This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of my blog. Crazy, right? I realize that nobody cares about an anniversary like this … I don’t even care, honestly … but I thought I would use the milestone as a teachable moment because blogging changed my life. And here is the main lesson of the milestone: To stand out in this world, you have to be known. To be known, you have to show up consistently. Consistency is more important than genius. Unfortunately, this is where most people fail. They stop and start, or perhaps they never start at all. In my Personal Branding Master Class, I show a slide ..read more

  I was recently talking with a young influencer and I offered to send her one of my books. “I don’t read books,” she said. “OK, how about an audiobook?” “I don’t listen to books either. The only content I consume is YouTube. I have the ad-free version and that is all I watch all day long.” This story is not unusual. Younger people are moving away from traditional media, burrowing themselves in private communities, and moving out of reach of marketers. So if you’re a brand … how do you reach her? How do you market to young people who seem unreachable? I posed this question to the smart m ..read more

A friend forwarded a post to me penned by digital superstar Neil Patel. I like and respect Neil a lot, and generally I agree with him, but in this case, I don’t — and I think his post provides a great lesson in the value of personal branding. Which works better? Today we’ll examine the business value of the personal brand versus corporate brand. Personal brand versus corporate brand Neil’s post goes through a detailed analysis of the number of followers on his personal and corporate accounts. He does his best to attribute revenue streams to his personal brand versus corporate brand, to determ ..read more

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” — Pablo Picasso I was just scolded in a Facebook Group. I love nature and participate in several communities that share photos and experiences with wildlife. One group is dedicated to sharing photos of birds. I don’t have a great camera like most of the people in the group, but I recently posted a watercolor painting I did of a popular local bird called a black-capped chickadee. I received many warm responses from people who loved the art, and they encouraged me to share more. In fact, this post received more likes (275!) than any post in the group fo ..read more

When I dress for the day, the first question that enters my head is, “I wonder how old this shirt is?” So … I’m not a shopper. But I do love studying the marketing behind shopping trends, and there is something going on right now that is blowing my mind. Temu and Shein are dominating the retail scene, seemingly coming out of nowhere. And when I say out of nowhere, Temu was founded 18 months ago and is now the most downloaded retail app in the world with 250 million customers. Shein has been around longer, but since the pandemic, it has become the number one fashion retailer in the world.  ..read more

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the most famous blog post I’ve written, and arguably one of the most well-known blog posts in marketing history. I am not one to reminisce or grow crazy over anniversaries, but publishing this post ten years ago was a unique, unexpected life experience and cultural moment worthy of explanation. Today, we’ll look at the impact of Content Shock and lessons from one of the most widely shared business blog posts in history. The idea behind the blog post It was the summer of 2013. I was on a plane to give a speech in Montreal, but I couldn’t relax because I ..read more

Annual social media prediction posts deserve their own category of boring. They usually name the same obvious trends over and over! This is the year of video! (yawn) And yet, we are in the midst of unprecedented, cataclysmic change. Let’s consider some non-obvious social media trends that are insightful, bold, and important! And you will be happy to know that I barely AI at all (too obvious!). This post covers 10 non-obvious social media trends: Marketing speed Why social media will upend search The big new platform on the horizon Why influence is everything Social listening platforms in tro ..read more

This continues a tradition of highlighting my top posts of the year, as determined by the number of your page views. Essentially, this is the “greatest hits” list of the best blog posts of 2023 as determined by you! This represented Year 14 of the {grow} blog, and I think it was one of the strongest years ever. I had a little more breathing room this year to relax and think things through. Appropriately, the big themes of the year were AI and Gen Z, and that was reflected in the top posts. I hope you find a few new posts to read or re-read if you’ve been a friend of the blog for some time! H ..read more

This has been a tough couple of weeks with a heavy dose of international travel followed by my third bout of COVID. It was time to produce a new episode of The Marketing Companion. What was I going to do? I was sick. I had no energy. I had no voice from the violent coughing. But I did have AI. What you are about to hear is my first entirely voice-synthesized podcast episode. You’ll just have to hear it to believe it. It’s either the coolest show you’ve heard, or the creepiest! Maybe both. I probably won’t use this frequently, but it saved me in a pinch. The technology for this short episode c ..read more

I recently visited Ernest Hemingway’s writing room at his home in Key West, Florida. Ernest Hemingway is one of my favorite writers. He’s surely influenced my sparse style. If it doesn’t move the story along … get rid of it! He also offered me a fool-proof method to break writer’s block. I recently re-read A Moveable Feast.  a fascinating account of his early years in Paris and beyond. It re-introduced me to one of the all-time best quotes about creating content, and I wanted to share it with you. Hemingway writes about his sure-fire way of breaking through writer’s block: So finally I ..read more