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...
Why SaaS companies shouldn’t engage in newsjacking
Since Oreo’s Super Bowl tweet in the dark in 2013, newsjacking has gained popularity with marketers, but it comes with its own pitfalls. In this article, you’ll learn about newsjacking and why you should rely on other marketing tactics. What is Newsjacking? Newsjacking is when you leverage a breaking news story or trending social media topic to draw attention to your product or brand. At first...
The Marketing Thought Leadership Trap
For the first few years of my career, I thought I wanted to work towards being a thought leader. Wouldn’t it be cool and beneficial if people saw me as a thought leader in all things digital marketing and community building. I can make big money. I can speak at big conferences. I can have the freedom that I crave simply by sharing some “smart stuff online.” It sounds pretty...
There’s no such thing as a free lunch (and why I’m not planning on deleting Facebook)
A lot of people are upset about Facebook selling their data and using it against them. Some people are even taking it as far as to run Delete Facebook campaigns. My reaction to this latest scandal (and not the people all up in arms) could best be summed up by this gif. Sure, after hearing about the data scandal, I too went through my account and looked at all of the apps that had access to my...