Tips are the distilled, actionable wisdom of subject matter experts. Tips become apparent to the subject matter expert as his general principles encounter reality. For the content marketer, creating a tip inventory of a market’s knowledge provides a deeper understanding of a market’s pains and opens up the following opportunities…
Opportunities You Create With a Tip Inventory
- Tip and advice “recategorization” or “reengineering” for easier access, increased usability and higher retention
- A ready starting source for a tip-based content calendar.
- A consistent way to uncover information gaps and clarification opportunities.
- A list of subject matter experts who create tips.
Info You Will Need
- 48 Query Stems for Creating a Tip Inventory
- A Brief Introduction to “Subject Matter Phrases” for Content Marketing Research
- Towards a Methodology for Classifying and Collating Market Research Queries (Not necessary, but useful to know.)
Your tip inventory will probably live in a spreadsheet – here are some thoughts on columns for that spreadsheet…
11 Tip Inventory Column Suggestions
- Tip Target: Who is the intended audience or receiver of this tip? Is it aligned with a persona you can detect, or a skill level, or a specific segment of your market? Tracking this will help you when it comes time to repurpose your tips into more targeted, useful arangements.
- Tip Result: What does this tip help someone do better, faster, with less effort, with greater impact, etcetera. Again, this categorization will help you to create new and meaningful tip groupings.
- Tip Requirements: Are there any notable or meaningful requirements for the tip-user? This could include objects or skill sets or codes, etcetera.
- Original Tip: Here, copy and paste the tip in its original format.
- Tip Revision: Here, write the tip itself as clearly and precisely as possible, as if it were a dictionary definition. Omit humanity for now – you can add character back in later!
- Source Title: What is the title of your tip source?
- Source URL: What is the URL of the tip source?
- Source Origin: Who wrote this tip as you first encountered it?
- Source Contact: What is the contact information of the author of the tip source?
- Tip Occurrence Frequency: How often have you encountered this specific tip in your research?
- Tip Occurrence URLs: What are the other URLs where this tip exists?
Related Resources:
The Link Builder’s Guide to Competitive ‘How-To’ Content Analysis
Linkable Asset Inventory: A Starting Point For New Link Building Campaigns
17 Tips for Tip-Based Content – How to Research, Scale & Promote