Practitioners discuss how to stand out online by mixing formats: a Singapore marketer drives traffic with free family content, while others balance long-form authority pieces with daily newsletters and personal blogs. The key is knowing your niche audience and keeping different brands separate across channels.
The idea is for you to contribute. It's literally about content. What do you do with it? How do you create it? How do you make it interesting? How do you actually cut through the onslaught of content from all over the place? What we've noticed in PR is you really have 2 types of content makers. The professionally educated with a background in journalism, etc., know how to write from a balanced perspective. Then you have the bloggers. Which have actually gained prominence because they write from a more emotional angle. They write with sometimes with a slant that people find interesting, and it's starting to get bigger follow-up than some of the journalists have. And there's a shift in the balance that we've seen in the past few years coming from both the client side and now the PR side. So who creates content here?
especially activities for kids in Singapore, because I aim mainly at Singaporean consumers. I don't sell outside Singapore, but I'm starting with that. So because I'm selling kids' clothes, I was thinking, so I need to talk about kids. And what I realized is that it's not that easy to find information about what to do with kids on weekends. You know, lots of families around here, especially expat families, with a lot more income power. So I decided every Friday to set up this list of 5 things to do on a weekend. So I do have my sources, and every Friday morning it takes me 1 to 2 hours depending on what I've got, and I write this list of things to do, and then I post it all over the place on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on forums, etc. And I've got people coming. So I'm talking, and this is the thing I'm doing every Friday, but in between I'm doing posts about the latest zebra birth in the zoo or things like that that is related to kids. So basically I'm not talking about my clothes, I'm talking about kids, and I'm expecting people to come regularly on my website every Friday and see that information. And talking about this, so it's like I'm selling something, but I'm talking about something else that is related. So basically, I'm using my time and my knowledge to give something. I give something for free.
Again, coming from different fields, you'll find companies are writing what we call white papers, if you're talking about the idea of even writing books. I don't know if you wrote books to actually make related to your business, but to establish you as an individual and establish the business as a thought leader. So it's kind of like you're writing away from what you sell simply because that's the way you're going to attract. It goes back to how do you attract people nowadays, more and more to your website.
Trying with different formats of content. So there would be some, some long pieces like long features. There would be other shorter opinions. There would be different Q&A kind of articles. And guess who owns who? There's a short strip called Twitter Litter. Which is, which is again Twitter litter is is what we tweet about and a couple of those interesting tweets. So we keep doing this on and off just to sort of break the monotony. The distinction between the print and the online is that the online's a newsletter. We we will keep it newsy, so to say, and and it's a daily update of of serious news that's happening around the industry and. Magazine is more sort of trend-oriented. It's more analytical. It's— a lot of volume is independent from what goes online. Online is just a day of news. Magazine is trend-based, industry-based. So that's the distinction. And hence, you'll see a lot of things in the print version which you will not see online.
But I thought that that could drive more traffic, if we are able to get more traffic online. These kind of things probably—
Yeah, it is.
Our aim is to get traffic, but then we will not forget that news is a serious business for us. And we do blog occasionally. There are video blogs. So there are 2 different set of contents. And we do not want to bundle, although attracting traffic is a huge, huge sort of driving force for us to put up news. But then we do realize that— There's a brand around the online and there's a brand for the print and we don't want to mix them.
2 books. They were not self-published. It was McGower Publishing in the UK. The first book was on the pseudosystems a long time ago in France, smart cards. Second book was payment. They're very specific to my area. And then the second one, things were changing very quickly and I was getting new insight. It was already published. It was like I wasn't going to do another book right then. So then that got me into blogging to kind of put all the new stuff and the case studies and things like that. And blogging also, I was feeling— I was founder and CEO of the company then, and then we split apart chairman and CEO positions. So I was losing my direct access to clients and the market.
Filtered.
So I was feeling the filter was getting in the way. So I wanted to write more and have direct link with people. So I started out as a useless blog. It has nothing to do with the company. It didn't have the company name, brand, or anything. And then just talked about what interested me. And there were many—
I'm teaching and lecturing, and I have their full attention for 3 hours.
So I actually do only half the work, which means I would Create content.
I have a lecture of three hours. I'll only teach for an hour and a half. That's about it, because humanly it's really not possible to continue. Like I said, it's very monotonous over a period of time. And after I finish teaching them something and I give a break, I get them to make their own content.
I mean, if if it's a question about keeping the blog interesting, I find the most interesting blogs on the internet are those that.
It's not too personal.
It serves a very niche function. If you are concerned about— if you are looking to improve your relationship with your child, perhaps you would go to that blog. Basically, it serves a very niche function. And if you— and I mean, people on the internet now, they start from Google and then they go elsewhere. They don't start from, like, I don't know, Yahoo. Like some random blog and start reading.
The way journalists write is different from 15 years ago. The balance is still there, but it's kind of shifted. The bloggers have taken prominence. You know, it was mentioned, I think, maybe by you, a very specific target market. You don't write for audiences in general. I don't think we ever did in one way or another. But you kind of understand who that target audience is better before you even start writing. Or as you started writing, you use that information about behavior, changes in interest, stickiness, length, whatever payments as well, and find out that well you adapt your writing towards it. So content is completely different from what it used to be.
2 people, infinite agents, 1 billion dollar idea #AIAgents #Startup #Productivity
