Just about a year ago, Basecamp, a project management software company, launched a quirky little lovely monthly online magazine called The Distance. The Chicago-based company hired a journalist to produce one long-form illustrated story per month, profiling a company that has been in business 25 years or longer and has thrived the old-fashioned way: through […]
Content
50 Shades of Mediocrity: Does Content Have to Be Good, or Just Good Enough?
When a franchise like 50 Shades of Grey enjoys crazy success, is it a signal that content doesn’t have to be good to be crazy-successful? Popularity is only one measure of success, of course. And for most of us in the content marketing world, it’s not a very good one. Yet popularity is still very […]
Win a Free Copy of the New ‘Everybody Writes’ Audiobook
The Everybody Writes audiobook is fresh out of the recording studio! This means that you can now listen to all 8 hours and 44 minutes of the Wall Street Journal bestseller while you are in your car, working out, walking the dog… or raking, shoveling, wrapping, drinking, cooking, canoodling, prepping, pre-gaming, or whatever you might […]
Creative, Funny, Unusually Honest Marketing of an Awful Dog Named ‘Eddie the Terrible’
Most pet adoption listings try to make the cats and dogs up for adoption as appealing as possible. But not the Humane Society Silicon Valley, which last week published a creative, funny, and unusually honest listing for a tiny tornado of a Chihuahua, “Eddie the Terrible.” UPDATE: Eddie gets a home. It’s an awesome piece […]
The Simplest Content Strategy
Creating ridiculously good content is hard. Which is why you have to squeeze every drop of juice out of whatever content you create—as C.C. Chapman and I wrote in the fifth “rule” in Content Rules: “Reimagine; don’t recycle.” “Recycling is an afterthought; good content is intentionally reimagined, as its inception, for various platforms and formats,” […]
This New Book Will Make You a Content Marketing Rock Star
Too many business books feel like cover bands. They might be entertaining enough, but ultimately what they deliver feels a little lacking—a substitute for the real deal. Which is why I love this new digital book launching this week from my friend Jason Miller, Welcome to the Funnel – or, WTTF, as I affectionately call […]
High-Fiving a Million Angels: It’s Launch Day for ‘Everybody Writes’
The sound you hear is Tina Fey high-fiving a million angels… because it’s launch day for Everybody Writes! Good writing helps good marketers become great marketers. And today, the book is finally in stock at the bookseller of your choice. Which means the sound you might also hear is thousand book spines being cracked […]
13 Writing Rules
Many hold a notion that the ability to write, or write well, is a gift bestowed on a chosen few. Writing well is considered a kind of art, linked murkily to muse and mysticism. That leaves us thinking there are two kinds of people: the writing haves—and the hapless, for whom writing well is a […]
What’s the Formula for E-book Success?
One of the tenets of my new book is this: Good writing is like good teaching. Good writing and (more broadly) good content strives to explain, to make things a little bit clearer, to make sense of our world… even if it’s just a product description or a blog post or a video or a […]