Sonia Simone

The Transcript

3 Content Marketing Strategy Fails (and How to Fix Them)

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plug-ins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices along with the occasion rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can get additional links and resources at Copyblogger.FM along with the complete archive for the show.

This month we’ve been talking a lot about content marketing strategy over on the Copyblogger blog. You’ve probably already noticed that publish a lot of stuff is not a strategy. Publishing lots of content or do your best to make good content is a worthy endeavor. It’s a good tactic but on its own it’s just not likely to do much for you. I think that a lot of the more visible critics of content marketing seem to think that that’s what content marketing is. You make a whole bunch of spaghetti and see what sticks against the wall.

Well, you know of course that’s not going to work and we know that’s not going to work so let’s look at some things that will. Today we’re going to talk about strategy, and content marketing strategy is not just for fancy ad agencies or massive marketing departments, it also doesn’t have to be this jargon fest that sometimes those kind of organizations make it into. I thought I would talk today about some of the points of failure that I see all the time in people’s content marketing strategy and then how you can do better.

The Painful Question You Have to Answer to Stay Out of “Me-Too” Content Death

It wouldn’t be Copyblogger if the first point of failure that I talked about wasn’t a quality problem. It really is the problem that I see the most often. I have somebody who, they might leave a comment on the blog and say, “I don’t know what’s going wrong. I’m producing lots of high quality content and nothing’s happening.” I click through and there’s no voice at all. It’s completely generic. It’s the same exact information I’ve seen on 10,000 other sites. There’s nothing new and there’s no real answer to the question, “Why would anybody go to you when they already have so many high quality things that they can already read?”

Because of the topic that Copyblogger has, I see a lot of sites that really make me say, “Well, okay, why should I read your site when the world already has ProBlogger, and Copyblogger, and Search Engine Land, and Moz? What is it you feel you’re contributing to this conversation that’s not being found on those sites?” It’s a hard question to answer but if you don’t have a good answer, you can’t win. That is a lot of what Copyblogger is about is helping people to create content worth consuming. If it’s text content, it has to be worth the time somebody takes to read it. Of course if it’s video or audio, it has to be worth that time that it takes to watch or to listen. You’re asking for time and attention. These are resources that cannot be replicated. It’s not like asking for $10 and then what you have isn’t very good and they’re out $10 bucks.

When you waste somebody’s time with your content, you have wasted something that cannot be replaced so it’s a big deal and people treat their time and attention as a big deal. They should. You have to be worth that time and attention. If you aren’t, partner with somebody who is because there are people out there creating great content. They just don’t want to trouble themselves with learning the business elements. If you don’t think the quality of your content is too good, you know, read Copyblogger and come up with a strategy to improve that.

But I’m going to assume for the rest of this conversation that you have got some good stuff, you have got a real voice. You’re speaking to a real audience about something they care about and there’s a reason to tune into you versus somebody else even if it’s just your personality and the way you look at the world, which is a perfectly acceptable answer, by the way, to that question.

The Path to Purchase, and How to Make it More Appealing

The second point of content marketing strategy failure I see a lot is there’s either no path to purchase or the path to purchase just isn’t very well thought out. Long, long ago in Internet time marketers used to buy content. They used to buy it on Google. They would buy traffic. They would buy eyeballs to come look at their site and that traffic would come check the thing out. They would read a sales page. They would buy or they would not buy and we were done. That’s how it used to be. It used to be really simple; buy some eyeballs, put a well written piece of copywriting in front of those eyeballs, convert or don’t convert. That’s not really how it works anymore, which is a good thing because that got really expensive.

Today, 21st Century, 2017, people are going to find you all kinds of ways. People are going to find your content. Some of them will find it on social, and some on search, and on different social platforms. Some of them, their aunt will send them your email with a link in it. It’s your job to make sure that however people find you all the roads, once they get to you, lead to Rome as the old saying used to say.
Now, this is not really just cram everybody who comes onto your site into your email list and then hit them with an ad every day until they unsubscribe. That is a thing. That is a strategy people use and it seems to work for some people but it’s not really content marketing strategy. It’s actually much more closely related to the old strategy of what they used to call spray and pray. Somebody finds your site and then you just spray them with offers until they buy or they flee in horror.

What we want to focus on, when we have this path to purchase, is the “what” from Brian Clark’s trio of “who,” “what,” and “how.” Who do you speak to? What kinds of information do you give them? Then how do you do it? In other words, your voice, your craft, your creativity. That “what,” the middle chunk is really the bulk of your content marketing strategy. What information does this person need? What order do they need it? Do they need it quickly? Do they need it slowly? Do they need really massive, meaty pieces of content, whitepapers, and case studies? Or do they need something more bite-sized? What’s their journey?

Whether you’re a big organization or a small organization, you have to map that journey out. You have to put yourself into the shoes of your prospect and figure out where they are when they come to you and then what are the steps that they need to go through in order to move further. Where are the buying points on that path because a lot of times there’s more than one? A lot of times there might be small purchases that they would make along the way that would lead to something larger.

