Tag: Audience Building
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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…
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Are You Crafting Content for Admirers or Buyers
Mickey Spillane did not suffer from delusions of grandeur. He didn’t write his Mike Hammer detective novels hoping they’d be studied in literature seminars. He wrote them to sell. And sell they did, more than 225 million copies. I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends. > ,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…