How to learn content topic planning and subscripting skills from media or corporate publications?

[About the author] Fabius Chin, known as White Bear in the world. He is currently the co-founder of the website “Content Hacker”. He has more than 20 years of experience in public relations, marketing and media practice, and is good at marketing copywriting and content marketing planning.

Qin Zhenjia has worked in the media, internal corporate marketing public relations and public relations, and marketing consulting companies, and has complete experience in the demand side and supply side of content issues. Interview experience covers information technology industry, medical biotechnology industry, financial industry and government policy, etc.

After introducing the enterprise self-media in [Taiwan] (https://www.contenthacker.today/2018/03/taiwan-enterprise-owned-media.html) and [foreign] (https://www.contenthacker.today/2018/02/enterprise-owned-media.html), let’s talk about how to “steal” other people’s cover topics and column planning methods from these enterprise self-media or general mass media.

For some corporate self-media that are publicly released and provide paid subscriptions, in fact, like general mass media, they must win the attention of consumers. If content of equal value is not provided, consumers will not easily open their wallets. Therefore, how corporate self-media in these professional fields “set cover themes” is worth learning. It is indeed not easy for these corporate self-media to not only publish on time according to a fixed cycle, but also attract readers willing to pay for them.

If time is limited and you don’t have time to read every article carefully, here are some key learning techniques recommended to learn other people’s skills. Of course, these tips also apply to learning from general mass media or professional magazines. It is recommended to start with corporate self-media or professional magazines in the industry you are engaged in. Since these industry terminology and jargon are familiar to you, it may be easier to get started.

Learn topic proportion planning from the table of contents page

By browsing the contents page of a print magazine, you can know the total number of pages in the entire publication. Next, learn:

• Cover topic proportion: Calculate the number of pages of a series of articles related to the cover topic, and understand the proportion of the topic articles in each issue of the total length, as well as the proportion of other fixed columns.

• Sub-topic allocation ratio: Understand how many articles the cover topic consists of, how to subdivide the topic, and how many words each article requires to clearly explain the topic concept.

For example, it is calculated that the entire magazine has about 64 pages, and a total of 5 articles on the cover topic occupy 12 pages, about 18.75%. Among the five cover topics, the core topic of the overview of the Asian market occupies 4 pages, China and Taiwan markets each occupies 2 pages, Japan and South Korea market occupies 2 pages, and Southeast Asia market occupies 2 pages. From this distribution of cover topics, we can understand the proportion of the cover story, and also learn how subtopics can be classified and the proportions of each.

Learn the full-year cover theme planning from the contents page

In addition to observing the proportion of cover themes in a single issue of a magazine and learning the distribution of theme proportions in a single issue of a magazine, we can also learn from the table of contents pages of multiple consecutive issues to plan the theme planning of inter-issue covers for a whole year or even more than two years.

Although some corporate self-media will not put the full text on their website, they are usually willing to publish the contents page of each issue, so we can see all cover stories and fixed column titles. This alone is enough to steal a glimpse of how they arrange and report what kind of stories.

From the inter-issue contents page, we can observe the arrangement, planning and logic of the cover theme:

• Seasonal theme: Whether there is a fixed theme report every year based on important festivals or industry activities, such as [Information Month Exhibition Special Topic] (https://www.ettoday.net/news/20171206/1067298.htm), or [Biotechnology Exhibition Special Topic] (http://www.gbimonthly.com/news/biotw2017/).

• Hot topics at the time: Major issues that happened at the time were set as cover topics, or at least explained as fixed column topics, such as “[Toilet Paper Rebellion](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=%E8%A1%9” in February 2018 B%E7%94%9F%E7%B4%99)” or “Earthquake Disaster Prevention”.

From the catalog pages of professional magazines, in addition to reporting on annual regular major events in the industry, we can also learn:

• Industry trends: What new [trend developments] is the industry concerned about (https://udn.com/news/story/6905/2197082)? What are the reasons for the industry’s overall market increase or decrease? Learn to look at the needs of buyers in this industry from a macro perspective of the industry, or even the overall economic level, and expand your own landscape. What corporate self-media is most afraid of is downgrading itself and narrowing the pattern to only reporting on its own products, which is no different from a catalog, and the sparks and responses it can arouse are too small. But we can also think in reverse: how to turn catalogs into corporate self-media? At least to the level of Quanlian Life Journal?

• Tips for reporting on new industry knowledge: Find out from the catalog page what kind of new knowledge the industry is concerned about? What benefits can it bring to consumers? What is the connection between your own products and this new knowledge or technology? How many manufacturers of the same nature or in different industries are also using this new knowledge and technology to develop products? The most popular topic at the moment is probably the development of “Digital Currency” driven by “blockchain”. Blockchain has begun to influence all walks of life from pure technological knowledge. There are also “Big Data” or “[Artificial Intelligence](https ”://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD)” Such popular issues can generally attract the attention of the target audience.

Learn article subscripting techniques from the table of contents page

Different companies talk about the same topic in their self-media, but they approach it from different angles and write the subscript (title) in different ways. How to write a title that is bold and focused, so that the target audience will want to continue reading the content at the first glance, is a lifelong learning; no matter how experienced the editor is, he dare not say that he can write a good title every time, it is all about constant adjustments.

Continue to pay attention to how corporate self-media or professional media bids. Learn key words or repetition patterns in sentences, pay attention to rhyming and consonance techniques, and see if you can use them. Quick tags like “Three dietary tips I learned from Dae Jang Geum” and “Five tips for powerpoint presentations that you should know even if your boss doesn’t tell you.”

However, the same trick cannot be used all the time. There will never be a farm article title like ”○○○ stunned 100 million people” all day long. The target audience will get tired of it after watching it for a long time.

Make good use of the library’s free resources

For corporate self-media that only publish print magazine versions or cannot read the full text on the website, if you cannot find so many magazines on the market at the moment, please first go to the [county and city library website] (http://www.tpml.edu.tw/) to check whether the branch library nearest you has a collection of books. If you are lucky enough to have one, you can then “catch them all” and immediately browse magazines from one or two years on site. It is fast and convenient, and you won’t have to make a trip in vain, and you don’t have to spend a fortune to search for magazines one by one (you may not be able to find every magazine).

The important thing is that after everyone observes and learns from these corporate self-media, remember to reflect on how to apply it to your own corporate self-media and implement it in the Content Calendar. Everything is difficult at the beginning. The corporate self-media compiled by yourself may be just a very thin publication or a small blog (https://www.contenthacker.today/p/blog.html). But as long as the theme planning is meaningful to consumers and the title is good enough to make the target audience feel that the content can be useful, the content can be spread, accumulate word of mouth, and further achieve the effect of promoting the brand.

I will give another example later to explain how to learn the practice of corporate self-media planning through the practical operation of “taking others as teachers”.

★ Content Hacking Lecture Series (CHL5): How to run corporate official websites, blogs and publications [Registration now]

★ Recommended reading:

• From 3C to finance, how do Taiwanese companies use self-media to deepen content marketing?

• Enterprise owned media: A content marketing tool that even Coca-Cola and NEC love to use

• Operating corporate self-media, starting from becoming a “growth editor” ★ Photo credit: Oliver Thomas Klein

★ Content Hacking Lecture Series (CHL6): How to use presentations for content marketing [Registration now]

★ To improve your content power, please don’t miss the online course “[Content Power: The Super Power of Building Brands] (https://hahow.in/cr/content-power)”

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