The Art of Impact

Hendrickson, Pam. The Art of Impact: How to Use Content Marketing the Right Way to Build Your Brand, Grow Your Business and Make a Difference

This book touches on a lot of topics but what had the most impact for me personally was the fact that you don't need to provide original or unique content to engage readers and be successful. For example, one section is devoted to 3 stages of content development; 1 Curate 2 Architect 3 Produce

The discussion is very comprehensive so I'm just going to focus on Curation in this post.

To quote Ms Henderson directly;

"Your audience doesn’t care if you are some super brainy wizard. They aren’t coming to you because they think of you as a living encyclopedia. They are coming to you because you are human person they can relate to who is able to share quality information in a way they can appreciate, understand, and employ."

Just as a journalist, doesn't create the news, we are not responsible for creating new information. Our value to our audience is in how we package that information to make it relatable and usable.

And these are the methods she suggests to present the information we share.

1. Sharing "As Is" - There is a whole lot of useless and outright wrong information out there on the web. You do a valuable service just by quoting or linking to the gold nuggets among the stinking heaps of nongold nuggets. And of course credit your sources.
2. Give Your Perspective - How have you benefited from using this information? What kind of avoidable pain did you suffer by NOT knowing this information?
3. Aggregate - Collect other peoples research and data and produce something new that highlights a theme or shows logical progressions. She explains this is how infographics work.
4. Provide Access - As professional content marketers we will come into contact with the thoughts and advice of many more experts than the average person could possibly do. Even if they knew exactly where to go for the information, they wouldn't have the time. You could do an article on 10 Best Tips for Starting a Business. Each tip would reference the source of the information. (of course WA can be one of them) So you have pointed your reader in the right direction.
5. Distill the Information - Cliffnotes has been around since 1958 and is still going strong. Because you don't need to read a whole book or article, if someone else has thoughtfully provided the main points and take-aways for you. See my post 'The Study Game' for a book that details a process to deconstruct information.

Putting her money where her mouth is, Ms Henderson gives blanket permission to the world to produce a blog, article or video like “6 Practical Things I Learned from The Art of Impact by Pam Hendrickson”

Read this book. You won't regret it.