2010 has been a great year for my blog. Not only did I meet a ton of great people by sharing my thoughts publicly, this blog has been the #1 traffic driver to my products this year.
For 2011, I want to take things to the next level.
It’s actually pretty complicated these days with Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other ways to publish content.
There is no doubt in my mind that producing good content and publishing it on the web is not only excellent for clarifying my own thought processes, but is also great for relationships and revenues (two things I care about deeply as a Startup Founder and Entrepreneur).
I’m writing this blog entry to share my thought process on how I’ll be thinking about publishing content and make sure I’m using the right tools and employing the right strategy.
#1 I want to continue to churn out good, timeless content
Most of the popular blogs out there today are by entrepreneurs with huge exits under their belt. They churn out a ton of valuable content on how they’ve been-there-done-that-and-here’s-how-you-can-too.
Well, I don’t have that to offer. I’m still hustling and so I decided to write about the hustle, I decided to write about the journey of entrepreneurship as I crossed each exit and took each turn.
To make sure  it appealed and was helpful, I made sure to always distill it into Principles. Principles are timeless, universal, and most importantly, appeal to a wide range of people.
For 2011, I’m going to continue to blog timeless content about my journey on this WordPress blog.
#2 I want to experiment with Video and Podcasting
Written word is great and has wide reach. However, after presenting this year at Startup Weekend and participating in a panel at BootstrapMD, I realized how much I love shouting out my ideas.
It feels so much more dynamic and the rush is absolutely amazing.
So in 2011, I want to experiment more with posting Videos (Gary Vaynerchuk style) and short quick thoughts.
I’m also hopefully going to be starting up a Startup-related Podcast with a couple of good friends in 2011. Details on these will be coming soon.
I’ll be using my Tumblr account to post/share this kind of new media content.
I’m using Tumblr for this because I consider it more of an “in-the-moment” thing, which I expect these videos, pictures and quick braindumps to be.
Whereas, I expect  my blog to be more thought out content that spans a few hundred words and focuses on being timeless and about the meta.
Most importantly, I’m choosing Tumblr for this because I think the community aspect of the site is really cool and has a ton of potential to bolster my two big goals (remember? relationships and revenues).
#3 I want to embrace email
RSS readers are dead. Getting on the front page of Hacker News brings traffic spikes but not long term visitors.
So with all of this timeless content I’ll be writing and with all these in-the-moment thoughts I’ll be putting into Tumblr, I want to be able to build a more dedicated following.
I want to be able to distribute my content more effectively. To do this, I’ll be starting to develop an actual mailing list.
In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, mailing lists and email in general is making a major comeback in our community, and realistically speaking has been the real money maker for all other “normal” people for quite some time now.
I’ll be building one master mailing list where my blog readers, my customers, and people I have relationships with will be opting into.
I’ll be segmenting the list as best as I can (based on Product, Relationship, etc). Once I have this set up, I’ll be taking the best performing new content  and will be sharing it with my mailing list monthly.
#4 I want to use Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn primarily for Relationships and secondarily for Distribution
I signed up for Twitter back in 2006. Ever since Day 1, I always just assumed I “knew” how to use Twitter.
I was wrong.
Twitter works best when you stop copying and pasting the link to your product/blog-entry/whatever blindly and start focusing on all those little clues Twitter gives you on who you should be talking to.
I’ve found that Twitter works best when you follow up on the lists of people Twitter says is “similar to you” — when you follow up with people friends you think are awesome are talking to, and most importantly, when you “@” someone and say “Hey, what’re you working on?”, instead of just shouting at them about how awesome you are.
So, in 2011, I’ll be doing more of this on Twitter, on Facebook and most importantly on LinkedIn.
#4a Do Not Write Off LinkedIn
Whatever you do, Do Not write off LinkedIn. LinkedIn is awesome because of their Groups section. In there, they have atleast 2 vibrant groups for any imaginable target audience you can think of. Go join those groups. Don’t just join and shout out your product, join and observe, join and have conversations, naturally, your awesome solution that can transform that target audience will surface and you’ll make a lot of money.
#4b Relationships first, Distribution second
My first focus will be on forging relationships and getting to know people on all these networks. Hopefully a byproduct of this will be a really large following.
Once you have this, I’ll probably take advantage of that and share a few self-serving links here and there to promote myself/my product or a new blog entry.
As long as my focus is relationships, I’m sure I won’t come off spammy and lose followers.
And more importantly, since my focus is relationships, I’ll hopefully end up with followers that actually pay attention to my tweets.
#5 Easy-peasy CMS for each of my product’s domains
The last part of this content strategy is a very specific thing having to do with content related to my product’s target audience.
I mentioned that this blog is the #1 traffic driver to each of my products. While thats great news for this blog, its actually pretty bad news when it comes to my products.
As part of stepping up my Marketing game for my products, I’ll be churning out a ton of very specific content that will hopefully appeal to my product’s target audience.
While these may take the form of blog entries, these will actually be highly specialized landing pages.
For example, Domainers happen to love Tout. They use it to pitch potential buyers on their domain inventory.
Since I want to get more domainers, I’ll probably be publishing some content on Domaining best practices and a HOWTO page on how you can make more money with Domaining if you use Tout.
I’ll be using a simple CMS for publishing this kind of content within my product’s domains.
So there you have it. That is my content strategy for 2011. What’s yours?
