Using Failure as a Foundation
“This is one tip I’ll offer to any struggling writer out there,” says Heather Fawcett in Writer’s Digest: “If you have an old idea in a notebook or saved to a flash drive, try recycling it into a new form”.
“It’s time you reinvented the word failure and saw it as feedback,” Suzie Flynn, BSc agrees… When you fail you have the opportunity to look at things from a new perspective, to experiment and even playfully have fun with new ways of doing things.
It was back in the early days of Say It For You that my then networking colleague Robby Slaughter had published the book Failure: the Secret to Success. Based on the thesis of that delightful book, I explained to my readers two ways in which failure could be an important ingredient in blogging for business:
- Your posts can demonstrate that you understand the problems the searcher is facing, and are devoted to the process of finding – and sharing – unique solutions.
- Failure can become a standard by which to understand how a successful outcome will look and feel.
Some ten years later, I gained another perspective on failure when then Nuvo editor Laura McPhee devoted an entire section of the paper to highlighting “alumni”, people who worked there but who had departed for “better things”. As a content writer, I understood that the best way to make a company or professional practice relatable is to introduce readers to the people behind the brand, even if those people are no longer involved in making the products or delivering the services. And, of course, some of those stories and memories are going to revolve around failures – things that, at the time, had gone very wrong.
For me, Heather Fawcett’s piece in Writer’s Digest added a whole other dimension to the concept of using “failure” as a foundational element in content marketing: “recycling” ideas and presenting them in a new way more relevant to what’s happening “in the now”… One great content marketing sustainability tip is to keep an idea file, online or in a little notebook or folder with articles you cut out of newspapers or magazines, notes on ideas gleaned from a seminar, from listening to the radio, reading a blog or a book.. Your folder of “ingredients” , I tell newbie content marketers, will make your job a whole lot easier!
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