Webmasters Journal

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5.Establish a Content Flow

You need to establish a document flow for your content, and draw divider lines when publication changes to content distribution or marketing. Your document flow helps to answer questions about your contents evolution. Where is it starting, and where will it end up? For example, it is common for bloggers to simply blog every day, without really discovering their contents potential. The exceptions are the bloggers who have been able to compile their work into publications like ebooks, or in the case of at least one Twitter user a book and a TV series. When you think about your flow, you cant think of your content as only existing in one place such as your blog or your webpage. If you aspire to one day turn your blog into a book, then start planning for it now and work out how you are going to transition from a blog to a book. Ive developed a system which allows me to quickly distribute the content I write, but then route it into a service that I can then use to produce ebooks or monthly ezines. After Ive written an article in Google Docs, I will paste the content into a blog post at http://thestack.posterous.com. There is a line at the bottom of each post which references the three main ways in which readers can interact with the content. This is important because I feed the RSS for this blog into curation services such as paper.li and Google Currents. I created a blog called The Stack after I used the app for the Conan OBrien show. I began to think about how late night talk shows are usually made up of their reoccurring segments: the monologue, skits, interviews, movie clips, audience participation, etc. When you watch the show live, on TV, these segments are shown to us in a specific sequence. But, when you use an iOS app to access the same materials, you can view them on demand in any order that you choose. I began to wonder what a talk show would look like if you started with just the components for your audience to interact with, and then later compiled the different segments or elements in a way that made sense. The Stack is a place where write about all of the different subjects that I want to write about. The posts are tagged, and Ive set up the Posterous blog so that I can autopost each post to a specific Wordpress blog. So, the article that you are reading now most likely started out in The Stack on Posterous, but it was also autoposted to my Webmaster Journal blog on Wordpress.com. The Stack is like my web-based talk show: it is where I want readers to tune in on a daily or a weekly basis. It is also almost guaranteed to be my most actively updated site because it covers so many different topics at once. All I have to do is write and post, and the content will continue to build up there. But The Stack also serves as a bridge between the documents I write on Google Docs and the finalized content I share in the finished ebook later. It allows me to get content out to my audience faster than any of my other properties would make possible. The strength of getting

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View: | Webpage | Doc | Activity Feed | Discuss: | Post a Comment | content out faster and farther is that you attract feedback, and the more feedback you get the more you can improve your content before it is released in different formats. Most organizations probably have publications or other vehicles which are like this. Electronic newsletters, for example, can offer you a way to highlight the most recent or the most popular content. They are a means of distributing content quickly and efficiently to subscribers. All of this is important because once you figure out the evolution of your documents, you can pick out the key milestones in your flow, and then you know where to send most of your audience. Once you can see the key milestones for your document, you will be able to see moments in its evolution which shouldnt be included in the flow. They should be tracked as a part of distribution or marketing, but not as an important part of the document. For example, an e-newsletter wouldnt necessarily be included in the life cycle of a document because it is a marketing tool. When I post content in The Stack, I am not thinking of this as a part of my documents life cycle, because it is only a means of sharing the content. An article I write lives only in Google docs, or in the service which I use to produce ebooks. All other properties are offshoots.