself. Other things you might include in this management document, things like where the content will be published on the website, whether it's going to the blog or to a social media channel or it's a main section front, definitely include due dates. In my experience, almost nothing ever gets completed without a deadline, so this section is particularly important when you are managing content development.

You may also want to add fields for author, editor, legal, and other reviews. That makes it easier to keep track of who needs to sign off on content as it goes through your process. Obviously, language requirements. You may have multiple languages you need to check off, metadata which I'll cover in a later video, and finally, testing: any information you need about the final testing and review process before the content can go to actually be published. To help you see this in action I've created this relatively simple content matrix, and I included it in your exercise files if you want to use this version to get started.

Notice that even in this very simple one, I have to scroll back and forth to see all of the fields. But notice also that I'm using the plus and minus, the collapsible panel feature in Excel, so that I can do things like see the name close to what type of content might be getting created. Even simple Excel features like this can really help you manage these seemingly unmanageable giant documents that often end up being called content matrices. If you're new to Excel, you'll find some great training on lynda.com, and the more comfortable you are with Excel the more you'll be able to use macros and other features to manage this part of the process.

You may also have to create things like abbreviations. Notice down here where I have there is a social promo. This stands for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You may need to create little abbreviations for things that would take up too much room to be practical in a spreadsheet. Ultimately, what fields you include in your content matrix really should depend on your team, how your organization has broken up, and you may need to break this big content matrix into multiple versions. Many content strategists use the matrix as the master document and then share different pieces of it with different people.

So for example, you might have one version for the production team and another that goes to the information architect. Similarly, you might have one version for testers and reviewers so they can check things off as they are finished. If you are managing content that will be published on blogs or through social media, you may also need a version of the matrix for your PR and marketing departments. Often you'll have attachments to your content matrix, so you might include something like this wireframe to demonstrate where the content goes in the pages of the site. We'll explore wireframes and how content strategists often work closely with information architects in a later video.

But I mention it here to help you appreciate just how complicated it can get when you're creating a good content matrix that can even include attachments. As you create different versions of the content matrix, remember, less is more. These documents often work best when you only give people the information they need for their part of the project. You never, for example, want to give your client or an executive the entire detailed content matrix; their heads might explode. Remember, the goal of these documents is to provide the right information to the right people in a way that helps them do their jobs better.

The most complicated version of your content matrix, that one's all yours.

Creating a style guide

A style guide is a valuable key to guiding your decisions about the style of thecontent in your website. You may already be familiar with some of the most popular style guides, such as the AP style guide, The Chicago Manual of Style, or The New York Times Manual of Style. It's not a bad idea to start by choosing one of these well-developed references to serve as your official style guide, but it's also good practice to create your own supplemental style guide to address things like vocabulary that may be specific to your business or specialty.

For example, do you prefer website as one word or two. Should you include a hyphen in email or a capital letter? Most editors agree that the most important thing is that you be consistent. If you decide to use website as one word, make sure it's written that way in every article on your website. A good style guide serves as an important reference for everyone who is working on a website, which is why it's also helpful to include information about tone and voice and the style you want to use for the content across your site. Southwest Airlines, for example, is known for being unusually playful as an airline.

The flight attendants literally say things like, "If we notice you smoking on the plane we will assume you're on fire and respond accordingly." I really heard that once. Most other airlines are a bit more serious in their tone of voice. But even if you choose a humorous voice, you may still need to change the tone to reflect the message you're conveying. In our website about pets we have lots of room for humor, and we can certainly use a more informal voice. But even if we take that approach, we may want to use a more serious tone and be more respectful anytime we're writing something about sick pets or how to care for injured pets.

You should also consider whether you want to write using the first person, using I or the royal we, or if you'll write in the third person: he, she, or it. On the Internet being less formal can help you see more authentic, but again the most important thing is to be consistent and make sure your style matches your company or organization. When you're creating a style guide for a website you may also include visual style guides, such as how to display the logo, what colors can be used and what fonts. When you're working with digital content you may also want to create a naming convention: a fancy way of saying that being consistent with how you name the files and folders can make it easier to find your content later and keep track of it all.

For example, many companies include the date, the author's initials, and other details in every name of every piece of content they create. Many web style guides also include things such as which formats to use, whether images should be stored as TIFFs or PSD files, whether they should be converted to JPEG, GIF, or PNG before they're published. And you may even need to include things as specific as what size files can be, and word count restrictions, so that the content will fit in specific areas of the design of your site. Don't forget to address legal and policy issues, especially if you work in a highly regulated industry, like medicine.

As you are probably starting to realize style guides can get long and complicated and they vary dramatically from one organization to another. I include these tips to get you started, but remember, you can always update your style guide as you go along, which is a great reason to keep it online. Don’t print it out in a book if you don't have to; storing your style guide on an intranet or in a secret part of your website makes it easy to update and share.

Establishing an editorial calendar and process

The best websites are not static; they continue to grow and develop overtime. But you don't want them to grow haphazardly. That's where an editorial calendar and setting up a few editorial processes can really make a difference. Most businesses face different challenges and opportunities throughout the year. For example, pets may need flea and tick treatments in the summer, when bugs are at their worst, or schools may change the way they update their websites when students are on vacation. Developing a calendar makes it easier to manage content creation throughout the year and can serve as a helpful guide to promoting your best content when it's most relevant.

Here are a few tips for creating an editorial calendar. Start with the four seasons. Take a macro view and think about how content may change each quarter. Factor in the big holidays. Look for any content connections you can make that are relevant to Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Purim, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and any other holidays that are important to you, your company, or your audience. There are a lot of holidays in the world, and if you're not sure about, say, when are all of the Jewish holidays or when should you celebrate Chinese New Year, a quick search of the web will help you find all of the cultural calendars you could ever need.

How did we ever manage before Google? To find updates that may be specific to the business or organization that you're working with, do a fresh review of all of the content created over the last year or two, and look for seasonal events or trends. For example, if you're working with a department store, they may have a home sale at the same time every year. Reviewing the last year's worth of annual reports, sales materials, catalogs, or advertising can also be useful. And researching the editorial calendars of local newspapers, magazines, or other websites can reveal events you might not have thought of.

Here's a tip on that front: you'll often find the editorial calendars of newspapers and magazines if you look in the How To Advertise section on their websites. Once you've developed your editorial calendar, you can plan your content around special events. It also may be helpful to plan certain kinds of content in advance. So for example, if you sit down and brainstorm fifty-two tips that you can send out once a week in your email newsletter, you can save yourself scrambling every week to come up with a new idea. Similarly, coming up with the twelve great blog post ideas in advance means you can plan them over time and take more time to develop, research, and write the best content you can, at least once a month on your blog.

Also consider using tools that enable you to schedule social media updates in advance. There are more and more tools on the market every day that allow you to plan and manage social media. So you don't have to post to Twitter, Facebook, and other sites every day yourself. Some of those things you can schedule in advance and coordinate with your overall calendar. You'll find lots of great social media training in other courses here at lynda.com. Although creating an editorial calendar can help, it's only a part of the big picture when it comes to developing a good editorial process.

