Tag: Content Planning
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 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 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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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…