9 PULLING TOGETHER YOUR DISPARATE FORCES
If you've read this far and you've nodded your head at least a few times, you probably have a fairly good understanding of how your upbringing, your background, and all the other “disparate forces” we've discussed can work together to drive your Content Marketing Hurricane.
Of course, these are factors that everyone has available to them to some extent. But not everyone is going to make a success of content marketing. The real magic happens where all these forces intersect under the right conditions.
Once you have given real thought to each of these areas, and you've truly identified the aspects of each that will be affecting your content, brainstorming (no pun intended) should result in a handful of clear intersection points where you either already know or want to learn enough about something and are passionate enough about it that you can succeed at marketing it to the world.
The potential for intersections is basically endless, so I won't belabor the point here with a bunch of examples. Suffice to say, you'll know them when you see them. They'll jump out at you as seemingly obvious "a-ha" revelations.
These points of intersection will form the basis of your most successful content marketing efforts.
That doesn't mean that you can't possibly succeed marketing products or services that fall outside these areas. As a matter of fact, a lot of professionals are able to successfully market just about anything, whether it floats their boat or not. (I like to count myself among them.)
But if you do focus on a topic that comes out of this brainstorm, it's going to be a heck of a lot easier.
And it's going to be fun.
Moving forward
With all that in mind, we're ready to start moving out of the realm of theory and into actual practice.
Looking back at that storm forming out in the middle of the ocean, those disparate forces – the water temperature, the air temperature, humidity, pressure, wind – have met in the right conditions to start feeding off each other and gaining strength.
Now, it's building to the point that it starts to coalesce into something of substance. The clouds have stacked miles high, the wind is picking up, and pretty soon, it's going to start spinning around a central eye.
Your Content Marketing Hurricane has reached the Tropical Disturbance stage.
Exercise #9 – Brainstorming: Intersections
1. Review all your notes from the last seven exercises
2. Note where topics fell off the list, and where new ideas surfaced.
3. Note where strengths (in what you know, what you love to learn about, and what you're passionate about) become obvious.
4. These points of intersection will become the focus of the next step in building your Content Marketing Hurricane.
5. If you've gotten this far, give yourself a huge pat on the back, and let us help you at the CMH Stormwatcher's Community!
6. Read the next chapter.