Now, Brian Clark has written a lot about this. He is continuing to write a lot about this so I will give you some links over at Copyblogger.FM if you want to pursue this in more depth, which I would encourage you to do.

At the heart of it, you have to understand precisely what a person needs to think. What do they need to know? What do they need to feel? Then what will they need to do before they actually purchase from you. Content exists at as many points as possible precisely to lead the person to get to the next step on that specific journey. Content exists to help them know things that they need to know and to present an argument to think about things in a certain way. That’s what content is for.

How Funnels Work with Content

Now, we should also talk about something called funnels and many of you know what funnels are and some of you don’t. They’re just little sequences of relevant information and they lead to an offer. It might be three pieces of email or four pieces of email that would be sent, opening the conversation, presenting some relevant information, and then letting people know, okay you can pick up the solution to your problem here and here’s what it costs, et cetera.

Now funnels are not really the same thing exactly as the path to purchase. Funnels are sort of little stopping points or tiny little diversions on the path to purchase. They’re the last few steps so each funnel you could think of as a little path from the trail to a place where they can actually get to the holy land of making a purchase. A funnel gives them the right information at the right time but it’s not the whole thing.

The people who are really doing this well have like a rich content kind of a path that people can walk down, explore. They can go different directions with it. They can try different things. They can follow their own interests and then at various points on that path there’s a way that they can take that little nicely paved funnel into making a purchase. Then they might stay on the path and make a different purchase or they might just go home and be happy and be a customer and they might be done. That combination of really strong, robust, interesting content path with some well crafted funnels to take them toward a purchase a little more smoothly, it’s not the same thing.

I think sometimes this gets interpreted as entice people with like one piece of content that you paid a writer for and then slam them with offer, after offer until they completely regret ever giving you their email address. It’s a way. It’s not the best way. Content marketing strategy is really much more about presenting the right information well presented at the right time to the right people and then creating that possibility for action. That means making an offer in the copywriting sense at a moment that makes sense in that sequence.

Not understanding that path to purchase is a point of failure I see a lot with content marketing strategy either kind of rushing the gun so it’s all offer and very, very little useful content, or sometimes you see people who meander around from New York City to I don’t know, San Francisco on this wonderful content path and there’s never any place to make a purchase. Neither of those really work. You have to be strategic about how the road leads to the result you want, which is to create the transaction.

Why We Get Stuck Using the Wrong Tools for the Job

Another really common point of failure that I see is people use the wrong tool for the wrong job. Something that I find really interesting about this whole path to purchase idea is that as the person who discovers your content and discovers your site kind of walks along the path, they go through different states. At a certain point they sort of, eh, they’re not really sure they have a problem. They’re not that interested in it. Then they go through various states of being more and more interested in a solution and possibly considering your solution to their problem. When they’re in these different states, you’ll want to be using the right tool for that moment in the process.

To give you one example of what I mean, there’s a moment in that path when the person really, they either don’t know you or they don’t have much relationship with you. Maybe they’ve heard of you. Maybe they’ve sort of seen you around somewhere but they certainly don’t feel closely connected to you. That’s the point where you’re using tools like social media, and blog posts. You might be using YouTube or podcasts. These are all great tools for getting audience attention, for getting people who either don’t know you at all or haven’t really had a lot of content with you to pay attention to who you are and to realize that this provider might be a very, very good solution for whatever this problem is that’s been bugging me. These are the tools to find the people who don’t really know you yet.

As so often happens with tools, we get comfortable with these. Like we get comfortable on Facebook, I see a lot. You get comfortable making blog posts and then that’s all you do. All you do is more Facebook posts and you’re not making any sales so you triple the amount of blog posts you write or the amount of Facebook posts you make. Well, that tool isn’t super well optimized for that work. You can do more of that work if you want to but you’re not going to get the results you want because you’re using a tool that’s ineffective. All of the attention-getting tools tend to be noisy. They just tend to be in a kind of open web environment that has a lot of noise. It’s a little bit like trying to have a conversation about the meaning of live in the middle of a busy street. It’s technically possible but it’s not really the optimal environment.

The Right Moment(s) to Ask for the Sale

I believe that that’s why email works so well, and study after study shows that it does do so well, to take the conversation, when it’s time, to focus attention a little bit more and start talking about, “I don’t know if you realized but I have something to offer that solves your problem and here’s how you can pick it up.” In other words, a copywriting offer.

Email is a super tool for channeling attention. Social and the public web are great tools for getting attention. Emails are a really nice tool for managing attention, and channeling it, and directing it, and saying, “Hey, I know you’re busy. I know the web is crazy but you might want to check this out and that out.” You don’t only send people to offers. You also send people to other good, relevant stuff that you’re creating.

