How do you know when your message is worth the effort to tell? Not only worth telling, but worth your audience consuming? To help build a well-oiled marketing machine, it helps to have clearly defined processes and checkpoints. Over the years, we’ve developed a checklist that grades our messaging ideas. It’s our top-requested resource.

In fact, it’s the heart of one of our frequently given talks “Right & Wrong: Lessons in Shareable Content” which discusses how we rate and beat up our initial ideas until it passes this checklist. It’s not an easy list to pass – most of our original ideas flunk it. But by working those ideas until they pass an acceptable number of these attributes, we get to the ideas that perform.

It’s free to download, but promise us one thing. Be sure to pay close attention to a few of our favorite rules:

1) Know the brand position you’re trying to reinforce.
2) Break some rules. Get crazy for a second and ignore a best practice.

Those two alone will make you stand out. Plus, it’s a whole lot more fun to create. We look forward to seeing your ideas come alive.