When it comes to producing any content, spending an extra 20 minutes upfront detailing the goal and desired outcome for a piece can save a bunch of time for you, your team, and your writers. Enter – the content brief. Without a content brief to lay the groundwork for writers, a simple blog post can take excruciatingly longer than desired to complete. Not to mention, the finished product can...
An Introvert’s Guide to Networking
As an introvert, talking to a bunch of people who I just met and engaging in small talk can be a bit daunting. Sometimes, just the thought of “networking” at a conference or event has me thinking about skipping it in favor of cozy sweatpants, Netflix and maybe following along from the event hashtag. Fortunately, I’ve learned some tips over the past few years for how to get more...
11 Excellent Brand Marketing And Copywriting Talks You Probably Haven’t Heard Of
Chances are – we’ve all heard the great speeches like the late Steve Jobs’ Think Different and David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.” However, digging through Youtube and TED, there are thousands of great brand-building, marketing and copywriting talks online. In this post, I’m highlighting 11 excellent marketing and copywriting talks. 1. How To Become A Better Copywriter –...
My Word For 2020 – Momentum
Every year since 2014, I’ve deliberately set aside some time in late December or early January to evaluate the past year and set my theme for the year ahead. For the past 6 of those years, I’ve shared my theme for the year in a blog post. My theme in 2014 was change and resiliency. In 2015, it was vulnerability. In 2016 it was mindfulness. In 2017, it was honey over vinegar. In 2018, it was...
Reflecting On My First Year In Business: Top Highlights & 9 Lessons Learned
I’ve heard many of my fellow entrepreneur friends say that starting a business is like a rollercoaster ride. While it made sense, I don’t think I fully internalized that until this year. I started my business in November 2018. Now in my 13th month, I can say that I experienced more intense ups and downs than the prior three years combined. While I had some wins (especially in the second half of...
The State of B2B Content Marketing in Q4 2019 (Including 70+ Statistics)
The world of B2B content marketing is constantly changing. As technology and best practices evolve, so do marketing strategies. While there’s a certain amount of testing, creativity, and intuition that goes into marketing decisions, you can and should rely on data to shape your strategy. In this post, I’m sharing more than 70 B2B content marketing stats that will help you with your marketing...
The WIIFM Principle – How to make your marketing stand out
WIIFM stands for – “What’s in it for me? However if you want your marketing to stand out and resonate with more prospects and customers, you need to be thinking about what’s in it for THEM, not YOU. Another way to think about this is – why should anyone care about what you are creating? What is WIIFM? While it is usually not intentional, most content that marketers write is pretty...
The Future of Voice Search: A Text to Voice Software Experiment
Should you record an audio version of each piece of content you produce? As voice search is expected to make up 50% of all web searches by 2020, I wanted to set out and understand what this means for the future of SEO and content marketing. While it’s still a fairly new frontier, this Google Home case study revealed that many of the same factors that rank for traditional searches are helping...
SaaS Marketing – How to Create Customer Personas That Work
One of the biggest SaaS marketing mistakes that I see companies routinely make is targeting too broad of an audience. While this may seem obvious, if you try to speak to everyone, you end up resonating with no one. Instead, you need to focus on the people that are most likely to convert into sales. This is where customer personas – a.k.a. buyer personas – can come in handy. Creating...
I hired 7 content mill writers and this is what I learned
As a copywriter and content strategist, my expectations going into this content mill experiment were low. I understand the amount of work that goes into developing a great piece of content. However, since some people are still buying from content mills, I wanted to conduct an experiment to see the level of quality that I could get for under $60. For the experiment, I spent $321 USD and hired 7...