Not long after I hung up from my podcast call with Carol Lynn and Ralph Rivera, I of course, thought of more things I wanted to talk about. As if an hour wasn’t enough! If you want to hear the whole conversation, on content and sharing knowledge, it’s right here: Web Search Social Podcast. While you’re […]
Are You Giving Away Too Much Knowledge?
Can oversharing your expertise cost you business? How much is too much and at what point do we start giving away so much knowledge that our prospects don’t even need to buy from us? Or even worse, our competitors steal our secrets? I don’t fault anyone for asking the question. But it’s the wrong way […]
Should You Publish on Medium?
This weekend I published my first story ever on Medium and it became the top story the next day. I’m not going to lie, yesterday was a good day for my ego. I mean, just look at me! But this was an experiment – should you or should you not publish on Medium? – and I’d […]
Hey! You Got SEO in my Content!
This past Fall, I learned how much I don’t know about SEO (search engine optimization) and it’s going to change the way we do work here at Big Leap. I was invited to speak at SearchLove in San Diego, organized by the great people at Distilled and while it was attended by CMOs and business owners, […]
Publish and Flourish: Get Organizational Buy-in of Content Marketing
If, as a brand/business, you decide to launch a content marketing or inbound marketing program, or simply a blog (or whatever you choose to call it), for the wrong reasons, it will certainly fail to meet your expectations. Red flags I see, as we begin to engage with clients are questions such as “how soon […]
Finding Inspiration: Ideas to Create Meaningful Content
I speak daily with CEOs of companies in businesses like machining, and widget manufacturing and financial services. They think they don’t have anything to write about. Their business/industry isn’t “interesting” and they certainly have no desire to write about it even if it were. You’re on deadline to publish something. You find yourself staring at […]
Video Marketing: When Gimmicks Work
I woke up this morning to find this video in my newsfeed. And of course I watched because the headline was: Customers freak out when the floor disappears, but mostly because it’s The North Face. We’ve all become jaded when it comes to branded content because it’s hard to pull it off well as is […]
How To Be a Better Writer: specifics and your delete button
When a catastrophe takes the lives of many hundreds or thousands of people, there is a reason the news outlets dig into the personal stories of those affected (other than their need to sensationalize): Specifics tell a far more powerful story than generic numbers. This morning, a pedestrian bridge crashed on a highway, and “one […]
Take The Mystery Out Of Your Brand Story
In the land of brand storytelling, the endings are happy ones. Even better: When your audience knows the ending before they start. That’s why I like to speak in the language of outcomes. Your buyers want to know what is going to happen when they do business with you. It’s a powerful and important way of telling your brand story. […]
The Risk and Reward Of Your Content
In her chapter entitled Moral Point of View in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Ann Lamott describes formula fiction: Good wins over evil; the guy gets the girl. We (the audience) crave stories and for the most part, like to know that good does win, and that we can find hope and inspiration in […]