When you do send them to an offer, what you send them to is something that’s called a landing page. It’s a web page that’s optimized for taking somebody’s attention and their interest. It’s gone beyond attention at this point. They’re actually interested. They’re actually engaged and translating that engagement into a behavior like making a purchase. If you try to make the sale in email, that’s really tricky because people get fed up trying to take in a longer, more complex message from their email inbox. Our attention spans are kind of fragmented with email. It’s great for channeling attention but it doesn’t hold attention as well as other tools do. You use the right tool for the right task.

How do we know what are the right tools for a particular point on this path to purchase? There are definitely a lot of places you can go to learn more about different options and good practices. I won’t say best practices in this case because it does change. The best place is really to just observe your audience.

Now you can always ask them but sometimes how we behave doesn’t completely match what we say because sometimes how we behave doesn’t match how we think we behave. You can, for example the classic example would be, you can ask your audience, “Would you buy an eBook on this topic for $20,” and they will say, “Yes,” and then you give them an offer for an eBook on that topic for $20 and nobody buys. What they do and what they say are not always the same.

When you observe, you know. When you observe it happening, you know. At least for now you know. Things do evolve but they don’t evolve in the sense that they start off as a tadpole and then they turn into an elephant. It kind of stays in the same realm of species type. Things do evolve. Your audience is going to change. They’re going to change where they like to hang out but it’ll tend to be recognizable from one stage to another, especially if you keep paying attention.

How to Discover Exactly What Your Content Marketing Strategy Should Look Like

As you keep giving that your attention, you’re going to be able to watch, and see where it moves, and how it moves. You’ll see which tools are working well for you, email, social media, which specific social platforms, what kinds of contents. Then you’re going to see what might be underperforming for you. Maybe it worked well last year but this year, you know, not exciting. You’ll get some good ideas about what to experiment with next. If you watch the audience, the answers always, always lay with audience.

One thing about marketing online, because the world is changing so quickly and the digital world really, really changes quickly, it’s never stagnate and it never stays still. You get it figured out and then it kind of morphs on you. It can be stressful for sure but it’s also what makes it interesting. I think it’s what keeps people kind of in this business for the longer term because it is definitely a situation where it’s always evolving and growing. It would be very hard to get bored because it’s very hard to find something that works long enough that you can get bored.

I mentioned earlier in the episode, Brian Clark really thinks a lot about the strategy of content and about the different places that people stop along this path to purchase and the different states that they’re in as they walk that path. One thing you can do to find out a lot more about it is just stay tuned to Copyblogger. Brian has been writing quite a bit for us on this exact topic so keep tuning into those because those will give you a lot to work with.

You may or may not know, he also has written quite a few eBooks for us that are available in what’s called the My Copyblogger Library. These are all free. There’s, you know, a good chunk of them are written by Brian specifically about different points of strategy. For example, one of the ones I really like is called How to Create Content that Converts and that really dives into the different types of content, and when to use them, and what they look like, and what their function is. Again, right tool for the right job.

You can pick up the content marketing library if you haven’t yet. If you just go to Copyblogger.com there’s an education tab and you’ll see under that tab, Free! My Copyblogger. Just drop your email in there and you’ll get access to this complete comprehensive content marketing library. It’s all free and there’s a lot of very meaty stuff in there if you want to study this in depth, which I think would be very beneficial.

That’s it today, three points of failure for content marketing strategy. The first is just your content is too me too. It’s too cookie cutter. It’s not distinctive enough. The second is you don’t understand what your path to purchase is. You don’t have a well-paved path to purchase so that somebody gets from discovering your content to actually going forward and making a sell. The third is that we tend to use the wrong tool for the job because we get comfortable with certain tactics or certain tools and we don’t step out of our comfort zone. But we need to use the whole range of tools available to us if we really want to optimize the experience for the audience. That’s really what it’s all about.

That’s it for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I’ll catch you next week.

The Transcript

How to Write (Much Better) Blog Comments

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s RainMaker.FM/StudioPress.

Well hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always find more links, extra resources at the show notes for this podcast. You can find them at Copyblogger.FM, and that’s also where you can get a complete archive for the show.

The Benefits of Leaving Comments on Blogs, Podcasts, or Other Content Venues

Today, I want to talk about a subject that might seem obvious, or it might seem simple, and every single day I am reminded that many people aren’t very good at it. That is leaving a good blog comment. You probably know if you followed us at all for any length of time, Copyblogger turned off comments for quite a while, I think it was over a year. The main reason we did was we just were not seeing super high comment quality. Now, some people were leaving wonderful comments, and then a lot of people were leaving the other kind. Spam comments are one thing and they’re taken care of tolerably well by spam filters.

That wasn’t really the problem. The kind of spam that gets caught in spam filters was not really an issue. The issue was the volume of comments that were really intended for a different purpose other than connecting with the community. Some people on the Copyblogger team hate comments, not all of those people are named Brian Clark, and some people on our team love comments, and not all of those people are me.

