I’m interrupting an extended period of not blogging to quickly write about Content Strategy, Simplified. That’s the name of a little consultancy I set up last year. I kind of hoped at the time that it would one day become a medium-sized consultancy. It didn’t, but that’s okay.
Better than okay, in truth.
If you’re reading this – and I doubt many people will – you’ve probably been redirected here from simplified.net.nz. That old site expires this week. It was a beautiful Squarespace site, which looked a lot like many other beautiful Squarespace sites. The actual work of Simplified – “Content strategy services and workshops for your business” – stopped months ago. This explainer blog post is only happening now because Squarespace’s annual bill has just turned up and I need somewhere to redirect the URL to. It’s a suitably simple strategy, I think.
The consultancy never graduated from “side hustle”. I never took the leap into full-time self-employment. The view over that cliff edge looked kind of fun. I was up for it, I think. I thought I had a pretty good shove about to hit me between the shoulder blades, too, because in the early months of 2017 we were getting ready to move from Auckland to Hamilton. There’s a lot of great things about Hamilton, but I’d convinced myself that the employment market for content strategists wasn’t one of them. I was wrong about that.
As I write, I’m in my 3rd or 4th month as Waikato University’s digital content manager, and Hamilton life is working out just the way Torie and I hoped. My new life goal is to get so deep into family life and 9-5ing that I actually get bored. I haven’t been bored since…2010, maybe? I mean I want to get properly life-bored, kind of tetchy, like I’m just sitting there looking around my house and kids and work and thinking, “I need to change something and do something new”. I want to find out what I’ll come up with.
So, if you just visited simplified.net.nz in the hope that you could find a content strategist who’ll spend a few weeks or months helping your team sort out its digital shit; or book a tailored version of one of my conference talks; or put together a day or two worth of training for your web writers, editors, and managers, then please accept my apologies. This post is probably not what you wanted to read.
Ironically enough, Content Strategy, Simplified has disappeared as I’ve simplified my life. Perhaps you have a unique and attractive enough piece of work, or an amazing enough team, or a profligate enough budget, that getting in touch is worth it. Perhaps by the time you read this I’ll be bored and just waiting for an email. I mean, it’s incredibly unlikely that a three-month project will tickle me the way it used to, but I do still enjoy leading workshops. Your call.