“But how can I be sure the writer will know exactly what I had in mind?” This is one of the most common fears I hear from marketers when it comes to hiring content writers, be it in-house or freelance. If this is you, I feel you. Right now, you may think you’re better off writing your content yourself. That feels easier than hiring a writer and then fixing their work. Sometime during the first year of my freelancing journey, I noticed I was becoming burned out as every writing assignment took me way longer than I thought it would. I realized I had very little guidance for the specifics of each ..read more

“But where are the conversions?” As a content marketer, you probably have to answer that question quite often. Prove the value of content and all the efforts that went into it for your business. You also know that the value of content goes way deeper than direct sales and revenue, such as getting an ideal customer to: Subscribe to your emails; Share your content with their team; Share your content on their socials; Read seven additional pieces of content after that first one. Each of these is a valuable activity—a conversion. You know you can show its value to your boss/company, but you need ..read more

So you’ve received the first draft of a blog post from your freelance writer. Your next step is to share your feedback with them, but you’re afraid that: You’ll spend too much time doing it to get it right The writer won’t take action on your feedback the way you want them to You may even think to yourself: “If I’m spending all of this time showing them how to write well, I may do the writing myself.” And that’s not a great place to be. You want a feedback process that: Is straightforward, fast, and effortless for you Is actionable for the writer Nurtures and strengthens your relat ..read more

Visuals have a powerful role in content. You’ve heard people say it’s valuable to add visuals to your blog posts because they add dynamics to a lot of text or help with keeping your reader’s attention. There’s truth to that, but I want to focus on visuals—graphs and charts in particular—from a slightly different perspective: Graphs and charts help your readers understand data quickly. It brings clarity in an instant. It shows relationships or patterns within a topic.  As I’ve been working with software companies on their content, I’ve quickly learned how valuable it is to paint a p ..read more

If you’re creating content regularly, it means you’re doing the same tasks many times over. Do some of them tend to slip through the cracks? Do you jump between them and spend way too much time doing them? This is exactly the place I found myself in, so I decided to build a checklist I can use every time I’m writing, editing, and publishing. This list is divided into four main categories: Outline and writing (in a notepad and a tool like Google Docs) Editing (in a tool like Google Docs) Optimization (in a CMS like WordPress) Promotion + shareability (on any channel that fits ..read more

If you’re in your first content marketing role, there’s a chance you feel overwhelmed with everything there is to be learned. And if you’ve been your role for a while, you may have put learning on the backburner because, well… There’s so much you could be learning, so it’s easier to not do it at all. In this post, I’ve distilled the entirety of the wide world web into free and low cost learning resources to keep you ahead of the game, with a few higher cost ones at the end. My goal is to give you an easy place to start your learning journey and find what works for you. This way, you make it a ..read more