Building a Concept into Content

Often times authors and thought leaders confuse a concept for content. A concept is a great starting point, it’s a notion, an idea that piques your interest and intrigues you. Content is a much more developed version of that idea or notion. You can do much more with content than with concepts.

You cannot monetize or leverage a concept; you can monetize and leverage content.

Most content has to start out as a concept; it’s the seed that is planted in your mind that needs to be nurtured to grow and develop. You can’t sell your seed; you can sell the fruits, vegetables, and flowers that grow from those seeds. Now here’s where it gets interesting—many authors and speakers are concept heavy. When they speak or write they throw out a slew of interesting nuggets, things that get you to think a bit differently about something or see something mundane in an entirely new light. It makes for interesting conversation at the cocktail event but you don’t know what to do with the concept. If you can’t apply it to your work, life, or organization it may very well be interesting but it just isn’t valuable.

Some concepts are, and always will be, concepts.

What I’m advocating is that you take the time, energy, and effort to convert your best, most viable concepts into solid content. Building a concept into content enables you to transfer your insight, models, methodologies, and processes to individuals, teams, and organizations so that they can apply and master it. They can do something with it. This requires work, research, experiments, and a lot of effort. The rewards for that are numerous. Your work can now move beyond a keynote or an article into the realm of scalable solutions that can be consumed by large organizations at the enterprise level. It’s easy and fun to come up with concepts on a regular basis. It satisfies our curiosity, it is ultimately what fuels lifelong learners. Think of those concepts as the starting point, not as the end game. Develop the best ones (at least the ones you believe to be the best ones) into viable content.

If this is not something that comes easy to you or that you enjoy, get some help. There are folks that are amazing at nurturing concepts into full blown content. It’s often a bit of a different skill set, but working together with a content developer may be just what you need.