The Kinds of Comments We Love

Every one of us loves the real community building kind of comments. It’s always great for all of us to hear from the people who really, truly make up the audience. Folks who are working on their content, interested in content quality, trying to make something happen, and maybe they have a question, or something catches their eye. Those are just awesome and we still love those.

Now, it’s probably worth talking about why leave a comment on a blog at all, other than just you ve got nothing else to do for the next two minutes. The biggest reason is that commenting on blogs still works. When I say works, what I mean is that one of the biggest questions people have is, How to expand their audience, especially when your site is new and young? How can you expand your audience, how can you promote your content, how can you get other people to find out who you are and what you’re doing?

One of the most important ways to do that is to create some conversations and relationships with other content publishers, with other people who have YouTube content, or blog content, podcast content, what have you. The web is a social place and the whole commenting system is a way that we can foster our community, and make connections with each other, and make new connections with people we haven’t met yet. That doesn’t work when people leave comments that feel dodgy or feel spammy.

I wanted to just give some suggestions for folks out there to leave the kinds of contents that are going to open up relationships with the people that … Whose work you respect. Of course, it’s a not very thinly disguised encouragement to come on over to the Copyblogger blog, or this podcast, or both, and leave comments so I can get to know more about who you are and what interests you.

I’m going to give you five things to keep in mind when you’re leaving a comment on someone else’s content. Again, really any kind of content. This also counts on social platforms. The first one is you want to put your best foot forward. Things like, make sure you’ve spelled things properly, make sure that your remarks are reasonably grammatical. Nobody needs to be perfect and things don’t have to be … You’re not submitting a paper to your eighth grade English teacher, but fluency counts and presenting yourself well counts. In my opinion, you must have a Gravatar. You get a Gravatar by going to the Gravatar website, it’s easy to Google, I will give you a link, and just give them the email address that you use when you post comments and put a picture of yourself up there. Your Gravatar needs to be your face.

A Peek Behind the Comment Spam Curtain at Copyblogger (Warning: It s Not Pretty)

Now, once in awhile you can get away with something kind of silly like, a cartoon face. In fact, on one of the email addresses I use sometimes, if I have trouble commenting with my regular one, it has a cartoon face, and that’s sort of okay. What does not work is to have your logo, or to have something else where you’re hiding behind some kind of organizational identity. Because organizational identities cannot get into relationships, and the only reason to comment anywhere is to have good conversations and create relationships. There are now a few sites that will simply throw into the trash any comment that does not have a Gravatar or that has a Gravatar that is a logo. Similarly, we will trash any comment where you use your keywords as your name, or usually, if you use your company name as your name, we will just throw it away.

Part of putting your best foot forward and part of making a good first impression is that, let us know that you’re a person and not, literally a bot, or perhaps some very poorly paid freelancer who’s just going around the web leaving comments, because people believe it has some kind of SEO value. I have no interest in starting a conversation with, Best SEO agency Atlanta, and I’m just choosing Atlanta at random.

Now I will definitely talk to you if you work in SEO. I like a lot of people who work in SEO and any glance at my Twitter stream will show you that. What I don’t want to have a conversation with is a collection of keywords. It just makes you look like a spammy jerkface. Okay, so that’s putting your best foot forward, making a good first impression.

How to Make Sure Your Comments are Relevant

The second best practice is please know the site that you’re commenting on. Please actually take some time to familiarize yourself with what’s going on there. You want to comment on sites that you actually know something about. You want to be able to make comments that are relevant. You cannot create the relationships that we’re talking about creating with content publishers with this kind of shotgun approach. I see it all the time. It’s often outsourced, and it’s clear that somebody’s got their little spreadsheet and they’re going down to 30 or 40 blogs a day and leaving a comment. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. You want to find a select group of sites that have content that you really resonate with. It really works for you, you’re really getting it, it’s meaningful to you. Then participate in an ongoing conversation there.

Because I’ll tell you a secret, the first time you comment, nobody is going to notice you, really. You’re just not going to stand out. Although, it does help to have your face in that Gravatar icon, because that starts to give the publisher something to hang onto. “Oh, that Susanna person seemed nice.” Now, when that Susanna person shows up consistently, not every day, not like being the first commenter … That it just becomes so obvious when it’s completely done as a tactic. I just see Susanna fairly regularly and I start to recognize her avatar and she’s participating in an ongoing conversation. Then I start to say, “Oh, Susanna’s cool, I like her. It makes me happy to see her on the site.” For example, and yes, this is absolutely a hint, you could participate in our content challenges at Copyblogger.

We just kicked off the January prompts last week. If you want to do that, let us know in the comments, you know, How’s it working for you? Let us know, “I tried this and then that happened,” or let us know that, “I tried the thing you recommended, but I ran into a snag,” or let us know, “I don’t know what it is about me, but I just can’t deal with the Pomodoro method, it gives me hives.” Just have a conversation that’s relevant to what we’ve been talking about.