If you're working with a small company or a startup people tend to wear a lot of hats, and the content production process may be a rather ad hoc affair. In contrast, large companies often suffer from having too many processes, which can lead to duplication of effort and even contradictory policies. If you're working with a new company or one that's still developing basic procedures, you may get to help develop a process for creating, reviewing, and managing content. At a bigger company, your best role as a content strategist may be to simply assess how content is currently being produced and prepare recommendations for how production and editorial systems may be improved as you implement your content strategy.

Working with information architects and wireframes

Information architects organize information and develop the structure of websites. Similar to content strategists, the role of an information architect is still a relatively new concept, and job descriptions can vary dramatically. But as the name implies, the job is similar to that of architects who design buildings. Information architects and content strategists often work very closely together, and I have seen a number of job descriptions for content strategists that include tasks like creating wireframes and sitemaps, which are more often assigned to information architects. So what do information architects actually do? Well, one of the most common job responsibilities is to create diagrams of how pages in a website link together, kind of like this one.

Often called flowcharts or sitemaps, these are visual representations of the sections and pages of a website. Think of them as the blueprints, designed to help everyone working on a website to visualize how the various pages and sections will be organized, and how visitors will move from one place to another around the site. Notice how the arrows, even in a simple diagram, show how pages can be linked in multiple ways. Also notice that using different shapes-- squares and circles--can be a useful way to distinguish between different kinds of content.

It also makes your flowchart look cool. A good flowchart or sitemap is like a floor plan for a big building. Just as you wouldn't want to design long hallways that lead people to dead ends, information architects don't want to create a content path that leads users to a page with nowhere else to go. As a content strategist you may find that a flowchart or a sitemap is a handy reference for studying how your content works throughout the site, and it's a fresh way to recognize if you have too much information in one section or not enough in another, or if there should be more links among related types of content.

Some information architects prefer to create text outlines, often called site structure listings, which are usually just lists of text with indenting to indicate sections and subsections. Like many things in this course, whether you need a flowchart or sitemap or just a structure listing depends on how big and complex your project is. Sometimes I start planning the structure of a website with a few sticky notes I can move around a table. In addition to sitemaps, most information architects create wireframes. Wireframes, which are sometimes called schematics, are guides to where content should be placed within a web page.

You don't usually create a wireframe for every page in a website, but it'sgood practice to create one for each of the main sections, and for each of the templates you'll need in a site. Wireframes are often used to make sure the client is happy with the overall structure of a site before you start building it.They're also used to inform designers and to help the production staff to put all of the pieces together when they build a site. I created this wireframe using Adobe Proto, which makes it possible to create interactive prototypes with links as well as basic wireframe pages.

Notice that this page includes a list of all of the pages in the wireframe along the right-hand side, and Proto enables you to set links from one page to another. I like Adobe Proto for multiple reasons. It's intuitive and I can use it while I'm reclining on the couch. Although Proto is not as robust as some of the other wireframe programs in the market, it's more than powerful enough to mock up basic pages and even create interactive prototypes. But what I love most about Proto is that it gets me away from my computer.

I find that especially helpful when it comes to prototyping, because the hardest thing about creating wireframes is not the technical stuff; it's the thinking part and I definitely think better when I'm curled up on the couch. Although you can draw wireframes and sitemaps yourself with the pencil and paper, there are a number of software programs that make it easier. On the low end, some people use the SmartArt functions in Microsoft Word to create simple flowcharts. You can also use Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Fireworks. If you want to get more elaborate and you have a bigger budget, consider Microsoft Visio and for Mac users, by far the most popular program is OmniGraffle.

For more on that popular tool, consider Jason Osder's course on Creating Web Sitemaps and Wireframes with OmniGraffle, here at lynda.com. You will also find a growing number of online tools and services that can help with creating flowcharts, wireframes and prototypes, including Gliffy, Axure, and Balsamiq.

Creating metadata

Metadata is data about data. Yeah, that's pretty meta. Metadata can be used to describe data in many different ways, but at its heart, metadata is all about helping keep data organized. You may already be familiar with metadata because it's a key part of search engine optimization, but metadata is important anytime you're dealing with so much content that you need help keeping track of it all, even if you're working on an intranet and don't care about SEO. Because this is not a class in SEO, I won't go into too much detail about all of the different types of metadata that matter to search engines, but you can learn lots more about SEO in other courses here at lynda.com.

Metadata includes things like the page title, which you see here at the top of the Wisdom Pet Medicine homepage. I've circled it in red to call your attention. Although the text in the title tag doesn't appear in the body of the page, it's arguably the most important piece of metadata. Title text is also what gets saved when someone bookmarks your site, and it's highly valued by search engines, which is why many people recommend you include your most important keywords in your title tag. In WordPress, the page title is automatically used as the title of the document unless you override it.

So as you see here, here's my page title, and that's copied up here in the title text at the very top of the page. But if I come back to the WordPress Dashboard, I'll show you how I can overwrite that and use different text in the Title field. In almost any good content management system, like WordPress, you should have some way of adding a title as well, as meta description, keywords, and other data to your pages. No matter how your CMS or web design program works, the thing to remember is this: the headline of an article is not always the best title for that page.

And that's why good content strategy documents often include fields for both the headline and a title. I'll use this blog post to illustrate how all of this works in WordPress, but you can find instructions on how to add metadata using almost any web design program in the courses here at lynda.com. Again, at the top of this page I have a headline: Cuttlebones: a healthy bird treat and a fascinating toy all in one. Not a bad headline. But this is an article about how Cuttlebones are useful for bird beaks and the word beak doesn't even appear in that headline.

So for search engine results, I'd be much better off with the words I have herein my Keyword field. For the purposes of this demonstration I'm just going to copy this and paste it into the Title field. Lots of people use titles that are basically a list of keywords, and that's perfectly legitimate. Just try to keep it under 60 characters. That's where most search engines will cut it off. I'll point out that the Keyword field itself is generally ignored these days by search engines. Too many web designers tried to stuff too many unrelated keywords into the Keyword tag and most search engines started ignoring it as a result.

But keywords may still be very important for improving results in your internal search engine, especially on a really big website, so it's still good practice to include a list of keywords, even though Google won't pay attention to it. The Meta Description tag here in the middle is also very important because this is the text that appears in search engine results. Let me show you an example of that. Here you'll see I've done a Google search on the word recipes. The best descriptions are really mini-sales pitches, and a good description can make a big difference in someone's decision to click or not click on the link to your site.

Again, there is a character limit. Most search engines will cut you off after 160 characters, but including a good well-crafted sales pitch as a meta- description is a key part of any good content strategy. One other important piece of metadata that's easy to miss is alt text. Alt text is an HTML image attribute for alternative text, which lets you include a written description of every image in your pages. It's like a little secret message hidden in the code behind the page that describes your picture for search engines and other programs that read pages but can't see them.

