Distillations

Confession: While most of my work is as a content and brand consultant, the funnest, most fulling work I do is  helping startups and storied brands deliver a best-in-class new product launch strategy. In fact, most of the inquiries—by a long shot—I receive each month...
In the early days of content marketing, content distribution was the red-headed stepchild to content ideation, content creation, content strategy, and, the darling of influencers, content amplification. Luckily, it didn’t take long for small businesses and enterprise brands to recognize the error, as they came...
Updated: February 2023 Years ago, Rand Fishkin addressed what was referred to as the “The Greatest Lie Content Marketing Ever Told”: The belief, held by many who dive into content marketing, that publishing content will quickly result in traffic to their website and/or conversions for...
Content marketers have taken the storytelling bit too far. OK, your brand has a story. Now what? A good story is simply table stakes. The web is now littered with blog after blog highlighting instances of how storytelling is setting businesses of all types afire....
Quality content is accurate, applicable, accessible, actionable and authoritative. Brands who nail those five elements can be successful content marketers. In that way, quality content is a lot like an atomic clock: known primarily, but not entirely, for its accuracy....
The state of Texas has lost more than 15% of its restaurants, and more are likely to be shuttered, having fallen victim to the lockdown that ensued as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic....
Across the country, smart small business responses to COVID-19 are desperately needed. Small businesses are hurting. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown healthcare and the economy into a tailspin that’ll take us years to recover from. But no group is being battered more right now than...
Create shorter content. That’s the frequent answer I give to brands looking to grow their reach via content marketing. Typically, a look of shock washes across their faces as they envision the SEO value lost from not being able to stuff myriad keywords in the...
Your small business does not have to scale; in fact, there is a lack of scale advantage for small business. You read that correctly. If your core product or service doesn’t scale well or easily, you can count on keeping much of the competition—who are...
Email typos make your brand look sloppy and unprofessional. As an editor, strategist, and writer with more than 15 years of experience editing magazines, newspapers and news sites, blogs, emails, e-books, landing pages, white papers, case studies, video and podcast transcripts, emails, and email newsletters,...