2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The April Prompts

2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The April Prompts

Author: Sonia Simone / Source: Copyblogger It’s April! Don’t ask me where March went, because I have no idea. But it’s time once again fo

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Content Excellence Challenge: April Prompts

It’s April! Don’t ask me where March went, because I have no idea. But it’s time once again for a pair of Content Excellence Challenge prompts.

Each month this year, we’ll give you two prompts — one intended to make you a better writer and one intended to make you a more productive one.

This month’s prompts both share a creative dimension and an ultra pragmatic one. Because creativity and pragmatism are like air and water — you need both of them to make it.

Ready or not, here we go:

The April Creativity Prompt

Remember last month’s creative challenge to find keywords?

(If you did that one, drop a note in the comments and gloat over the lesser mortals who didn’t quite get around to it. You know you want to.)

This month we’re approaching the same critter, but with a different net.

Starting today, every day until the next Content Challenge post, go to a social media site and copy some phrases written by your target audience.

Let’s face it; you’re already hanging out there anyway. And while we all definitely want to know what you think about Bulletproof Coffee, you might as well use that time to do some listening, too.

Write down, word for word, what people are saying about your topic. You might find a phrase, a sentence, or a full paragraph … you never know what’s going to show up on a given day.

You’re looking for:

  • Frustrations
  • Rants
  • Questions
  • Irritations
  • Failures
  • Embarrassments
  • Triumphs

Important: Make sure you label these as someone else’s words when you copy them down. You can use something crazy like quotation marks and the name of the person who originally wrote it. Date each entry, with a note about where you found it.

You don’t want to come back to this in six months, think you wrote these phrases, and accidentally plagiarize someone else’s wording.

What you’re mining for are scraps. Word choices. Conceptual frameworks. Mindsets. Approaches.

These words and phrases are idea seeds for your content — seeds you can grow into blog posts, podcast scripts, and maybe even entire products and services.

Now let’s talk about a productivity tool to help you find those again when you need them.

The April Productivity Prompt

You may have noticed that there’s been something of a resurgence in journaling lately. If you’re…

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