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Content marketing is an exercise in keeping plates spinning. Not only do you need to keep your readers’ attention, but you also need to feed their appetite for content. Josh Shipp, the motivational speaker behind HeyJosh.com, freely describes his rough upbringing as a foster child. Realizing that he was adept at grabbing his classmates’ attention [...]
Bloggers often learn from and post about mistakes. When it’s our customers who are making the mistakes, should we post on them? In the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon plays Felix Ungar. At a dinner party, he mentions that he writes for TV news broadcasts. Doe-eyed neighbor Cecily Pigeon replies, “That sounds like [...]
Blog-posting for somebody else can play a role in your marketing communications effort. Here are three ways to make it work. In “Ghost Blogging As If It Were Alec Baldwin,” I mentioned that ghost blogging, or posting to a blog in the place of people who are unable to do it themselves, has proponents and [...]
Ghost blogging backs up a recognized person with professional writing experience. Marketing communications writers may also need to tune the person’s voice. Is it blogging? “By the way,” the vice president of product development told me. “I want the posts to have a certain personality. They should sound as if Alec Baldwin wrote them.” Alec [...]
Thousands of blogs are born each day, but it’s not all sweetness and light. A summary of the downside of blogging, whether for yourself or for your organization. Even back in 2006, Technorati was estimating that 175,000 new blogs were born each day, or one every half-second. Even if only one-tenth of them made it [...]
Before you try to write witty corporate or marketing content, know your ideal reader intimately. Otherwise, don’t even bother. Witty? Says who? Well, that’s really what it all gets down to, then, isn’t it? Who says your writing is witty? And who gives him/her the authority to judge it? “Give me a place to stand, [...]
Hire marketing communications writers who can tell a good story. Then have them tell yours. The biggest problems around creating new, interesting content are: Finding time to do it consistently. Finding talent to do it “magnetically.” Finding an angle to do it “engagingly.” These problems go away if you think in terms of stories. Prospects [...]
Re-purposing content is part of the art of marketing. Have your marketing communications writer convert big-bite content into multiple smaller pieces and put them into different channels. “We have a white paper, but it’s too long for this day and age.” Of course, the engineer or executive who wrote the paper doesn’t think that, but [...]
When you meet marketing communications writers in networking situations, here are 5 useful questions for qualifying them. Believe it or not, freelance marketing writers do get out in the wild from time to time, where, if you’re shopping for writers, you can hire them. You may encounter them at chamber of commerce meetings, industry get-togethers [...]
It’s not easy to keep your content machine fed, is it? You’re finding out that providing valuable content to your readers really does take some work, doesn’t it? When you were a kid, responsible for the family dog, your mom would holler up the staircase, “Timmy! It’s time to feed the dog again!” You remember [...]
