Category: Content Strategy
-
Earning Audience Confidence Through Consistent Content Marketing
In 2007, something strange happened to me. I’d been publishing valuable, free content on my blog for eighteen months, no product, no service, just a relentless focus on serving the audience. And people started emailing me with a question I didn’t expect: “Why are you giving all this away for free? What’s the catch?” They…
-
Ditch Terrible Stock Photos and Choose Better Visuals for Your Posts
Stock photos are simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to content marketing. They’re the best thing because, without them, most of us would be publishing walls of unbroken text and hoping for the best. They’re the worst thing because the wrong image doesn’t just fail to help, it actively undermines…
-
Crafting Intimate Prose Without Crossing into Narcissism
I almost didn’t write this introduction. Not because I had nothing to say, because I had too much to say about myself, and I could feel the slide beginning. The one where a perfectly useful essay becomes a diary entry with a megaphone. Every writer who dares to be personal knows that slide. It’s the…
-
Clever Cropping Tricks to Instantly Transform Your Photos
Cut it out. Not the dramatic kind, the photographic kind. The kind where you take a perfectly mediocre image and, with a single decisive gesture, remove everything that doesn’t serve the story until what’s left is magnetic. I learned this in design school, and it remains the single most underused visual technique available to anyone…
-
Choosing the Right Topics for Your Audio Show
A friend launched a podcast and called me six months in, voice flat with the particular exhaustion of someone who’s been talking into a microphone and hearing nothing back. “I’ve published 30 episodes,” she said. “I’ve interviewed interesting people. I’ve covered topics I care about. And my audience is still the same 200 people, most…
-
Captivate Your Perfect Audience Through Meaningful Content
In 2014, Jerry Seinfeld sat down with Alec Baldwin for a podcast interview and said something that should have been boring but wasn’t. He explained why his show was good: “In most TV series, 50 percent of the time is spent working on the show, 50 percent of the time is spent dealing with personality,…
-
Build a Scrumptious Content Plan Inspired by Farm-Fresh Principles
I once had a farm-to-table meal in Devon, England that I’d been dreaming about all day. Fresh, local lamb. Honey collected on-site. Baby vegetables picked that morning on farms within thirty miles. The menu read like a love letter to the countryside. Then the food arrived. Overcooked lamb. Drowning in honey. Baby vegetables reduced to…
-
An Effortless Content Workflow for Producing Great Writing on a Tight Calendar
I used to write blog posts the way I used to pack for trips: throw everything in at the last minute, panic, and hope the result was acceptable. It wasn’t. The posts were ragged. The suitcase was always missing something essential. And both activities left me exhausted and vaguely resentful of the entire process. Here’s…
-
A Streamlined System for Promoting Your Brand Through Content Creation
I’m going to tell you something that sounds like a lie but isn’t: content creation can become as automatic as brushing your teeth. I know. You’re rolling your eyes. You’re thinking about the blank page and the blinking cursor and the way your brain suddenly remembers every urgent task the moment you sit down to…
-
A Straightforward Path to Building Your Mailing List from Scratch
I watched a friend refresh his email dashboard every morning for three months. Zero new subscribers. The number sat there like a stain that wouldn’t come out, mocking him, confirming every quiet suspicion he had that maybe nobody cared about what he had to say. He was writing good stuff, too. That was the painful…
-
A Smarter Comment Moderation Strategy for Busy Blog Owners
My favorite word is No. I say it with relish. At dinner parties, at negotiate-your-own-salary meetings, at the moment someone asks if they can “pick my brain over coffee.” (I contain multitudes. One of them is unapologetic.) Here’s what most writers get wrong about building an online community: they think hospitality means an open door…
-
A Seven-Step Blueprint for Crafting Highly Viral Posts
I once watched a blog post I wrote get shared by someone with a massive audience, and in the four hours that followed, I learned more about traffic than I had in the previous four months of trying to game search algorithms. The post wasn’t my best piece of writing. It wasn’t my worst. It…
-
A Ninety-Day Roadmap for Finishing Your Content Endeavor
At the end of June 2009, I got an idea: I should write an ebook. My writing and editing business was less than a year old. I had never written anything that resembled a book. The notion should have felt absurd. It didn’t. It felt like the next step I’d been avoiding by calling it…
-
Seven Strategies to Attract an Audience When You’re Completely Unknown
The early days are a quiet kind of magic. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s expecting anything. You can say the wrong thing, publish the imperfect draft, experiment with a voice that doesn’t quite work, and the stakes are beautifully, almost painfully low. It’s the one phase of building an audience where you’re truly free. Naturally, we all…
-
What It Really Takes to Succeed as a Content Creator in a Noisy World
I once worked closely with someone who had bright pink hair. Neon, unapologetic, visible-from-across-a-conference-hall pink. And here’s what happened inside my head every time I sat down to write: Am I interesting enough? Do I need a thing? Should I dye my hair? Get a signature outfit? Develop a larger-than-life persona? It’s the question that…
-
Building a Content Marketing Plan From Scratch
I was on a call with a sharp marketing director who’d just been told to “create a content strategy.” She’d read the blog posts. She’d attended the webinars. She knew she needed one. And then she sat down at her desk, opened a blank document, and realized she had absolutely no idea what a content…