It’s easy to create a content calendar, you can fill it with items like:
- Member of the month
- Member Interview Tuesday.
- What Are You Working On?
- Expert Advice About [x]
- Throwback Thursday
- Promotion Friday
It’s harder to make the content exciting enough to sustain interest.
The problem with anything regular is unless it’s regularly (and surprisingly) interesting members learn to ignore it.
Working out loud discussions typically begin strong but the popularity soon fades as members realize the number of useful connections from them doesn’t justify the effort.
Interviews with members typically falter because many members don’t have anything remarkable to say. Once you’re in week 20, you’ve been through most of your top members. Worse yet, the audience often has to wade through an hour-long interview, or a 2000+ word transcript to find a few interesting nuggets.
A few tips that might help here:
1) Tweak the format to make it scannable. Reduce an hour-long interview to a members’ top 5 tips, what I learned this month, top links, top resources, or an edited digest etc…
2) Only publish content that passes the interest test. It’s harsh, but if you interview a member for an hour, and they don’t say anything remarkable, respect your community and don’t publish it. Your duty is to the entire community, not one member. Better yet, wait for members to say something remarkable in the community and interview them. Have a few people you can run content past to see if they like it.
3) Drop the content calendar. If you’re just churning out content to fill an arbitrary slot in the calendar of your own making, it’s probably an idea to drop the calendar. There simply isn’t enough meaningful activity to fill out. Wait and help create the conditions for amazing things to happen and then write about it.
Publishing content “because it’s Thursday” is the worst reason to publish content.
