When I worked with Petra from Guidance Connection, there was no need to discuss the best content strategy. Petra brought an unexpectedly impressive strategy with her.

Standing Man worked with Petra from Guidance Connection to create a website that would achieve a few goals:

1. Deliver a daily blog post (Daily Soul Massage)
2. Deliver a monthly blog post (Monthly Guidance)
3. Answer reader’s questions from time to time
4. Promote an upcoming book

In our initial discussions, my focus was on building Petra’s audience and to encourage them towards buying her upcoming book. But she’d already done most of the hard work. The approach was simple; it’s above, in points 1–3.

Know your audience

The beauty of Petra’s strategy is that it precisely addresses the needs of her readers. She is well aware that her audience is split into groups that want to receive daily and/or monthly updates. She also knows that she wants to offer more – answering specific questions from readers.

She’d already built a list of people that she was emailing on a daily basis (Daily Soul Massage recipients). A slightly modified group of people, based on the same list, were recipients of the Monthly Guidance. And reader’s questions were currently being answered only to the person who asked.

Consistency

Petra’s strategy works so well because it is consistent in both timing – daily, monthly and every now and then – and because of the format of what’s being communicated.

The Daily Soul Massage is short and sweet. Monthly Guidance follows the same format every month meaning readers know exactly what they are going to receive. And the answers to reader’s questions balances out the consistency of the Monthly Guidance with an appropriate dose of unexpectedness.

A blog of 3 blogs

Implementing this was relatively easy. We created a blog (website) with 3 blogs. Using a WordPress site and the Avada theme, we were able to create pages that included the blog shortcode. We added filters to display posts under specific categories. We simply created categories for Daily Soul Massage, Monthly Guidance and Your Questions and selected those when filtering.

It’s easier than Facebook

At project handover, I showed Petra how to write and publish her various messages, assign the correct categories and also post to facebook. The next day, I received a message:

Hi Doug, I have posted the daily “Soul Massage” on the Website. I do however have problems posting it on the Facebook page.

Petra’s content strategy is successful because she knows what her readers want, she delivers messages regularly, using consistent formats and balances these with answers to reader’s questions from time to time.

I hear that book sales are going very well (but I guess Petra knew they would!).

Take a look at Guidance Connection.