If you happen to be in Austin Saturday, you should come see me at BlogathonATX!

This Saturday marks the third Blogathon in Austin, which started innocently when organizer Ilene Haddad asked on Twitter if anyone wanted to get together and blog one afternoon. It’s now a day-long event that includes a tech room with experts to help you tweak (or even start) your blog, awesome food donated from great local businesses to keep us fueled for the day, and presenters who will answer blogging and social media questions related to content, finding your voice, engaging your audience and much more. Like me. I’ll be in the hot seat answering questions about personal vs. business blogging.

For instance: If you’re a business owner, should you have a business blog and a personal blog? What about separate social media accounts? Companies have social media policies, should individuals have personal policies?

We’ll be doing lots of things related to blogging — helping each other brainstorm ideas, offering input on design and maybe even starting new blogs with new friends over shared interests. But they’re also be lots of learning and fun. And I think that’s my favorite part.

My dad had all sorts of great one-liners. They seemed to come out of his mind and mouth quickly and appropriately for any occasion. For a skinned knee, he would always say, “It’ll feel better when it quits hurting.” When it came to love, he often reminded me, with a wink, “It’s just as easy to marry for money as it is for love.” (I married for love, in case you’re wondering.) And when it came to my career, he encouraged me to aim high, explaining, “It’s better to aim high and miss just a little than to aim low and be right on the bull’s eye.”

Columnist Regina Brett from The Plain Dealer of Cleveland shared that same tip with participants recently in a Content Marketing World breakout session on emotion and storytelling. Brett encouraged those of us in the room — whether we’re writing for a newspaper, a personal blog or a corporate website — to pick a bull’s eye and go for it. To aim high or not even bother.

While I walked away with a full page of notes from her session and probably 20 tips for telling a great story, 5 from my list are definitely favorites:

1. “Put a face on it.” Say you run a hospital with the highest birth rate in the state. Instead of spouting off numbers and statistics in your writing, talk about specific babies or the doctors and nurses who give them such exceptional care.
2. “Circle the wagons.” If your manufacturing plant runs on the sweat of employees who have been there for 20 or 30 years, instead of writing from the corporate viewpoint, share the point of view of one of those employees. Brett called it “hearing the story through different ears” and seeing it through a different set of eyes.
3. “Show me, don’t tell me.” Do the words alone do your story, blog post or article justice? Would a picture make a positive impact? What about an infographic?
4. “Tell a big story small.” There was a huge music festival in Austin this weekend — Austin City Limits. It brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city and puts millions of dollars into the economy. Our local newspaper ran many stories on the festival, one of which focused on a 9-year-old boy who had been to the festival every year since it started when he was only 10 months old. Telling the story from his viewpoint makes a big story small.
5. “Edit.” It just takes a couple of minutes. Read it out loud. Email it to yourself and read it in a different font. Go eat lunch and come back to read it again. Just make sure you give every piece a good once (or twice) over.

There is lots of content on the web. Lots. If you wanted to build a website about, say, the health benefits of running, there would be no shortage of content already out there that you could license and curate to fill your pages. But don’t underestimate the power of custom content — your own words, videos and pictures produced from your own point of view — and what it can do for your site.

If you’ve been thinking about custom content but aren’t sure you’re ready to take that plunge, here are four benefits that might help persuade you:

1. It fills a void. What are readers searching for when they visit your site? More importantly, are they finding it? If not, fill those gaps with content that you create in the form of how-to articles, videos and illustrative photographs. If readers aren’t finding what they’re looking for when they search your site, you can be sure they’re searching for it — and finding it — elsewhere.
   Do you have content you wish you could get your hands on? If you’ve been spending your energy searching for just the right content vendor for that dream content, why not just write it yourself? You’ll save time, energy and money, and that custom content will lead right to the next three benefits.
2. It increases traffic. Google and other search engines really like fresh, relevant and timely content. It other words, if you wrote an article on cold weather running gear back in 2004 that only your employees read, Google doesn’t really care at this point. A new article on the subject will allow you to share that content with readers on your site and through social media tools. If people like it, share it and link to it, and if it contains strong keywords, more search engines will point to your piece of content when potential readers search for “cold weather running gear”.
3. It makes you the authority. If you’re licensing content from Kyle, The Running Expert, readers of your website will soon realize they only need to read and subscribe to Kyle’s site to get the information they want. Instead of serving as the middleman, sharing Kyle’s content, providing your own content will make you the expert and allow readers to trust your expertise enough to visit again, subscribe and share.
4. It creates an opportunity to make money. Yep, money! If you start creating enough quality content on a regular basis, maybe someone will knock on your door — or at least drop you an email — and ask about licensing your articles, videos or photographs.

   Let’s say you start a monthly video series on how to get started with a running program. it might include the right gear, proper nutrition for before and after a run, mistakes beginners make and so on. That new content is not only updating your website, but it’s also producing good “Google juice,” as it’s sometimes called. It’s making you an authority on the subject and it might even be good enough that someone else wants to pay you for using it. How cool would that be?!

We’ve decided to change things around a bit here. Starting today, we’re going to blog here as a company. I’ll still be blogging at LauraCreekmore.com on a regular basis, so please continue to visit me there, as well.

But we’re going to all share our thoughts here on content strategy, as well. Hope you’ll stick around and join the conversation.