Adobe Dreamweaver, which you see in this image, prompts you to add alt text whenever you insert an image, unless you turn that feature off. And most good content management systems, like WordPress, include a field for alternative text in the image options. As you can see in the highlighted text here, alt text is just text included as an attribute of the HTML image tag. In this example, I've included the description, "Labrador attacks toilet paper." One last meta tag that's especially important to content strategists is the Author meta tag, which is used for the name of the person who authored the content of any web page.

It looks like this. This is my name and how I would add this to any page on the web that I author. In addition to helping you keep track of who wrote or created each page on your site, the author tag has become increasingly popular because it can help you identify your own content if it gets stolen by pirates, who usually use automated content scrapers to copy content from the web and pick up the author tag along with it. If you use the author tag and you create a Google profile with your photo, Google will even show your picture in the search results on pages you've authored.

Whether you're adding metadata to improve search engine optimization, to help you keep better track of the content in your website, or to make the search features internal to your site work more effectively, creating metacontent is a key part of any serious content strategy. My best advice is that you start developing metadata as early in the process as possible, and that you include fields for metadata in all of your planning documents, including your content inventory, gap analysis, and the content matrix we covered earlier in this course.

Choosing the Best Medium for Each Message

Appreciating the value of text and images

The life of a content strategist was so much simpler when all you could publish on a website was text and a few small images-- simpler but oh so vanilla boring. And as far as I know, no one got paid to be a content strategist back in the good old days. Today, there's so much hype around video, animation, and other rich media, it's easy to forget that good old text and images are still the best choice for most of the content on most of the world's websites. So before we get into best practices with rich media formats in the next few videos, let's give text a little respect.

It's easy to get caught up in the power of video, but never forget that most of us can read faster than we can talk. I know some of us talk really, really fast, but believe it or not most people can still read even faster. That doesn't mean you should use text for everything, or that you should use text at the expense of images. We would not have improved the old text-heavy version of our Wisdom Pet website by simply converting everything into video. And even on the pages like the educational section where we do include video, animation, and other rich media, we've still included text descriptions.

These text descriptions are designed in part to sell our visitors on the value of our rich media. That's because we're asking a lot of people on the web when we ask them to watch a video or sit through an animation. Most consumers want to know if that rich media is worth their time before they click on it.Adding text to pages like this one, where you have a video, can also improve your search engine results. Search engines can't parse the words in a video and thus they will never match this page in a search engine if we don't also include text with important keywords and phrases.

Here is another example of content that should always be presented as text: your address and phone number. I am amazed at how many people still save their address and phone number in graphics on the pages of their website. This may look like a graphic, but this is all text. The problem with having phone numbers in an image is that more and more of us are surfing the web on mobile devices and you can't click to call if the phone number is in a graphic. Similarly, you can't copy and paste text that's in a graphic, which means you can't copy an address into your address book or into an online mapping program to get directions.

Remember, the biggest goal of our pet website was to get people to call and make appointments, so we wanted to make sure the phone number was as easy to find as possible. That's why we put it in multiple places on the site. But even here on the front page where it looks like this text may be part of this image I made the photo a background image, so that I could place the text over it and it can still be copied and pasted or clicked to call. You can learn how to use background images like this, as well as many other great CSS techniques, in the web design courses here at lynda.com.

As for images, I'm sure you've heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. As for the value of text, it can get pretty boring all by itself and even intimidating when displayed in large chunks. So on a page like this Services page, photos and other images can help break up the text and draw our attention to important information. As you consider the best ways to present content on your website, remember, text and images are still a great choice, especially when you're providing contact information such as phone numbers or addresses, when you want people to be able to copy and paste information--when you're restricted by limited bandwidth, text and images still download a lot faster than all that rich media-- when you want people to be able to scan information quickly, when you want to make information easy for search engines to find, and when you're providing instructions or a recipe that's easier to follow in text.

And never forget, images are text's best friend. Just because video and animation have become popular on the web, doesn't mean they are always the best way to share information. If a client, colleague, or boss starts asking you for video and animation just because it's cool, but you as the content strategist believe that text and images are still the better choice, don't be afraid to make your case. Text and photos still serve a very important role on the web.

Using video to make content more compelling

If you want to sell an idea or teach a complex concept, video offers a powerfulway to show, not tell. Consider how you'd explain to someone the process of brushing a dog's teeth, or even your own teeth for that matter, if you are restricted to text. Now assume that the reader has no idea what it means to brush someone's teeth and they've never seen it done. You might try something like this. Step one: take the cap off the toothpaste. Step two: squeeze a half inch of paste onto the bristles of the brush. Three: hold the brush firmly in your hand.

Four: use the other hand to force the dog's mouth open. Five: put the brush in the dog's mouth. Six: move the brush in a circular motion over the dog's teeth, while politely asking the dog not to bite you. Okay, I think you get the idea. Now, let's imagine that you actually can use video and watch this segment to see how much more impactful it is to show rather than tell. (Female speaker: Brushing your pet's teeth with a veterinarian-approved toothpaste made just for pets) (a few times a week can prevent periodontal disease.) (And with regular brushing, your dog will actually start to enjoy the process and crave the toothpaste) (as a tasty treat. Best of all, they'll have fresh breath and a healthier smile. Because we all know that happy dogs smile.) As you consider how to present all of the content on your website, remember that video is best used when you want to convey information quickly, you want to share instructional information--video is ideal for how-to information--or the information that you want to share is highly visual, especially if it's hard to describe in words.

For example, it's much easier and more impactful to show a video of a tornado than to try and describe how a tornado moves. Keep in mind, sometimes the best use of video is to combine it with text. For example, if you're teaching me how to cook brownies, it may be helpful for me to watch you prepare the batter and see you take the brownies out of the oven. But when I go to make my own brownies I probably appreciate it if you also included written instructions, so that I can follow along and I don't have to watch the video again just to figure out how much flour or sugar to add.

Remember, you probably don't want to replace all of the text on your website with video, but adding a little video here and there can make the information on your site easier to understand, more visually impactful, and ultimately far more powerful.

Explaining complex concepts with infographics and animations

When you can show the real thing, photos and videos are great, butsometimesinfographics and animations are the only way to truly illustrate complex concepts. Infographics like this one, which illustrates the lifecycle of a heartworm, are a great way to share information in a concise and engaging way. Done well, they can also serve as excellent link bait, meaning they can attract new visitors to your site and even get other websites to link to you.Infographics have also proven very popular on social media.

If you invest the time and resources in creating this kind of rich media, make sure you promote it across all of the channels you use to reach your audience. More on that in a later video. Infographics work especially well when you want to show how things are interrelated; demonstrate cause and effect; illustrate complex systems; make data visually understandable, from simple pie charts to complex graphics--and this whole trend toward big data makes infographics even more important; or when you want to illustrate complex relationships using multiple datasets.

