Focus on moving three things a mile, not a hundred things an inch. This is great basic planning advice for any business. No matter how good you are at multi-tasking, think about how solidly you build your business by reinforcing three primary parts of it at a time. You can do that by focusing on your how-to tips.
When people ask what topic to write a tips booklet about when they have many topics of interest, the answer is to choose from among:
- a topic that makes you come alive
- tips that represent the most lucrative part of your business
- information based on the most frequent questions you get
Ideally, the answer to what topic to write your tips booklet about encompasses all three. Even if you’re not ready to write a whole tips booklet, there are other ways to use your how-to tips that may or may not ultimately get you to a whole booklet of tips.
You may also find that there are related topics that easily fall under one theme, one broader umbrella. Your topic could be about leadership. Within that broad topic, you have tips about how to be a leader as a business owner or corporate department head, how to be a leader in a professional volunteer association, and how to be a leader in a community volunteer organization. While different venues and contexts, there are similarities in basic concepts.
Your business can serve each of these various audiences, or you could decide to narrow it to only corporate leadership, focusing only on tips related to before, during, and after an offsite corporate planning retreat. Maybe you’ve done that already and have the opportunity or have made a decision to enter a different arena.
You have probably heard some variation of when you think the whole world is your market, no one is your market. While your services may easily adapt to different audiences in different industries and different demographics, until and unless you choose who to target, your efforts are diluted and your results are less than what is possible.
Look at what you’ve been doing up until now. You can take what has been a scattered approach of generically reaching out to a wide range of markets and streamline the content you already have. Determine a direction to go and test it out. Put some industry-specific or audience-specific references into your generic tips. Then focus on moving three things a mile rather than a hundred things an inch:
- Create an article with a top-10 list of tips.
- Send the article to every appropriate media.
- Evaluate the results.
Rinse and repeat:
- Record the content of your top-10 list of tips.
- Distribute the mp3 audio link in every appropriate way you can.
- Evaluate the results.
One more time:
- Do a video of the same content you created in the article and the audio.
- Post it online and send people the link.
- Evaluate the results.
By taking the content of the same tips and putting it into three different formats and sending it to the same people you want to reach, you have accomplished the importance of repetition (since humans rarely learn something the first time it’s encountered), presenting it in different formats (to accommodate various learning and lifestyles), and you’ve given yourself a good test of how receptive an audience is that you want to reach. You have also formed the basis of a product line to later expand and sell. Those top-10 tips articles can be combined and expanded into a tips booklet, almost without realizing it.
You have moved three things a mile rather than a hundred things an inch.
