Category: Contentions
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Social media just doesn’t hit like a website does
Seven years ago, the Pigeons & Planes team shut down its music publication website, thinking it might be better to connect with people on social media platforms. Last month, it started up its website again. Here’s how founder Jacob Moore explains it: All that said, we’re not sure what a music website’s role is in…
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Five lessons for whispering into the Hacker News front page
A couple of years ago, I met a CEO of a series A startup. At the time, I was working as a content strategist on Figma’s marketing team, where I also found an informal role as the in-house Hacker News expert. At the time, Figma was expanding outside of its core design audience, and into new…
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10 years of stories
Whether it’s a client-initiated project or a self-initiated one, my projects all have one thing in common: I’m telling a story. Spending energy in this process—finding a story, developing a thesis, pitching it, giving it shape, infusing it with experience and expertise, writing it, editing it, publishing it, promoting it—effectively creating assets that connect the…
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Foundational content
There are many, many, good entrepreneurs with good businesses who have a website with only a homepage. If you’re one of them, maybe you haven’t put much effort into marketing promotion. (You might say, “We’ve done zero marketing!”) Or you might have hired some marketing firms in the past—SEM, publicity, social media, etc.—but you haven’t…
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A return to my business writing practice
My strategy with making and shipping creative work has, generally, involved earning money through business writing (in the form of working independently as a marketing consultant, or in a marketing full time role) and investing it into creative projects. Projects like Creative Doing, pretty much all my writing online (including Medium), Prologue, The World According…
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The power of proof assets
Every so often, you send an important professional document to someone. The most universal experience is applying to a job, which you do by sending HR your resume. Your resume is a proof asset; it describes your experiences, accomplishments, and expertise. If you lead a business, you send many documents like this. For example, you…
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Figure out what’s working, and do more of it
When you start a new project, it’s useful to figure out what has worked for the team or company already. Most of this is a form of manual labor: setting meetings, asking questions, reading reports, proposing actual deliverables and completing them. It’s also a humbling exercise, to restrain the impulse to come up with answers…
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Simple questions to sense content marketing ROI
If you’re need a sense of how much ROI you’re getting on the writing and editing activities in your company, ask these simple questions: Does the content communicate how we see the world? What impact does it make if other people also buy into our perspective? Does the content add leverage to a launch moment?…
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Marketing readiness
A product’s features may be complete, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for customers yet. Before they use the product, customers want to know: What does the product do? Who’s it for? What’s a good reason I should care? There are more questions you need to ask yourself: how can you get the customer’s interest?…