Here is an example of that, and this isn't just any infographic. This is believed to be the first infographic ever published in a newspaper. It appeared in a French paper in 1869. This infographic shows the number of men in Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign army, their movements, as well as the temperature they encountered on their return. Even today, it demonstrates how infographics work especially well when you want to show distance, time, fatality rates, and temperature and how all of those combined to take a toll on Napoleon's army.

An infographic may also be the best choice when you want to offer a visual look inside something. For example, if I just had a photograph of this truck, I could only show the outside, but with an infographic I can show how the engine fits in the front of the cab, and provide a better visual of both the inside and outside of the truck at once. If I wanted to show how the engine works then I might want to graduate to an animation. Animations are ideal when you want to show how something moves or changes or multiple things interact in motion.

Animation also works especially well when you want to demonstrate scientific concepts or health, such as how Serotonin moves between neurons or anything else like this that's virtually impossible to capture with video. Animation is ideal when you want to show dynamic data, when you want to show moving parts, demonstrate chemical or physical reactions, show how to assemble something--because you can actually show how parts fit together--or when you want to attract attention.

Just including a little motion on a web page captures your users' attention. When visitors see something moving they react on an instinctual level. If you overdo it, animation can be terribly distracting, but used well, it's one of the most powerful ways to attract attention and to teach or demonstrate complex concepts. Bonus tip: animated GIFs, which seems so 1990s, have made a surprising comeback on the web, because they bring motion to web pages and they work across all devices.

More on designing for mobile in a later video. And here's a final tip: no matter how you create an animation, whether it's an animated GIF or an interactive slider like the one on the front of this site, don't let your animations repeat or loop forever. I find three times is the magic number. On a slider like this, I also like to include controls, so if somebody wants to actively move through these or stop on a particular slide, they have the choice. Limiting the number of times an animation repeats and providing options for your users lets you get your users attention without distracting them too much or worse, driving them crazy.

Using timelines to give context over time

Timelines are a powerful visual way to provide context, relevance, history, andto show how things change or evolve over time. In this timeline on the wisdompets website users can quickly find out what vaccinations they need based on the age of their pets. That means they don't have to wade through a long written explanation of when and how to get a vaccination. They can just jump right to the section that's most relevant to them. This simple timeline was created using a slideshow tool, but there are many ways to create timelines.

In addition to the Slideshow tool that we used to create the timeline on thewisdompets site, you'll find a number of dedicated timeline plug-ins for WordPress and other content management systems. You can also design timelines as graphics using Photoshop or Illustrator. Even the WordArt in Microsoft Word is a handy way to create a simple timeline. And you'll find a growing list of dedicated timeline-creation tools. If you just search Google for "timeline tools," you'll find the latest. Interactive timelines are a useful way to help visitors to your site learn how your company or organization has developed and grown over time.

Showing history can help build consumer confidence, because most people assume if you've been around for a while you must be doing something right. Similarly, timelines can be useful when you need to see how things happen across different time zones. Using a timeline can also help you put current events and perspective, because you can include links to previous stories and show how things that are happening now build on events from the past. Further evidence of the power and value of timelines is the Facebook timeline, which lets you see the posts and milestones in any user profile over time.

Facebook recognized the power of providing context in recent updates by lettingusers build a history. Timelines work best when you want to show how things change over time, illustrate how one event leads to another, provide a quick reference that users can control, and ultimately, adding timelines to a website can help you take advantage of one of the things that makes the Internet different from any other form of communication: the ability to provide context, to show the past as well as the present, and even hint to the future.

Making the most of PDFs

The Portable Document Format is popular in part because it's relatively easy to convert large text files into PDFs quickly. Using Adobe Acrobat, you can turn a text file into a static PDF as easily as you can send it to print. In fact, with Acrobat integrated into Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and many other programs, you can literally use the print option to generate a PDF.Unfortunately, anything that's that easy is often over used. As you conduct a content analysis of any existing website, pay special attention to the PDFs.

Formatting content in HTML is often a better option, because text formatted inHTML is generally more searchable. By that I mean search engines generally can't search the contents of a PDF the way they can search text formatted in HTML across an entire website. HTML also generally loads faster in a web browser and text is often easier to edit and update later, because you don't have to go back to the original Word or PowerPoint document, edit that, regenerate the PDF and upload it to the website, all of that just to make a simple text change.

But if the content were in HTML, it would have been a very easy thing to fix. That said, there certainly are times when PDFs are the best choice. PDFs are especially useful when you need to preserve complicated formatting in a document designed for print, such as a legal contract, a sales brochure, or the pages of a catalog. In our fictitious wisdompets site, we've resorted to PDFs to provide the detailed medical information that comes with the drugs our vet prescribes. Please keep in mind this is a completely fictitious website.

I'm sorry if it disappoints you, but no pharmaceutical company that I know of has actually invented a bark suppressant called Barkhof or a drug like XCALM,which includes side effects like making your pet levitate. We created these fake drugs and their instructions to amuse ourselves, and we hope you, and to illustrate one of the better uses of PDFs. When you're dealing with something like prescription drug information, for pets or humans, you're dealing with information that's highly regulated, which means that the information often has to be presented in a very specific way, and even the order and the relative size of the text may be regulated.

In a document like these, a single typo or an accidentally deleted phrase can lead to lawsuits, or worse: someone might actually get sick if they misunderstand the warnings or the instructions. When you simply convert a document to PDF there is not much chance of human error. PDFs are also a popular choice when you have hundreds or thousands of pages of information, and entering all of that content into a database or formatting it all in HTML is time- or cost-prohibitive. Although I have to say, of all the reasons to use PDFs, that one is my least favorite.

The best uses of PDFs won't necessarily save you time, but you can create interactive PDFs with links, embedded videos, and other rich media. And although creating an interactive PDF is generally no less complex than formatting content with HTML and CSS, they do offer a compelling advantage. An interactive PDF can be shared in one self-contained file and can be downloaded and viewed offline, which makes the Portable Document Format a popular choice for interactive ebooks, annual reports, sales materials, and any other content you want to distribute beyond the pages of your website.

In general, PDFs are best used when you want to preserve complex formatting, especially in a document that's likely to be printed; if you want to present a document exactly as it was originally designed, because of legal issues or liability; if you are sharing large documents such as eBooks or annual reports; if you want to create an interactive, self-contained file that can be downloaded and viewed offline, which is great for sales presentations and marketing materials as well when you have hundreds or thousands of pages and using PDF is the most cost-effective or time-saving option.

And in the next video, we'll explore how you can use PDFs to create interactive forms or to preserve the formatting in a complex form you want somebody to print and fill out offline.

Using interactive forms

On a website you can use forms for everything from gathering basic feedback to conducting surveys and polls, to the search field that lets someone searched through your website. There are a lot of different ways and reasons to create forms. The basic HTML needed to create a form is relatively simple. But because forms generally require a script on the server to process their contents, creating interactive forms is more complex than many people expect. That complexity is compounded by the fact that many commercial web hosting services, or ISPs, put safeguards in place to prevent anyone from using their servers to send spam.

