Tag: Blogging
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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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A Straightforward Routine for Producing One Strong Article Every Week
The best writing advice I ever received was delivered in slippers. Mine, not someone else’s. I’d dragged myself to my desk on a cold morning, wrapped in flannel, nursing a cup of coffee that was more hope than caffeine, and I realized: the articles I was most proud of hadn’t been written in heroic marathon…
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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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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…
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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…
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A Detail-Oriented Writer’s Twelve-Step Preflight Guide for Blog Posts
I once watched a writer accidentally publish a half-finished draft to a site with six figures of daily traffic. The post went live with a placeholder headline that read “WORKING TITLE, FIX THIS.” It sat there, in all its glory, for forty-seven minutes before anyone noticed. That writer was not me. (This time.) But it…
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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…