Category: Content Strategy
-
Three Essential Strategies for New Writers Without a Following
I could talk about beginner writing all day. The early stage of a writing career is my favorite topic because it’s where everything is possible and nothing is proven, a combination that’s either thrilling or terrifying, depending on the hour. You decided to be a writer because you can’t not write. The impulse is bigger…
-
The Trust Puzzle: Does Visual Design Establish Credibility?
Subject: Panic Hey Milt, So like I said over coffee Friday, I’ve got to get a website set up fast. And it needs to look credible! Not like I put it together in a week. Even though that’s exactly what I need to do. Not sure where to start. Thoughts? Frank Subject: Re: Panic Hey…
-
The Surprising Reason Audiences Reject Unfiltered Authenticity
I had a t-shirt from SXSW Interactive 2000, the kind of faded, threadbare artifact that only looks cool because you actually were there and the shirt earned every frayed edge honestly. I wore it like a badge of honor. Then a friend showed up to dinner in a shirt that looked almost identical. Same vintage…
-
The One Trait All Readers Share: Leverage It for Maximum Relevance
It doesn’t matter if you write about minimalism or motorcycles. If you have an audience, it contains three concentric circles: 1. People who read your content. 2. People who read and share your content. 3. People who take action on the advice in your content. These aren’t separate tribes. They overlap. The person who implements…
-
The Content Strategy Spectrum: Matching Your Message to Buyer Demand
Staring at a blank page, wondering what you could possibly write to convince someone, anyone, to become a customer? That feeling has a name. Actually, it has several: dread, obligation, paralysis. And underneath all of them is a mistaken belief that every piece of content you publish needs to close the deal. It doesn’t. Not…
-
The Case for Why Slackers Excel at Content Promotion
I’m going to let you in on a secret about me: I don’t leap out of bed in the morning ready to conquer the world. I’m more the type who needs to avoid all human interaction, including email, until at least one cup of coffee has crossed the threshold from my mug to my bloodstream.…
-
The Case for Having a Dedicated Editor on Your Marketing Team
If you saw my standardized test scores from high school, you’d notice something odd: very high in math, very low in verbal. Not exactly the profile you’d expect from someone who became one of the web’s most seasoned content editors. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world. Sort of. Content needs to communicate quickly and…
-
Ten Strategies for Turning Far-Off Dreams Into Actionable Plans
There’s a particular kind of sadness that arrives when you realize you’ve spent another year helping other people hit their deadlines while your own projects gathered dust. Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of sadness. The quiet kind. The kind that shows up when you close your laptop on a Thursday night and think, I really…
-
Strategies for Captivating Unfamiliar Audiences
I published a blog post once that I thought was brilliant, carefully researched, elegantly structured, full of insight. The comments fell into four distinct camps. One person said it changed their thinking. Another said “Great post” and clearly hadn’t read past the headline. A third picked apart my sources. And a fourth used my ideas…
-
Strategic Prompts That Spark Meaningful Connections With Your Audience
I know. I know. I know. “Viral” is a real word people use to describe content that has exploded across distribution channels, landing in feeds, group chats, news roundups, and that email from your aunt who just discovered the internet. But I still don’t like it. When “going viral” becomes your goal, you’ve already lost…
-
Six Irresistible Web Design Tricks Your Visitors Will Devour
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”, Steve Jobs You wrote the words. Good words. Words that teach and persuade and build trust over time. And then someone lands on your page, sees a wall of text floating in a sea of visual nothingness, and bounces. Your…
-
Scale Your Traffic With a Scalable Blogging Approach
Here’s a question that nobody in the history of the internet has answered honestly: “Do you get all the traffic you’d like?” The answer is always no. The person with 300 monthly visitors wants 3,000. The person with 30,000 wants 300,000. The person with 3 million wants the NYT homepage. Traffic hunger is the one…
-
Proven Guidelines for Contributed Posts That Actually Get Published
The first guest post I ever submitted was rejected. Not gently. Not with feedback. Just silence, the kind that stretches from days into weeks until you realize silence is the answer. Five years later, the same publication asked me to write for them. That gap between rejection and invitation wasn’t luck. It was the most…
-
Professional Blogging for Real Results, Not Flawless Ones
I wrote an entire ebook to avoid starting a blog. That’s not a joke. That’s a confession from someone who once believed that a finished, bound, never-to-be-touched-again document was safer than an open-ended commitment to publish regularly. The blog felt like exposure. The ebook felt like control. Here’s what I know now that I didn’t…
-
Getting Your Writing Noticed by the Right Audience
If you want to get discovered as a writer, there’s an elephant in the room. Its name is SEO, and if you’re anything like I was, your immediate reaction is somewhere between a yawn and a groan. I wasn’t into it either. For a long time, SEO looked to me like sketchy tricks designed to…
-
Four Surprising Ways to Establish Expertise in Almost Any Topic
When I started writing about marketing, I had a terrible secret: I wasn’t sure I knew enough. I’d read the books. I’d done the work. I’d gotten the results. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice kept whispering that I was one tough question away from being exposed as a fraud, that…
-
Five Reader Personalities You Should Feel Free to Disregard
I once received two emails within the same hour. One said I was publishing too often. The other said I wasn’t publishing enough. I stared at both, wondering if I’d accidentally built a audience of exact opposites. Here’s the emotional truth most writing advice won’t name: wanting to please everyone isn’t generosity. It’s fear dressed…
-
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…