For those of you who have been reading this newsletter for more than a few months (First, thank you!), you may have noticed that I’ve been playing around with TikTok for the better part of this year. Over, the last few months, I’ve seen more early adopter marketers and brands – including many that you wouldn’t think would be on there (including cops, bakeries, AliExpress...
September Reading Recs: OKRs, Remote Work and Edgy Marketing
Are you focusing on the important or the urgent right now? In our obsession with productivity, it is never been easier to only work on the “urgent tasks.” It may even feel good to plow through your inbox and check off all of the items that get added onto your to-do list every week. However, success is all about focus, execution, and prioritizing the important tasks. The most important...
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...
August Reading Recs: Startup Acquisitions, Technical SEO, & Habits of Successful Content Marketers
Hope you are having a great 250th day of 2019! Here are some links to make it even better. *** Here are five more things worth reading this month. Technical SEO audits don’t have to be scary. Here is how to conduct a DIY one. If you want to scale, you need build scalable processes. This post is a great read if you have ever wanted to organize a conference or large-scale event. The media...
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...
July Reading Recs: A Content Mill Experiment, Fake Instagram Ads and Purpose-Driven Marketing Campaigns
I have strong feelings about content mills, but I put my feelings aside to run an experiment. So, I hired 7 “content mills” to write the same article, analyzed the results, compared them to the top 3 ranking posts for a specific keyword and then shared what I learned in this monster case study. *** Here are five things worth reading this month. What caused this SaaS founder to almost...
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...
Are you the tortoise or the hare?
Are you the tortoise or the hare? I was browsing TikTok – a guilty pleasure – and stumbled across this video of a tortoise and a hare in a race. I started thinking about marketing and how so many marketers act like hares. They are quick off the gate, move fast and jump from one trend or shiny object to the next big thing. However, this approach is pretty shortsighted. It is often...
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...