And those safeguards can make it tricky to set up the permissions you need to create even a simple web form. As a result, many people use an online form service such as EMailMeForm or Adobe FormsCentral, two of the most popular options. In addition to all of the ways you can use the Portable Document Format that we covered in the last video, you can also use PDFs designed interactive forms, or to preserve the complex formatting of a form that you want someone to print, fill out, and sign offline.

For example, W-9 Forms and other tax related documents are often saved as static PDFs. But you can also use the Portable Document Format to create interactive forms that can be filled out and submitted online. And making it easy to fill out and submit a form makes it a lot more likely that someone will take the time to do so. If you use the online service at Adobe Forms Central, you have the option of creating an HTML form or a PDF form. So what's the advantage of creating a form as an interactive PDF? It's kind of a best-of-both-worlds solution.

You can fill it out on the computer, but you don't necessarily have to be connected to the website to do so. That means you can save your work and finish filling out a form later. So you don't have to an all in one setting, which is especially useful when you're dealing with very long or complex forms. If you work for a large company or organization, you should start by finding out how your system is set up to create online forms, and you may have a team of programmers who can help you, but be prepare to revisit whatever system they may be using, especially if they've been using the same system for long time.

The technology we use to create and process form data has evolved dramatically over the years, and as part of your content assessment you may want to review the best way to collect and store information using forms. Another thing to consider about forms is how you use them on contact pages. Many web designers try and hide their email addresses by using a form so that scrapers used by spammers can't just pick their email addresses up off the web. Now, I hate spam as much as the next person, but I think that's what spam filters are for.

Enforcing a visitor to your site to fill out a form just so they can contact you reduces the number of responses you'll get, because so many people hate filling out a form just to send you an email. If the main goal of your website, like the goal of our Wisdom Pet site, is to get visitors to contact you, you want to make it as easy as possible. So let me conclude this lesson with a quick review of the contact page on the Wisdom Pet site, and a few best practices. First, notice that we've provided a variety of ways that visitors can reach us, starting with our phone number at the top, and our email address prominently displayed.

I've also included links to our social media sites, because more and more users like to connect with you on social media. I have used a form here when people want to become a volunteer. But in this case I used the form because I want to prescreen people. I want to ask them some specific questions, like what kind of volunteer work they might want to do. And that is a great use for a form. Also notice that I'm giving them the choice of filling out that form as anHTML form or printing out the PDF, filling it out at home, and bringing in into the office later.

Giving people multiple options is always a good idea. Finally, at the bottom of this page, you'll see that we have a sign-up for our monthly tips newsletter and a form that has just one field asking only for their email address. It's the simplest way to capture emails and the most common way to get people to sign up for an email newsletter. You may choose to include more fields and collect more information about new subscribers. But no matter how complicated you get with your form, I strongly suggest you consider using one of the bulk email services such as MailChimp, which I'm using here.

We'll look at several other popular email services in the later video on email and blogging, but the main thing to know about email is that in order to comply with anti-spam regulations you have to be very careful anytime you're sending out many email messages at once. In general, interactive forms are best used when you want to collect information and save it into a database, when you want to prescreen visitors by asking specific questions, when you're asking people to fill out an application or collecting lots of detailed information, and when you're asking people to sign up for an email and need to comply with anti-spam laws.

The main thing to take away from this video is that there are almost as many different reasons to use forms as there are different ways to create them.

Managing Publishing Options

Keeping up with blogs and newsletters

One of the best ways to keep your audience up to date and keep them coming back to your website is by regularly posting to a blog or sending out an email newsletter. If you are working on a small site, you may find it efficient to set up your blog so that each post also gets sent out to subscribers via email. If you are working for a bigger company, combining a blog and newsletter may not be such a good idea, because blogs and newsletters typically serve very different purposes. Before I get into any of my content tips, I'd be remiss here if I don't at least warn you that one of the most important things about email newsletters is that anytime you send email to more than a few people you need to comply with strict anti-spam laws.

That's why I showed you MailChimp in the last video, and why I am showing you AWeber and other sites like Constant Contact. There are a variety of bulk email services on the web, and they all serve similar purposes, so find the one that works best for you. But one of the things that many of them have is a collection of templates like this that you can use to start the design of your newsletter. Just scrolling through these can be a great way to get ideas. In larger organizations, email newsletters are often used as a marketing tool, away to stay in touch with customers, offer discounts on products, and share timely information and updates.

But even then, you don't want to be too overt with the sales message. Email newsletters often work best when you set them up as a series that starts with offering valuable content and builds to a sales message over time. If you like the idea of a series, consider this: when someone first subscribes to your email newsletter, start with a welcome message, thanking them, letting them know what to expect, and offering them something of value right away--a tip or some kind of helpful information. Then follow that with another useful tip, and after that, may be a valuable insight.

And wait until the third or even the fourth message before you suggest your subscribers take action, by buying something or using your service. And ideally, offer them a discount or another incentive. Using a series of email messages like this helps you build connection with your audience before you hit them with the sales message or a call to action. Here are a few more tips about newsletters. Keep it short, limit the number of graphics--remember, these are going to be read in an email program not in a sophisticated web browser.

For the same reason, you want to keep the design very simple, offer something of value: tips, insights, educational information. Include a call to action; one of the main reasons to have a newsletter is to remind people of your website and to encourage them to continue to buy your product or service. Personalize the emails as much as possible. You can automate the process of replacing people's names. There are many ways to make an email feel more personal. And remember, reading email is itself a relatively personal experience.

And perhaps the most important thing: write a killer subject line. Studies show that writing a compelling subject line is the single most important thing when it comes to getting people to open your email in the first place. So here are a few suggestions for writing killer subject lines. The obvious: don't use the same generic subject every time, but I can't tell you how many email newsletters I've subscribed to and the subject line every week, every month is simply the name of the newsletter.

That's a wasted opportunity. Replace the name of your newsletter with something specific to the contents of the email every time. Write a subject line like you write a headline: short, compelling and with an invitation that makes me want to read what's inside. Limit it to 50 characters or less. Never use the word free. That may seem counterintuitive, but again, studies show that when you see the word free you often associate no value. And if there is no value why am I going to waste my time reading your newsletter? And finally, don't use all caps.

As you may know already, using caps in email sounds like shouting. In contrast to email newsletters, blogs can have a very different style. In the blog on our Wisdom Pet site we've mostly posted educational information, like the story about how a cuttlebone makes a good toy for a pet, but you can also use them to keep their beaks healthy, or cat scratch fever, about the value of providing scratching posts for your animals. If we sold cuttlebones or cat scratchers, we might want to add a link to where you can purchase one of these products.

But I still wouldn't recommend that you use your blog only to announce that you are having a sale on your site or that products are available. Most people expect to get some value, insight, or entertainment from a blog post, not just sales pitch. Blogs are great when you want to publish things frequently and make regular updates. It's often easier to post things to a blog than other parts of the website. They are a great place to express opinions, and many sites use blogs as a way to separate content that's more editorial from content that's more opinion-oriented.

