When you are looking at seeding content for a new module or a section, the biggest challenge that greets you is – Will it work? Now, it is fairly easy to cheat yourself and, say yes, to all ideas that come and you get passionate about. However, making it happen, again and again, is a very different ball game altogether.
At times, the team, which is planning a particular series gets carried away with something which is working on a similar site or a competing site, and at times, someone just decides not to share any idea thinking it is “just too weird”. Planning content in the time and age of social-media hyper awareness can be a daunting task, full of insurmountable challenges of user profiling and a never-ending list of expectations. Trust me, a content planner’s job, once understood, just can’t be anyone’s envy.
We, at Mapsofworld, battle almost 10,000 content questions every year and till last year we were giving a go ahead to almost 3,000 + every year. That is a lot of money and a lot of effort and a few lots more of risk. A few months back we decided we would start going slow on content planning and development and do more testing to pre-assess what would work and what would not.
I, particularly, remember approving the content series on Top 5 and Top 10 things in different geographies. My fear was that it is too competitive a segment, but then search engines need to be trusted, too. We told our team to do an out-of-the-world job about it, and they did! This project worked, now the issue was where to place these? And then, there was a brainstorming session, which suggested that these all are travel tips, hence they all started enriching travel tips section. Today travel tips section has almost a hundred of these and we are not letting them go.
Oh! For the particular one, check here.