Another nice way to do this is to ask a relevant question. Something specific like, “Should I try this technique that you’re recommending in this piece of content given the set of circumstances?” Now, you probably don’t want to have five or six pages of explanation, but enough details that we’re talking about a real world scenario, and not just the vague show.

It shows that you’re actually connected to the topic and you’re kind of working with the material and making it your own. That’s really what virtually every content creator wants to see happen. We want to see people who are taking the material and actually doing something with it. That’s a huge win for almost any content creator. We love to hear about what you’re doing.

Make Sure You Have Something to Say

That kind of leads to my number three point, which is, let’s please stop with the vague comments, the content-free comments. “This certainly seems like a high quality site, your advice with this is very good. I will try it.” That just goes right in the trash. It doesn’t say anything. It’s completely meaningless. I mean, it’s an attempt to be pleasant and I like that, rewards for being polite, but it doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation. You can’t create a relationship with a publisher and a relationship with a community, and don’t overlook that element of it, until you actually start sharing something specific about what’s going on with you.

You should realize, if you’re going to use blog comments to widen your network and get to know more people who publish content so you can just organically grow your audience, you should know that as a content publisher, the reason that I have comments on my site is I want to know more about who’s reading, and who’s listening to the podcasts, and what kind of things bug you, and what kind of things work for you, where are you coming from.

The content-free comments, those vague comments, they’re sort of vaguely pleasantly complementary without ever getting specific, they seem like they’re no big deal, they don’t seem like they’re hurting anything, but they create all of this clutter. I gotta tell you, after awhile, they get incredibly irritating. So please just don’t. If you don’t have something to actually say, think about having something to say and post comments on the sites where you actually feel moved to add something to the conversation.

How Not to Be That Guy

The fourth kind of best practice or recommendation is really, you have to realize that this is a long game. Commenting on a blog or commenting on a podcast is not going to get you a flood of traffic, it’s not going to help you make your numbers this month, it’s not going to help propel your book to Amazon number one. If you’re using it as that kind of short term tactic, it just shows, it’s so apparent, and it feels creepy. Even if you follow the rules kind of to the letter, the spirit is off and it feels off and your comment s going to get trashed.

I’ll tell you what that reminds me of. If you’ve ever been to a networking breakfast, like a live thing, and you know that there’s always those couple of people, often guys, but definitely not always guys, who relentlessly hit everybody up with their thing. It’s usually a multi level marketing thing and everybody in the room groans when that guy walks in, because he never asks a question, he never has any curiosity about what anybody else is doing. He’s for sure not there to buy, he’s only there to sell his crummy thing that you could get anywhere.

Nobody likes that guy, do not be that guy. Don’t comment on blogs where you think somehow you’re going to sell something, whatever that means to you. Comment on sites where you’d just really like to make a connection and you’d like to get to know people better, and possibly do some work together at some point down the line. It just needs to really be about making a connection first.

Now, major bonus points if you’re in a situation where you can swing it. If you know the site, or you know that writer from some kind of a connection face to face, so at a conference, a live event of some kind, definitely do say hi. It is so nice to see somebody in the comments, or on Twitter, or a lot of places, if I’ve had a nice conversation with them at a live event somewhere. This applies just as much to conversations on social media, as it does to content comments. It’s really delightful when you can make that connection, it just makes such a difference when I have a real person to connect the Gravatar and the name to. If that’s something that you can do, it really, really is a wonderful way to make a lot better relationships, and make good connections. And then you can maintain those connections with things like comments.

What No One (Except Me) Will Tell You About Playing the Devil s Advocate

The last piece of advice, a lot of people will not tell you this, but I am going to tell you this, because a lot of people are not telling you the truth. Everybody actually hates the devil’s advocate. There’s always that one person who thinks it’s a good way to get attention to be super contrary and constantly say, “You guys are wrong, this is dumb, lol,” usually lol goes in there somewhere.

If you want to be contrarian about somebody’s ideas, whether that person has a big site, small site, I don’t care, do it on your platform. Your platform is a great place to say, “I know everybody thinks those Copyblogger people are smart, but I think they’re totally wrong about this and here’s why.” Then present a cogent, intelligent argument. Smart, well thought out disagreement will do a lot of good on your site. When you come take it to the comments on my site, it’s just kind of annoying.

Now, that in no way means that you’re not allowed to disagree, because that’s just silly and I’m not saying that at all. But, you need to think about how reactive, in fact, how inflamed the social web is, especially right now. If you make a habit of bringing attention to yourself by being contrarian, a) I think it’s a little bit lazy. I’d rather see you actually come up with some ideas. I’d like to see you come up with some recommendations, some … “I think everybody ought to do this, I think this is the way to go and here’s why and here’s my evidence.” A little bit of, Being a contrarian makes a good seasoning, but again, do it on your site. It’s just going to get you a lot more benefit and everybody hates that guy.

