Writing

A Writing GPS: The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Next Piece of Content [Infographic]

The writer Andre Dubus (House of Sand and Fog) has described writing as inching your way along a very dark, very long tunnel: you can make out the next few feet in front of you, but you’re not quite certain where you’ll end up or when you’ll get there. What helps with the uncertainty and […]

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 […]

9 Qualities of Good Writing

👉 👉 👉 New newsletter! Get a letter from me to you in your inbox, every two weeks! Sign up for free right here. There are two kinds of people: Those who think they can write, and those who think they can’t. And, very often, both are wrong. The truth is, most of us fall […]

A Message from My Marketing World… I’m Writing a Book!

I’m interrupting this personal blog to bring you a message from my business world: I’m writing a book! Planned for early December release, Content Rules is a how-to guide to creating compelling content for the Web. The talented and fun CC Chapman is co-author (David Meerman Scott is writing the foreword), and together we’ll answer […]

Parent Bingo

My 17-year-old will be in college next year, and right now he and I are deep in the process of applications and school visits and talks that spring up suddenly at dinner or in the car and begin with, “Maybe I should think about…?” or “Have you considered…?” It’s a process that feels very much […]

Wagging the Dog

I had some happy news last week: The story of Gigi’s adventure with her beloved green tomato has been picked up by The Bark, a magazine I happen to love. In other words, if I were a dog, my tail would be wagging like that of a retriever with a tennis ball. (Or Gigi herself […]

Excerpt: Things That Scare Me

I’ve been thinking about Things That Scare Me for a while, and when I wrote it, it turned out much longer than a blog post. So here’s an excerpt, including photos of the video shoot in Steve Garfield’s dining room cum video studio. A few weeks ago, I had to film a video greeting that […]

Four Diary Entries

Barb Chamberlain is the Director of Communications and Public Affairs at Washington State University in Spokane. She was also the youngest Representative and (later) Senator elected to the Idaho State Legislature–which I didn’t know until she tagged me in a post she wrote on her blog: Five things you don’t know about me. But I’m […]