If Content is King, Content Strategy is the King’s Astrologer — Part 1

edited 9/9/2023

A personal, historical perspective on the birth of content writing and content strategy in the digital world. My thoughts and words are my own.

As a writer, I have spent over twenty years of my life working mostly in the digital space. Over the years I have seen many changes in how content is created, managed, and strategized. I have always been fascinated by words, and serendipitously, when a few years after I graduated from college, after a miserable experience in phone sales, I finally landed my first job as a writer for the internet.

Although I actually did pretty well in sales because I realized, as well as being a writer, I have always been a great talker. In fact, talking might be what I do best. But what is writing but talking with written words?

But I digress. In my early twenties, with idealistic dreams of writing poetry and becoming a novelist, I really wanted to put my writing chops to the test and become published. I had been blogging in whatever the early iteration of that was called. I think I created my own little site using HTML on a text pad program, and loading pages onto an FTP server. That’s how web pages were made back then, there were no GUI editors. I taught myself HTML for fun.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, the internet was just starting to take off, this was in the late ’90s, and everything was going “online”. Although my schooling wasn’t technical, I studied creative writing with a major focus on poetry and a minor in philosophy, I always knew I wanted to write. But everyone said, “Good luck with that.”, and “Why don’t you teach?”. I was not against teaching.

My father, now retired, was an English Professor at Georgia State University and a well-known Faulkner scholar for an epic amount of time, and my Grandfather was a professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill, and he has some books in the Smithsonian museum even. I come from a long line of intellectuals and avid readers, and writers. I grew up with the sound of a typewriter clicking in the background of my childhood. One thing I know about writing, which my father taught me, is that to be a great writer you need to be an avid reader. And another thing he taught me is sometimes the beginning of the story is actually the end, or consider making it the end because it’s hard to write anything if you don’t know how it is going to end, knowing the ending first helps you discover a path to get to that final destination of “the end”.

My father also taught me how to read when I was three years old, because he saw I was interested in books, as you could imagine we had a lot of books in our house, and we weren’t even allowed to watch tv on the three channels we did have, except for on the weekends. So my sisters and I, we read a lot. And we were allowed to read anything really, my parents didn’t ban books.

I learned how to command the English language early on in life. I remember being fascinated by how words flowed together, and especially billboards, which I realized later it was ad campaigns that fascinated me. I listened to ad jingles on the radio during Braves baseball games, which my Dad always listened to while he was doing yard work. I paid attention to billboard slogans and magazine ads, and this was all pre-internet.

I went to public school in the city of Atlanta school system, and I remember in my 10th-grade journalism class, somehow the school received a donation of one Apple desktop computer, and my peers and I would fight over using the MS Paint program because we had never seen such a thing, and it was magical, and that’s when I became fascinated with computers.

Though I didn’t actually get a personal computer probably until I was a Senior in college at Georgia State University, where I went to get my BA degree in English. Before, that I remember typing papers on an electric typewriter and thinking that was pretty cool because you didn’t need Whiteout, there was an eraser tape you could put in the electric typewriter.

When I got my first computer, I think it was a Dell, I was delighted, and I started my first blog. It was called “The Hard Times…”, because times were hard. I don’t know what happened to that blog, it may still be out there in the internet ethers somewhere.

I landed my first job working in the digital space as a Content Manager for Creative Loafing, a well-known alternative newspaper in the Atlanta area. As I mentioned, I was not technically trained, and there really was no training available, we are talking about the wild west of content creation back in the day, every man, and woman especially, for themselves, but that’s a story for another blog.

When I learned I had a knack for basic coding and taught myself HTML, which back then, had to be manually programmed around text and graphics in a Textpad program and then posted online via an FTP server on a dial-up modem. If you remember that sound, you know what I mean, it was slow.

But that’s how we did things, there were no GUI editors at the time. That was a fun job, though. I was on a team of writers, book and movie reviewers, and IT guys who were in charge of creating the first online version of the newspaper.

Eventually, one of the IT guys created a sort of content management system to keep track of files, this was before the cloud, before the dawn of digital transformation, when content began its reign as king. It was like a free for all back then in a lot of ways but it was exciting to be on the frontier of this wonderful invention called the World Wide Web at the time. There really were no strategy theories around content, back then and a content strategist was not an industry term.

But there was a huge push for content creation among brilliant people who had great ideas. We managed to have a sort of framework to follow for our online content initiative, based on the newspaper, which had articles but was known for listing events, activities, concerts, and so forth. That’s why most people picked it up. So the head of the company at the time, Debbie Eason, decided the online version should mimic the newspaper. There were two smart, young, engineers on the team who created the framework of an online event. One of my tasks there was to create a user manual for the company around this proprietary events database.

And that’s when I started thinking about strategy in content writing, when I began writing the technical training manual for this renegade content management system. What does technical writing have to do with content strategy, you might ask? Because you have to think about how someone who has no technical experience, potentially, would be able to understand what you are explaining, like steps in a process.

These days I work in technical worlds where engineering and marketing and sales sometimes work together, but sometimes they clash. Everyone wants strategy, every company needs strategy, but most companies don’t want to take the time to implement it. They want what I call a “magic strategy”.

Content strategy doesn’t just happen though. That’s why I thought of the metaphor for content strategy being like the king’s astrologer because back in the times of medieval courts, the king always had an astrologer to help guide him in making decisions.

From my perspective, content isn’t effective without a strategy in whatever avenue it unfolds. And where does strategy begin? In understanding your customers. In this first blog in a series of blogs about content strategy and writing, from my own perspective, as my thoughts are my own, I will give you a couple of tips.

The first rule of content writing with a backbone of strategy is to know your audience. I can’t stress that enough. If you don’t know who you are writing to, you can’t make a clear messaging framework. The second rule of strategy-backed content is to know the purpose of what you are writing.

Purpose in the content world is about where you want to drive your audience. If you don’t have purposeful reasoning behind what you write, it’s like sending your audience on a long drive with no destination.

Sometimes, just like in fiction or other writing even, you write the ending first, that way you know where you are going and can write to that effect. In the simplest of terms, strategy isn’t magic, it’s just more purposely written content with a focus on the audience. There is a lot more to it. I will get into that in future blogs so feel free to subscribe and like my post.

Tune in next week for part two in my series about content strategy and why it is so important.

Ask me a question via email, and I will try to answer via another blog.