Newsletter Week 12: Delving into the “content” debate, the record spread of book banning, plus 3 people to follow, 3 books to read, and plugging yourself in. The difference between creative work and “content” There is none. OK. Put down the pitchforks, people. You and I work in the content industry, whether we admit it…
If you want to attract attention with your writing, you have to say something new. If those thoughts running around in your head seem like what everyone else has already written about, that’s a problem. None of us want to read yet another post about how customer experience is important, you should measure what matters,…
Sometimes you pick up a book and immediately think, “This is so useful, how is it possible that nobody has written it before?” Melanie Deziel’s The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas is such a book. If you have or aspire to have an audience of any kind, this book is for…
When you’re a freelancer, leads are your lifeline. Where do they come from? Five years experience at this has taught me that while content marketing works, tone is just as important as content. Back up a bit. I have had six full-time jobs in my pre-freelance career. The first five of them I got through…
Bloomberg reports that, according to the U.S. Census, as of 2018, there are 6.4 PR people for every journalist. Reporters will tell you what that means for their inboxes. Thousands of pitches falling on the floor. Constant pestering. And waste. So much waste. You can lament this trend (and the loss of media is a…
With a nod to René Magritte, the book you write is not a book. Magritte’s painting is actually called La Trahison des images (“The Treachery of images”) and includes the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). Because, of course, it’s not a pipe. It’s a painting. But enough about Magritte….
Brian Dean of Backlinko, an SEO maven whose site includes a technique that “almost guarantees that you get high quality links from every piece of content that you publish,” published a study of 912 million blog posts. He says his results include worthwhile insights. I say they support an alternate explanation: nearly all content marketing…
Your business sells something that helps people, right? Give away free content that helps those people. They’ll appreciate it, share it, and find you. There is a mass of knowledge about how to do this well and effectively. But if you have to explain it to your boss, those two sentences ought to do the…
According to CONCURED, an artificial intelligence platform, the perfect length for promotional video is 3 minutes and 54 seconds. This may be the silliest “fact” I’ve read this month. CONCURED, which calls itself “The world’s first AI-powered Content Strategy Platform,” issued a press release about its new insights. Here’s the whole thing: Artificial Intelligence Names…