The first snowflake of the season always brings excitement.
We know that with it comes sledding, skiing, snowball fights, and maybe – if we’re lucky – a good, old-fashioned snow day.
Trillions of snowflakes later? It’s sort of a drag.
When you reach the stage in your life where snow days no longer mean cancelled classes, your outlook tends to change on the form of precipitation. What was once a novel diversion morphs into a chore. It’s not fun anymore; it’s inconvenient and involves more effort than we probably want to give.
And the same goes with our content marketing.
Once the novelty wears off we see the long road ahead of us. And it’s covered in slush. We know the footing will be difficult and the work will be hard. It seems impossible at first. And it’d be a lot more comfortable to stay cozied up inside with our beverage of choice.
But the truth is that it needs to get done if we want to go anywhere – in the winter or in content marketing – we need to pick up our shovel and get to work.
Here are some lessons that apply to both:
Select the tool that is right for the job. Digging a car out with a dust pan is an exercise in futility. And so is trying to get traction with your audience without the right tools.
Survey the area and create an attack plan. Before you dive in, figure out your approach. You don’t want to have to spend additional time undoing what you’ve done midway through the exercise. Remember that saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?” It applies here.
Before you go setting up social profiles on every new network that pops up, or add widgets with must-have, cutting-edge functionality to your site, think if it makes sense in the grander scheme of your plan, and if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Start plowing and fine-tune at the end. Do what absolutely needs to be done first, and then worry about the little details once you’ve made progress. Not every piece of content you create will be perfect (like this one), but even your mistakes can help you inform your approach for next time. Some shovel scoops will carry more of a load and make more of a dent in your work than others. But all of it (usually) contributes in some way.
Work when the sun’s out. When the sun is shining it helps you get the job done by melting while you plow. Take advantage of external factors. Interact in social media while people are online. Send emails when your audience wants to receive them. Add your content to existing conversations and let the external factors help you with some of the heavy lifting.
This may be the cheesiest post I’ve ever written but I blame it on cabin fever.
Besides, I’d rather be doing this than be outside shoveling snow. If only you could say the same about reading this.
[image: the_colmans]
