The holiday season is fast approaching, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how content marketers should handle it. After all, this whole year has been unlike anything we’ve experienced before, and there’s no reason to expect the holidays to be any different. The same old holiday content marketing strategies that brands have used for […]
How Fine Cooking, a much-loved cooking magazine, ghosted its community
And how that community responded This post started when the Fine Cooking website, which I had visited just the day before, suddenly redirected me to Food and Wine. No landing page, no pop-up notification, and no response to the Tweets I sent to both publications. It was complete and total ghosting by a magazine I […]
Why my content marketing blog often flies in the face of best practices
What you’ll read on my content marketing blog is a little different than the advice you’ll get from most content marketing resources. The advice on keyword research Neil Patel offers, for example, is based on the idea that you have to know what keywords your audience is searching for, how many people are searching for […]
Proud to be included in this amazing resource!
I’m very proud to be included in this list (I’m #12). Miles Anthony Smith did an amazing job of curating this resource listing top-notch content marketing agencies as well as personal advice from experts in the field. Enjoy! 65 Content Marketers List the 44 Content Marketing Agencies Crushing It (Plus 70 Tips & 78 Myths […]
Is ghostwriting ethical?
It seems funny to me that, with the tons of content being published every day, people still ask whether ghostwriting is ethical. Otherwise, who’s writing all this stuff? But let’s take a fresh look.
How to help your content writer succeed (updated for 2020)
More and more businesses are choosing to outsource content creation. While you’ll sometimes find a writer whose work is less than stellar, there are times when the source of the problem is a lot closer to home. Could you be doing more to help your outsourced content writer succeed?
How to Write a Content Brief That Will Help Your Writer Deliver the Goods
I often use a cooking analogy when I’m writing about writing. That’s because content is a lot like chocolate chip cookies, hamburgers, bread, or anything else where there’s a gazillion different ways to make it. So if you just tell your writer you want bread, you could end up with white, wheat, rye, pumpernickel, even […]
A Call to Freelance Writers: Mindset Matters. You’re a Business Owner, Not an Employee.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about pay rates for freelance writers. (Obviously, it’s a topic of high priority for me.) Yes, there are plenty of content mills out there that pay pennies per word. Most of the project bidding sites aren’t much better. And then there are the big players like HuffPo that […]
Irony vs. coincidence, and why O. Henry had it right
Not only does your content need to deliver value; it needs to be credible. One of the quickest ways to lose credibility is poor writing. And one of the biggest offenders is the word “irony.” If you use that word in your content marketing, there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.