No one will tell you that, because we all want to think, “Oh, I’m all for constructive criticism,” and everybody’s for constructive criticism in theory. Nobody really likes it. So, if what you’re doing is commenting to create relationships, a real small amount of that goes a long way. Occasional disagreement is fine. Keep it respectful.

The Art of Constructive Disagreement

My dad, who is the world’s biggest crank, really just on the planet, will go on a major tear and then he catches his breath and says, “Well, that’s how I see it. You might see it differently.” I think this is such a good … That’s such a good way to look at things. Yes, it’s okay to disagree, you don’t have to agree with everything we say on Copyblogger, but if you make a point of showing up and telling us how wrong we are, you’re just being irritating. In most subjects there are multiple good approaches, and so a good content publisher is going to kind of choose one path, and they’re going to publish content about the path that they can speak to intelligently and authoritatively.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any other paths, or no other paths exist, or every other path should die in a fire. But, if you have a real different way to do things, be respectful, learn what you can, engage in the conversation, make friends, and then present your way that you think is the right way on your site and pull your own tribe together. There’s no reason we have to fight, or squabble, or any of this silly nonsense. We can all hang out, and be cool, and each have our own point of view about things.

That’s it, five ideas for leaving better comments on blogs, on video, on podcasts, on any piece of content. They also work when you’re leaving a note or a comment on somebody’s social media platform. This is, as you can tell, a hardly disguised at all little bit of motivation. We love to see your comments on Copyblogger. I particularly love to see your comments on Copyblogger.

If you’re going to be joining us for any one of the content challenges, or all of the content challenges, or if you just see something that you find useful, or you’re not sure about, maybe something feels a little bit unclear, I love it when you leave us a comment. Let us know what’s working. Do let us know if something’s not clear or it’s confusing to you and you need something spelled out a little more, because that really helps us create content that works for you, and that’s what we want to do.

Thank you so much. I sincerely hope to see you in the comments. This is Sonia Simone with Copyblogger FM, take care.

The Transcript

The 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: Your January Assignments

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state-of-the-art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more.

If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Well, hey there. It is excellent to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant.

My name is Sonia Simone. I am the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always pick up extra links, resources, and show notes by going to Copyblogger.FM in your browser. That will also get you to the complete archive for the show.

Welcome back after the Christmas break. It is excellent to see you again. I missed you madly. I hope you had a great little break during the time away.

Why Sonia s Not a Fan of New Year, New You Messages

Today, of course, it’s a New Year episode. So we’re going to talk about new year, new you resolutions, all that stuff. This is the time of year when we all decide collectively that we’re going to be entirely different people.

We are no longer going to eat any sugar, and we are no longer going to dribble our lives away, getting into fights with racist people’s uncles on Facebook. We’re going to floss every day, we’re going to exercise, and we’re going to think charitable thoughts. And we’re going to be completely different, more shiny and virtuous human beings.

Except as you know and I know: Yeah, no, we won’t. I’m not saying that we never get to recreate ourselves or that we never do create a new you; we never recreate ourselves, reimagine ourselves. It does happen.

It happens gradually. It happens cell by cell. It happens over time. Sudden change is typically associated with trauma, and your brain normally, actually correctly, is terrified of it.

Real change, lasting change, true deep change very rarely comes from these New Year style resolutions, these all-or-nothing promises we make to ourselves. And we’re breaking them sometime around January 3rd, January 4th. It certainly has been known to happen that we make big changes all at once, but it’s rare and often it’s not by choice. And that’s really not what we’re about.

The other thing I happen to dislike about this whole new year, new you kind of message is that it rests on an assumption that the old you just ain’t cutting it. And in 2017, I really think that for most of us, it’s exactly the wrong approach.

So do be useful, do be interesting, and do respect your fellow human beings. Get the bases covered, and then from there, let go of all this nonsense about trying to be some kind of plastic, perfect human being. Because not only are you not going to get there, but nobody actually wants it anyway.

I hereby give you permission to quit trying to fix everything that’s wrong with you. If you’re not useful, interesting, or you don’t respect your fellow humans, fix one of those three. Other than that, let’s work with what you’ve got and try and make it better.

Introducing the Content Excellence Prompts

You might remember, middle last month I kicked off something on the Copyblogger blog that I grandiosely called the 2017 Content Excellence Challenge. This is a combination of writing prompts and then habit prompts.

The design here is to get all of us with a better skill set for 2017 and a better set of habits or practices, so that we can produce more work, get more done, and just be happier with how things are going.

This week we’re going to start our first official prompts. In December, we had some to play with, noodle around with. Because it was December, and December is nuts for most of us.

This week we’re going to start our first official prompts for January. Our writing prompts for this month are going to be around headlines.

Now you probably already know this, even if you’re never seen any official stats, but most content on the web, on social media, etc., is shared without being read.