You can write in a more casual style; in fact, blogs are almost expected to be written in a more casual style. And blogs are a great place to provide insight, explore trends, even kind of think about the future and test new ideas. Because blogs usually have comments, they are great place to foster conversations with site visitors and even with other bloggers. It often works well to combine a blog and a website as we have here on Wisdom Pets. On many sites you find that the content is more formal and authoritative in the main pages of the site and then more casual in some of the blog posts.

But at the end of the day, blogs are really just another type of website with a few special features, like the ability for visitors to leave comments, which tends to make them more conversational. But the big takeaway from all this is that as you plan the content strategy for your website keep in mind that you may need to create different kinds of content for different publishing channels: one message for your web pages, a different one for your newsletter, yet another one for a blog post. And don't forget that you can use one to promote another.

So for example if one of your veterinarians writes a great post about why you should be fair to fish, you may want to promote that post in your next newsletter.

Doing content marketing on social media

An increasingly important part of any good content strategy is how to leverageyour best content on social media sites. From Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest and beyond, social media has become an important place to promote any business or organization. Whether you create a profile on every social media site out there or you focus your efforts on one or two, it's never too early to start thinking about how to share your best content across social media. If you're working on a large website, you may just be giving content ideas to the social media team.

On a smaller project you may have to do it yourself. Either way, here are a few general suggestions to get you started. The first step is to identify which social media sites you should target. Not all of them may be appropriate to you. Choose the content and write the copy for each site, and remember that each site's different. I'll show you some examples in a moment. Think about how and when to publish on each site and ultimately, include social media in your content matrix, your calendar, and any other planning documents you're creating.

Rinse, review, repeat. This should be an ongoing part of any good content strategy. Let me show you a couple of examples of that with our Wisdom Pet site. Blog posts are particularly great content to promote on social media. So we have this post about tooth- friendly toys and treats for dogs. It's got a great photo and it's kind of playful. That all lends itself pretty well to Facebook. So let's assume that I have generated this post. The wrong chew toys can hurt your dog. Find out which treats will make your pets happy and keep them away from the furniture.

You want to think about how do you distinctly summarize that blog post to put it on a social media site like this? But we also want to include a URL. Now, the URL here isn't a too long, but I still recommend that you use tools like bitly. bitly is a URL shortener. So when I type that URL in there and hit Shorten, you'll see that it's now giving me a shortened version, and I can copy that and paste it into Facebook. When I do that notice that Facebook is going to go and actually retrieve the first part of my post and that adorable photo.

If there are multiple photos on the page, you should have a choice about which ones you post, and you want make sure that you're using the photo that's most attention-getting that's going to best promote this piece of content. So we've promoted our blog post on Facebook. What's another good piece of content we might want to share? Well, we put a lot of time into this timeline. Anytime you're looking at something like rich media content, you're probably looking at an opportunity to promote on social media. So again, I'm going to shorten this URL using bitly. This is especially important when you're thinking about Twitter, because on Twitter you're limited to only 140 characters.

So here you see I'm promoting Are your pet vaccinations up to date? Find out with our interactive vaccination timeline. And here's my bitly URL. If I try to put that entire URL in here I'd be using a lot more characters than I need to, and that's especially important on Twitter. Twitter is also a great place to give people calls to action and things that are especially informative. In the interest of showing you the range of options, on Pinterest you want to think visually.Pinterest is all about pictures, so it's a great place to post some of those wonderful photos submitted by our customers.

But as I'll discuss in the video on user-generated content, make sure you have permission before you post anyone's photos on a place like Pinterest.Assuming that you do, a cute little caption and then information about who took the photo, if you want to give them credit, and ultimately a mention of your own business, can help make this a great way to promote your site and show off your best customers. After you pin something to Pinterest, you can always edit it and add a URL. So again, we can go back and just get the URL.

In this case, because I'm only going to put the top-level URL here, I probablydon't even need bitly. Understanding the differences among different social media sites can help you choose the best content and the best way to promote it to each of their respective audiences. As you sign up with each social media site, spend some time listening, watching, and learning what's appropriate on the site before you start posting. To help make sure you're using all the best sites consider using a service like Name check, where you can actually search to see if your name is available.

So not only can I test now whether the domain is available, but I can look at social media usernames. Even if I'm not planning to use all of the social media sites today, it's not a bad idea to get those reserved in advance. As I scroll down the page and this completes the search, you'll see that it's checking domain registration, top-level domains, and it's also looking to see where names are available on social media. Now, if you want to do a fair test, you want to make sure that you're actually testing the specific name that you're using.

So if I'm using wisdompets on my social media sites and my URL is wisdompets then you want to make sure you're typing in exactly that name. And now you'll see that I've got the URLs and down here I've already registeredwisdompets on these social media sites. But maybe I want to think about registering it on these other sites, if nothing else just to protect it for the future. There are entire courses dedicated to social media marketing and you'll find some great ones here at lynda.com.

My best advice to you in this course is that you start thinking about promoting your content on social media from the very beginning of the content review process, and that you make content promotion a regular part of any good content strategy.

Managing user-generated content

It's hard enough to manage the development, production, and curation of thecontent when you're working with a team of professionals. But when you open the doors of your website and invite your audience to contribute, anything is possible. In this video we'll explore best practices for managing user-generated content, things like photos you invite your users to send in. And we'll review some of the common problems you should watch out for and explore why it's important to be clear with all your contributors about exactly what you expect from them and what they can expect from you.

There are many ways to invite contributions like this. You can specifically ask for photos. You can invite comments on your blog. In the Wisdom Pet Medicine site that's exactly what we do, and you might think those are relatively safe types of content to ask for. But when you're dealing with the public, always expect surprises. Here are a few rules to guide you as you create any instructions you might have for how users should submit content. First, give them recommendations.

Don't just ask for photos; make suggestions about what kinds of photos are best. Two, clearly express any requirements. If you want to set any restrictions to the formats you accept, the file sizes, or any other requirements, explain those very carefully and in detail on your site. Restrictions. If there's anything you don't accept, such as pets dressed in silly clothes or humans wearing pet costumes, make sure you clearly state that in your guidelines. Finally, reproduction.

It's also very important that you're clear about what you'll do with your user’s content after they submit it. So if you're thinking already that you're going to want to promote your photos on social media, make sure you've clearly told your visitors that if they send you photos they may show up on Facebook. When we created the Wisdom Pet site and we started inviting people to send photos, we created a page of instructions like this. Just a simple clearly stated set of guidelines is really all you need for most user-generated content.

That I suggest you then link to a privacy policy and terms of use. Now we've created fake privacy policy and terms of use here. I suggest you consult an attorney about how to do that best, or look at some other guides to creating privacy policies and terms of use. But again you want to be very, very clear with your audience anytime you're asking for user-generated content. Another thing you should know is that if you're inviting comments, say on a blog or in a discussion forum, there are almost always a number of settings in the tools you use to control how those things get posted.

