How to use your content to attract customers to your Universe

What is a content Universe?

I like to think of the content universe as this big thing that holds all of your content. It’s all your ideas, your blog posts, and even your videos. This is the stuff that you create for the purpose of educating and attracting potential customers or audiences to you and your services or products.

This will include things like blog posts and social media content.

This post, as an example, is part of my content Universe, but there’s a problem with how most of us create our content, and ultimately, our universe.

Why do we need a Content Universe?

Having a Content Universe creates a library that you can tap into not only to invite your customers to travel from where they are and to come and visit your universe, but also maybe to pack in a bag and stay a while.

Having this library of content, your content Universe, not only builds up your content creation muscle but also builds up variety for your audience to engage with you. If you only ever created one post or one blog article or one video, then that wouldn’t be very informative for your audience.

Imagine there was only one TV show, or one newspaper article. There wouldn’t be any reason for us to switch the TV back on or buy the newspaper ever again because there’s just nothing new and interesting there.

What you should avoid when creating your Content

There is a mistake that we all make when we creating our content, and you may have heard me talk about this before, but it something that we do all the time and that is, talk about ourselves or our products and services all the time.

Now there’s nothing wrong with promoting your products but your customers or audience is probably so far away from that conversation that is can sometimes feel like lightyears away. It’s so far away that they don’t understand anything that you are saying and so they do what we all do when things are too far away, we switch to another channel.

What you can do instead

Instead of taking straight shots to talk about your product or service, what you want to do is create invitation for your audience to come along and hear something interesting. This is easy to do in short social media posts.

Think about the problem they are having

When I create content I’m trying to think about “What problem is my audience having”. Then I carve stories and content in my universe, around those problems. I don’t often offer a solution but rather something that highlights the issue. You want to agitate the problem so that they react to your posts with a “ME TOO!”.

This will give you insight into just who and how many people have the problem that you are trying to solve.

Don’t be despondent if no one responds. When you are getting started your audience doesn’t know you well enough to share what they are experiencing as problems.

Ask questions about the indirect ways to solve the problem

These could be things that aren’t a direct solution that is in your head, often very challenging for you as the content creator to do, but definitely worth putting in the effort. This will expand your thinking of alternative solutions that your customer may be thinking which in turn could unlock opportunities for you.

Create a spark then some fire

The more you do this, the more sparks you will be creating. The more sparks you create the better chance you have of starting a content fire that burns as hot as the sun in your Universe that may just catch the attention of your audience and customers that then make the effort to not only engage in your content but also spend time in your Content Universe, consuming more of what you have to share.