On one hand, this is horrible. But on the other hand, it’s not as horrible as you think it is. What happens when content gets shared without being read is somebody looks at it, they make a snap judgment: This looks useful. It looks like it will probably be kind of interesting. And they share it.

They might share it with a friend. They might email it to a friend, or more typically they share it on social media. They might even read a sentence or two, but a lot of times that’s all they do.

What that allows is it allows your content to surf along from slightly interested person to slightly interested person until it finds your perfect person. It’s only depressing if you’re counting on every single person that shares it, having read it thoughtfully and carefully and perhaps made a few notes. We know that’s not really happening.

But it does find the perfect person for that piece of content. It is actually a pretty good way to locate that person who is really resonating with what you have to say. Really resonating with the kind of problem that you solve.

It seems depressing at first, but it’s actually a cool way the content pinballs around the web until it finds the person that it’s meant for. But that will not happen if you suck at headlines.

Good headlines are essential to allowing this to happen, to allowing that content to surf along until it finds the exact perfect person. It also does cool things, like it makes it more likely that somebody will click on your article if they’re doing a Google search. And you end up on the page, but maybe not at the top of the page.

It makes it easier if you wanted to run some advertising to your content. People are more likely to click on it. In 2017, we need decent headlines on our content.

The Importance of Avoiding Cheap, Weak Headlines

I’ve got a couple of don’ts before we get to the dos. The first don’t is don’t create misleading headlines. Don’t create clickbait, fake news baloney. Do not write headlines that are not supported by the actual content. Because it’s lame, it’s cheap, and it’s weak.

Also related to this, don’t actually write fake news. Don’t write lies. Don’t say things that are false. We are in enough trouble as it is. So, please everybody, let’s respect reality.

But when you are writing something that’s worth reading or creating a podcast that’s worth listening to, I want you to put a really solid, interesting, compelling headline on it. Because good work should get a wider audience. It deserves it.

Fact-based work should drive action. It should be what people share, and it should be what people read. Being incompetent at marketing doesn’t make you virtuous, it just makes you ineffective. And we need good people to be effective.

By the way, lest you think that I am letting one side of the other off the hook here, both sides of the political spectrum in the United States — and also in the UK and also in Europe, and also everywhere else on the planet — share stupid baloney. This is not something one set of people does and the other set of people are way too smart.

Why Smart, Ethical Content Creators Need to Get Very Good at Marketing

Everybody shares nonsense. We need to knock it off. Which means that good stuff and people like you who are creating real content that’s ethical and tells the truth need to step up our marketing game. We need to put our big-person underpants on, and we need to learn how to compete in the marketplace of attention.

It’s actually really important. It’s important to us individually, and it’s important to your audience.

Copyblogger is known for headlines. We have a lot of materials to help you out with headlines. We have a very cool ebook. It is free. You just go sign up for it, and you get immediate access to it in our content marketing library.

We also have lots of articles, so I will share all kinds of links with you. All you have to do is put Copyblogger.FM in your browser, and you’ll be zoomed automatically by virtue of the Internet to the right page to get all those links. You can also just go over to Copyblogger.com, look at the blog, and find my blog post there, and I’ll put the links for you there also.

5 Rules of Thumb to Keep in Mind When You re Crafting Your Headlines

I’ll give you a couple of rules of thumb, just to get your engines going. The first thing, the first technique if you will, that you want to do with headlines is you just want to learn. You want to get ideas for good headline structures by looking at what’s working already.

It’s really useful if when you look at a headline that does get good traction, try and figure out why it’s working. Is it really making a big promise to the reader? Is it commanding attention with maybe an unusual word choice? Try and figure out why it might be working.

If you have a decent idea, a lot of times you can just take that headline and swap in your own information. In fact, there’s a technique that copywriters use. Brian Clark wrote about it ages ago.

Sometimes called the Cosmo technique, where you just pick up a popular magazine that’s good at headlines. Find one that jumps out at you. And then you put your topic and your information into that headline structure, and then write a piece around it.

This is also incidentally a great way to come up with a post idea, if you’re just really dying for one this week and you haven’t come up with anything good.

Back in the day, when I was publishing my personal blog, Remarkable Communication, I wrote a post called 50 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew. It was just ripped off right from a Cosmo headline. It was like 50 Things Guys Wish You Knew. It was a tremendous post. Actually, it was great fun to write, to come up with all these things. It was a real exercise in creativity. It also just went crazy, that post did so well.

That’s something you can do. You can take a strong headline that’s working, that you find interesting, and then you can shape a good piece of content to fit the headline. There’s nothing wrong with that. Writing the headline first — time-honored copywriting technique and works really well.

The second principle of good headlines is you always have to be able to back it up. You don’t want to run thin, weak content under a powerful headline, because all that does is get the word out really quickly about how crummy your content is. Make sure that your headline is not writing a check that your content can’t cash.