So here in WordPress, if I go into the backend here in the Dashboard settings, you’ll see, under Settings, in Discussion there a number of options about how users can comment on things like blog posts, whether those comments are automatically posted to the site or whether they're held for review and must be approved by an administrator. You can also control whether somebody has to log in and be registered or whether people can comment anonymously. Most discussion forums and blogs include these kinds of settings.

And I highly encourage you to get familiar with the options and to think carefully about how you want to manage discussion on your site. Although the biggest concern I hear from people is that they're worried about comments or users putting things that are inappropriate, the reality is the more common problem is that nobody posts comments at all. Taking a few steps to invite participation can make a big difference in user-generated content. Here is something that's very simple to do that we've added to the end of each of these blog posts to help invite comments.

At the bottom of each post we've added a very simple question. Here: How do you keep your kitty from clawing the place to pieces? We're inviting users to submit their best tips, but we're also giving them permission to comment. Most Internet users are lurkers. Based on several studies, only about one in every 1,000 people actually leaves a comment. People are much more likely to participate if you invite them with a question, especially one that's provocative or playful. So as you can see, at the end of each of these posts we've invited that kind of participation with questions like, "What does your dog love to chew on?" Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when it comes to managing user-generated content.

Post clear guidelines about how content should be submitted. Post clear messages about how that content may then be used by you and others. Make someone responsible for moderating comments or posts. It's very easy to set up a comment section and never look at it yourself. That's a potentially dangerous thing to do. In fact, not only can you prevent bad comments by having it moderated, you can encourage better comments if somebody on your team is actively participating and making sure good discussion is happening.

If you want more civil conversations, require registration. Clearly, and over and over, in many places where I have seen discussions happening on the web, the more you require people to register and the more information you collect when you do, the more civil the conversations are. If you really want the most responses on a controversial topic, the opposite is true. If you let people post anonymously, you will get a free-for-all. If you really want to control the conversation then you want to actually hold those comments for approval. As you saw on those settings in WordPress and as you'll find, like I said, in almost any of these discussion or blog programs, there is an option to either let post go automatically to the site or to hold them and review them first.

One more great place to learn about managing communities and a company that's had a lot of experience with this as CNN. If you've never been to the CNN iReport, I highly recommend, check their community guidelines, check some of the other instructions they have on that site. They've spent a lot of time thinking about this and they're a great place to learn more.

Optimizing content for mobile devices

Designing for mobile is not just about creating websites that look good on small screens; it's about carefully stripping down a site to just the content that's most important to a mobile user. I designed the Wisdom Pet Site to respond to different screen sizes. I'll talk more about that in a moment. But like many things I've covered in this course, you don't have to be an expert in mobile design to be a great content strategist. You just need to know that mobile is increasingly important and that you should factor in content for mobile devices from the very beginning of your content strategy.

When it comes to content for mobile devices, don't overlook the obvious. If someone is searching for your website on a mobile phone, there is a pretty good chance they're looking for your phone number. That's part of why I like to include the phone number prominently throughout a site and make sure it's displayed at the bottom of every page. Simply making sure your phone number is easy to find and making sure it's formatted in text and HTML can dramatically improve the usability of your site on mobile devices.

Similarly, many people use mobile websites because they are lost. If you have a physical location, make sure you include your address, directions, and links to a map. When it comes to mobile design today, you should know that there are two distinct approaches. Most people are using either responsive design, which is what I use for the Wisdom Pet Site. Responsive design uses CSS media queries and it takes one HTML page and makes it respond to different screen sizes. That's why you saw the change in that design in real time when I changed the width of the browser.

But that means I only have one HTML page, so that one set of content has to work for all devices, and you need to be thinking about things like making the phone number prominent and the address prominent from the start. The second approach can be far more complicated. Adaptive design requires creating two or more distinct versions of your website, and then using an auto-detection script on the server to identify each device and deliver the best version to each visitor. That's the approach taken by companies like American Airlines, where you have to reach a broad audience with a highly interactive site.

If you're working for a company this big, as a content strategist your challenge will be making sure that the best, most relevant content is presented as concisely as possible in the limited space on a mobile screen. Another concept to be aware of when it comes to mobile web design is mobile first. The idea behind mobile first is that it's easier to design a simple mobile version of a site first and then add additional content as you create a desktop version of your site. You may not have this luxury if you're working on a site that already has a complicated desktop version.

But if you're creating a new site from scratch, definitely consider creating the mobile version and then adding on to create the desktop version. Here are a few other things to think about in mobile design. First of all--and maybe this is obvious-- but the screen size is really limited, and that means you generally have to limit your design to one column. So you're not going to be able to have sidebars and all of that secondary information you may be using on a desktop screen. Second, most cellphone users suffer from what we call fat-finger syndrome, which means you want to make your links really big and easy to click on, but it also means that the text that goes on those links may have to be even more concise.

Three, think visually. It works really well to use icons in place of text when you have very small space. And four, limit multimedia. Audio, video, and large images take up a lot of bandwidth, and that's problematic on mobile devices. You may need to cut out some of the things that you use on your main site or even provide a text-only version. If you do include multimedia on a mobile site, it's even more important to include short text descriptions first and give visitors the option of downloading that multimedia content only if they have the bandwidth to justify it and they're really interested.

In the last few years I've written entire books on mobile web design and I’ve watched the technology change dramatically, so I can't cover everything here, but I want to leave you with this: the hardest part of most good mobile web strategies is creating very concise content. When you're limited by such a tiny screen, you have to be ruthless about the words you use. If you've already mastered the process of prioritizing and writing as concisely as possible, you're well on your way to managing the content for a good mobile website.

Gathering Feedback

Creating surveys and polls

Sometimes the best way to find out what content you should add to your website is to ask your audience. In the next video we'll explore how to use testing and analytics to study user behavior, but before we get into all of that, let's start by simply asking them what they want. Like so many aspects of web development, there are a number of tools on the market you can use to create polls and surveys. To keep things simple and reasonably priced, in this video I'll use SurveyMonkey, a free online tool that's easy to use and will help me demonstrate how you can create a survey for your own site.

Here's a survey I created using the free tools at SurveyMonkey. Notice how they have a number of options that make it possible to add bulleted lists and questions with fields. And here's a tip: when you're offering a list of options like this, always include an other option. Not only will that help you get more specific answers if you forget to ask something, it will help make sure that your users don't feel left out if they don't have an option on the list. Of course we ask some specific questions about content: What are you interested in learning about, are you interested in videos, things like that.

But sometimes the most valuable questions are the wildcard questions. Notice here up at the top where I ask, Do you buy a birthday present for your pets? That may seem like a random question, but if you buy birthday presents for your pets, I probably can assume you're going to be a better customer of my veterinary clinic than someone who just changed their dog in the backyard. Similarly, if you're a mechanic and you work on cars, you might ask a question like do you name your car? Think about your own industry and a provocative, playful question like this that might help you separate your most fanatic users from the more casual ones.

