Years ago I did a presentation on The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. I bought 100 (or so) copies of the book and gave them away to audience members. It is tied for my most recommended book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN2NJ0_u_TwChecklists for Maintenance
One of my clients asked me to focus on helping them create a marketing process for the month of July. I immediately went back to this idea of building a checklist for their content process. Note: I personally use a lot of visuals & checklists.
To start the call about building a marketing process – I started with this visual.
Checklists create good habits.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Will Durant
Parts of a Content Generation Checklist
A good idea is to not create an overly long checklist with 100 points to check off. Instead break the checklist into parts/stages. Here are the parts/stages we identified for them to focus on:
- Ideation & Theme Research
- Title Writing
- Writing
- Publishing
- Social Promotion
- Outreach
- Recycling
- Optimization
Let’s explore two of the sections of the content generation checklist.
Title Writing Checklist
I usually include helpful links about the topic as a note above the checklist. Something like:
Note: 4AFramework, Apple Marketing Copy, 15 Blog Post Titles, Twitter 🧵
⬜️ write 5 headlines
⬜️ run each headline through headlime for alternatives
⬜️ record headlines
⬜️ used alternative headlines to generate additional articles or subheadings
Content Recycling Checklist
For this section I started the discussion with another visual.
Then we did the same thing with a simple checklist:
Note: Simple Publishing Framework
⬜️ turn content into an image
⬜️ turn content into a video
⬜️ turn content into audio
⬜️ turn content into download (white paper, case study, presentation)
⬜️ turn content into email
⬜️ turn content into longer or shorter form content
In this particular case – I have far more examples and the checklist items are more specific, but I created a generic version for this post. All of my customers get access to the full marketing content generation checklist and other resources.
Meta
You notice I included several links to posts to other people’s content. I will follow my own advice (section 6 outreach) and reach out to them to let them know I included it in this post.