Is Your Content Categorized? Raising the Barr Weekly Memo: Issue 179

This week’s reflection point: You’ve probably heard me say that powerful content creation is one of the key distinguishing attributes of great thought leaders and leading organizations. Whether you use programs such as Evernote or Trello to store your ideas, organizing the content is critical in order to achieve successful results. It all starts with the formulation of the proper categories.

Here are the categories I have created for our content development:

• Topics: The list of all my ideas for the creation of future articles, podcasts, videos and such.
• Stories: Interesting stories, vignettes and examples that I may use.
• Metaphors: The collection of my favorite metaphors.
• Chadisms: These are my unique quotes I have created over the years
• Quotes: My favorite quotes of other fascinating thinkers that I may debunk or add value to.
• Questions: This is a collection of questions I’ve been asked by clients, colleagues or individuals attending my presentations. When I publish content from this category, I email and thank the person who asked me the question and include the proper attribution.
• Books / eBooks: Ideas for future publishing including chapters and sub chapters.
• Diagrams: The concept of the process I want to create in a diagram format.
• Cartoons: This will include the headline as well as the scene I want my team to draw and design.
• Products: Future offerings as products.

Although I use both the Evernote and Trello platforms to manage various functions of my organization, for the purpose of organizing my content ideas I find Evernote to be outstanding. When I think of an idea that deserves to be recorded for later use, I quickly enter it into the proper category or email it directly into Evernote.

This week’s tip: Time to start creating your own categories and populate and organize them for prolific content creation.