One last thing to keep in mind when you do a survey: keep them short. Any more than a few questions and the number of people who respond drops off quickly. So if your goal is just to get a little information, keep it short, keep it sweet, and let them get out of the survey quickly. And here's another tip: surveys like this often get better results when you offer visitors to your site an incentive for participating. Just be careful that the incentive itself is not so valuable or so unrelated to what you do that people are only answering the question to get the prize.

If you run a health spa or a pet clinic, a 10% discount on your services is a great incentive to get user feedback, but a free iPad or a new car might attract people who don't really care about your services at all. After you create a survey like this, you'll probably want to add a little content to your website to promote it. Think of a good place that people will see easily and regularly, and don't forget, you can also post it on social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Similar to survey programs, you'll find a number of plug-ins and software tools on the market that you can use to add polls like this one.

In this case I'm using a WordPress plug-in. In contrast to surveys, polls are generally much simpler and limited to one or two questions, but they can still be very useful for thinking about new kinds of content. You might, for example, run a poll on your site that asks a question like this one: Have you ever hired a pet sitter to care for your pets? I'm asking a simple yes or no question, but if enough people answer yes, I might decide that that's a good topic for a blog post, or that I should write an article on how to hire and manage a good pet sitter.

No matter what you choose to ask, remember that surveys and polls are not only great ways to learn more about what our audience is interested in and what content you should create, they can also become valuable pieces of content in and of themselves. Some people really love taking polls and really enjoy seeing the results.

Using A/B and multivariate testing and analytics

The first thing to know about multivariate and A/B testing is that despite thescientific-sounding names the basic concept is pretty simple: you create different versions of your content, show them to people, and see which version works better. A/B testing generally involves creating two versions of a piece of content or a page design: version A, version B, although some people create multiple versions and still call it A/B testing. Don't be confused by the number of tests that may be conducted. What's consistent in most A/B testing is that you're only testing one variable.

In contrast, multivariate testing involves testing many things at once. Multivariate testing, sometimes called bucket testing, can get far more complicated than A/B testing, but it can also lead to more interesting and often unexpected results. A/B testing is often used to test ad copy. If you're running a Google AdWords campaign, for example, and you're limited to just a few words of copy, it's good practice to create at least two versions of each ad, run them both through Google's Ad Network, associated with the same keyword, and see which one gets more clicks, which one generates more transactions, and ultimately, which one works better.

Similarly, you can use A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of different landing pages on your website. In that case you might run the exact same ad copy but link half your leads to one page and half of them to another to see which page on your site works better at converting those leads once the new visitors arrive. You can also use A/B testing to look at specific changes within a page, like whether adding questions to the end of your blog post entices users to leave more comments.

As a content strategist, you'll often have to make a case for why it's worth putting a little more effort into developing content, and conducting these kinds of tests can help you prove your theories. You may assume that adding a simple question like this to the end--what does your dog love to chew on?--will increase the number of comments on your blog, and you're probably right. But if you want to see how much of a difference adding questions makes, consider creating two pages with the same blog post-- one with the question, one without--and then split your visitors between the two pages.

If you can then show, for example, that adding questions to all your posts increases comments by 25%, you can make a much stronger case for why it's worth investing the extra effort to add those questions in the first place. Google offers a lot of help when it comes to conducting A/B and multivariate testing, and you can learn a lot just by reading through the different sections at Google.com. Another popular testing tool is Adobe's Test & Target service. Tools like this can really help, especially when you're doing multivariate testing.

Things can get a lot more complex when you're testing multiple variables at once. For example, if your tests involve creating multiple landing pages and changing the calls to action, the headlines, the color schemes, the images, even adding or not adding multimedia. If you're looking at all of those different variables at once, you're going to need all the help you can get to make sense of the results. One other note on multivariate testing: if you're experimenting that much, you probably don't want to split your traffic in half. In general, with multivariate testing, especially on a relatively large site, you never want to divert more than about 5% of your traffic when you're testing that many variables at once.

At the high end, conducting advanced multivariate tests require sophisticated software tools that can range from $99 a month to nearly $400,000 a year and take an entire team to run effectively. If you're interested in comparing high-end testing solutions, this comparison chart at WhichMVT.com can really help you sort through the options. If you don't have the resources to do that kind of high-end testing, you can still measure the effectiveness of your content on a smaller scale with Google Analytics. If you use Google Analytics and you want to get more formal about testing, consider using Google's new Content Experiments Interface.

No matter how big or small your content strategy, I recommend that you test the success of all your content by regularly reviewing analytics reports for your website. If you're in a big company, you may be using proprietary analytics solutions and you may need to work with the technical or marketing teams to get access to the reports. But make sure you get those traffic reports, study them, and use them to test your theories about content strategy, so you can make the best case for why investing in good content can pay off. Another simple tool that I find useful for A/B testing is the link shortenerbitly.

Not only is bitly great for helping you make the most of every character on Twitter, by shortening long URLs, but if you take the time to set up an account onbitly, you can use the site to track how many people actually click on each of the links you post. Here's an example of the kind of data you get from bitly.Notice that one of the things you can learn here is how many people clicked on a link from Facebook versus how many people clicked on the link from Twitter. That t.co down there is short for Twitter, and here you see Facebook.

Also notice that bitly pulls mobile traffic, the m.facebook.com, out as a separate number. That can help you test for mobile content and justify investments in mobile. Like many elements of content strategy, a big part of your job is determining how much of your time and budget you can afford to spend on testing, but remember, this kind of testing may also be the best way to justify the time and budget you need to develop new content in the first place.

Conclusion

Next steps

Developing an effective content strategy is not a task you do once and call complete. The best content strategies are living breathing project plans that are almost constantly being revised and updated. Although you may do one grand content assessment and develop a content matrix with a clear set of deadlines, your ultimate goal should be to develop a content strategy designed to keep the content fresh, up to date, and relevant, on an ongoing basis. Let me leave you with a few tips and suggestions for where you can learn more.

First, study the analytics of your own website. The best place to learn about what's working on your site is from the reports about how people are actually using it. You'll find great courses on Google Analytics here at lynda.com, and you can learn loads more on the Google Analytics website. Test, test, and test some more. Continue to test your theories and assumptions and use the results to guide your development as well as make a case for investing more time and money in great content. Revisit content policies and style guides to keep up with new terms, regulations, and any user feedback or complaints that may warrant adjusting the way you do things.

Seek out content strategy groups. You'll find them on LinkedIn, MeetUp, and other places in your community, and consider joining user experience or UX groups where you are likely to find like-minded professionals with similar job responsibilities. One of the best ways to learn, network, and job hunt is with other people who are doing what you do in the real world. And finally, keep in touch. One of the reasons I love teaching content strategy and teaching web design is that it's so much fun to see what my students create on the web.

Please feel free to drop me an email when you have questions, or just to showoff what you've accomplished. You can always learn more about me, my books, and videos, on my websites at janinewarner.com and digitalfamily.com. Thank you for joining me! Never forget, technology is important, but the best websites make content strategy a high priority. So get out there and make sure your website tells a great story.