Our first cohort for the Content Flagship course on Maven launched this week. Registration is closed now, but if it looks like your jam, add yourself to the wait list there and you’ll get a heads up when we release the course again.
When my kid was small, one of his favorite books had a character who was full of “mauvaise bonnes idées.”
In English, those are ‘bad good ideas.” (The book is Claude Ponti’s Le Doudou Méchant, which is unlikely to be available in English as it’s pretty much untranslatable. Highly recommended if you read any French, though.)
The world is full of bad good ideas, and today I want to talk about three.
These all actually good ideas in the right context. But I suggest you give serious thought to not doing them when you’re looking to improve your website.
#1: A content audit
Once you’ve been publishing content for awhile, you’ll find that there’s all kinds of old stuff there that doesn’t really make sense any more.
This can include promotions for people who no longer offer that product, as well as promotions for people you no longer think are awesome.
It includes time-based or pop culture references that haven’t aged well, or are just confusing now.
And it can also include rants, tangents, and rabbit holes that no longer pertain to what you’re focused on today.
In a content audit, you make a huge spreadsheet of everything on your site, then make decisions about what you’ll keep, what you’ll update, and what you’ll redirect. (I don’t recommend deleting posts if there’s any chance anyone has ever linked to it. Better to redirect it to something that will be relevant.)
There are a couple of problematic words there. Specifically, “huge,” “spreadsheet,” and “decisions.”
Would it be great to clear out all that clutter and get it organized? Definitely. Just like it’s a great idea to clear out the garage or attic that’s been accumulating clutter for the last decade or two.
Are you going to do it? That might be trickier to answer.
If you have a pro helping you and you feel confident you can get to the finish line, go for it. But if you know in your heart of hearts that you’re going to get bogged down in the middle of the process, look for a smaller version that will get you some of the most important benefits.
That can be as simple as refreshing and republishing a few of your most popular posts. Your site will instantly look better, and become more relevant to your audience. And you’ll feel better when you look at it.
(If you do want to put on your Big Person Underclothing and tackle an audit, I wrote here about how to do one: How to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience.)
#2: Redesigning your website
Now before all my designer friends come for me, let me explain.
A website redesign is sometimes exactly what you need. If your code is outdated (or, worse, not secure), if your site design is ugly, if you’re on the wrong platform for your needs, or if you have major structural problems, you might need to bring in a pro for a total revamp.
There are times when it’s absolutely the right thing to do.
But it’s also a huge project, and unless you’re a designer yourself, it should be rare.
Just like a major remodeling project on your house, it’s going to take longer than you think and it’s going to cost more than you want to pay.
It’s very possible that your site doesn’t need a complete design overhaul as much as it needs to be reorganized. Particularly if you’re already on good infrastructure (like self-hosted WordPress with a good theme).
In my experience, it’s smart to make the organizational decisions before you start a major revamp. Know what pages you want, where they should go, and how you want to structure your reader’s path through your site.
Then you can call a designer in to implement what you can’t do on your own.
Any designer I know would rather work with a client who has a strong understanding of their goals and vision, and the business reasons behind them, over a client who says, “I don’t know what I want, it just doesn’t work, make it better.”
#3: Boring niche and avatar exercises
I’m taking a course myself now, and it starts with the usual exercise on defining your niche and your avatar.
Are those important to know? Um, yeah. You need to know who you serve, and what they want from you. It’s a the cornerstone of your work and your business.
But the boring, simplistic exercises that most courses start with? (And full disclosure, I’ve written my share of those.)
If you’re brand new to this idea, do those exercises. They’ll get you started.
But if you’ve done them a dozen times and you still don’t feel like you have a handle on how to define your audience and your unique role in serving them, it’s time to find some better questions.
There are three books that I like a lot for this:
- Pamela Slim’s The Widest Net (brand-new, and my favorite on this list)
- Tamsen Webster’s Find Your Red Thread
- Brant Pinvidic’s The 3-Minute Rule
Any of these will give you a more nuanced approach to clarifying your ideas, rather than the simplistic formulas that didn’t work for you the first 10 times you tried them.
It can also be worthwhile to work with a smart content or marketing coach. Sometimes a compelling answer to “what do you do and who do you serve” is surprisingly obvious to everyone but you.
That’s The Fierce for this week!
Sonia