Third good headline principle is to experiment with how strongly you word it. Sometimes, with some audiences and some markets, it’s useful to actually step back the hype one or two clicks. You also want to be careful about the new clichés, like You won’t believe what happened next. It worked really well for three weeks, and then it became a self-mocking statement.

A Sure Way to Get Your Headlines to Bomb, and Where to Use Those Skills Instead

Related to that: Fourth headline principle is to avoid doing things just because they’re clever, because they’re an in-joke, or because you’re being ironic. Like running headlines saying You won’t believe what happened next.

All of these things — cleverness, in-jokes, and irony — can work really well in content. They can work beautifully in content. But they usually bomb in headlines, unless you know your audience very well.

Typically headlines want to be clear, and you want to promise something that actually matters to the person reading the article or listening to the podcast.

Then the fifth principle of good headlines is you watch what works for your situation. Not in my situation, or BuzzFeed or ProBlog, or anything else, but what’s working well for you.

Take a look at your email platform — which messages are getting opened, which blog posts are getting more traction, more traffic, more comments, more shares — and do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t work for you.

We can give you all kinds of starting points, and we can give you all kinds of general ideas of best practices. But everybody has to establish our own best practices for our own specific set of circumstances.

It does definitely happen that what works well for you might not work well for me, and vice versa. That’s the background on headlines.

In January’s writing prompt, first thing that I would love for you to do is to come up with 20 headlines for the next thing you want to write. Could be the thing you’re writing right now, could be the next piece. Maybe more than 20 headlines.

Feel free to use that Cosmo technique to come up with some ideas. You can actually just go to a site like Magazines.com and just look at issues of popular magazines for interesting headline structures. And then think of what really good pieces of content could you create that would fulfill the promise of those headlines.

Do go ahead and pick up our headline ebook, because that will also give you some good structures, some good principles you can use. And just brainstorm 20, 30 headlines. Then every day this month, every day in January, I would really recommend just brainstorm a couple more — two, three, four a day. Just keep a big long list of headline ideas.

Some of them can be silly or crazy. Actually, sometimes the crazy ones end up working really well. Try and incorporate all the headline techniques you learn from the Copyblogger posts, from the headline ebook. Try and incorporate those techniques. I will get you those links again at Copyblogger.FM, or you can pick them up at the Copyblogger blog.

That is our writing prompt. It might not seem creative, but it absolutely is creative. Working on headlines is an interesting blend of art and craft. More to the point, if you are wonderful at headlines, your content is going to do better.

Copyblogger is really marked by how many gifted, talented content creators listen to the podcast and read the blog. I want you guys to get more eyes and ears on your content, because it’s worth the attention. I want you to get amazingly great headlines so that your content can get more of the attention that it deserves.

Every month, in addition to a writing prompt, we’re going to do monthly habit prompts. These are tweaks and little changes that you can make with the intention of creating more, producing more, and again just being happier with how your professional life is going.

This month s habit prompt: Today, after you finished listening to this podcast, so that might be in five or six minutes. I want you to find whatever you use for your calendar to plan out your day, and I want you to mark your highest-priority, first-thing task for tomorrow.

I also want you to set some kind of a timer, probably on your phone or your laptop or whatever, to do that every day this month. Try and get it done by lunchtime every day.

You might have an 8 a.m. meeting tomorrow, or a 7 a.m. meeting or a 6 a.m. meeting. You might be doing the school run, or you might have the dog to walk. I’m not necessarily saying that you need to do this as soon as your eyes open in the morning.

You might need to define first thing. It’s possible that that will have different shapes depending on what day it is. Like when you have your Monday morning 8 a.m. meeting, then first thing is first thing after the meeting. But the rest of the week, you can go ahead and do your first-thing task as the first part of your work day.

Frankly, you know yourself better than I do. If your best first-thing moment is first thing after I put my kids to bed, I am not going to judge you. You know what works for you.

Most of us actually do well to attack one important weighty project first thing in our professional day. You can make a commitment to do this five times a week, or you might prefer to do it six times a week or seven times a week. If you can, try and make that decision today, which way you want to approach it.

Sonia s First Official Rule of the Challenge (and No, It s Definitely Not Don t Talk about Content Challenge )

I’m going to introduce a challenge rule. And this rule will obtain for the entire 2017 Content Excellence Challenge, and it applies to both your writing prompt and your habit prompts.

The rule is no beating yourself up, because it really doesn’t help. If you mess up a day, if you decide Yes, I’m going to do this, then you do it three times, and then you forget the rest of the week and you don’t remember again until the middle of next week, just get your first-thing task identified as soon as you remember.

And then jump on it tomorrow and define what is your first-thing time. What’s the time frame you’re going to do it in? In other words, first thing after what? First thing after my first coffee? First thing after what? Then make sure you’ve got all the stuff you need.

Do you need certain reference materials? Do you need to run a session that shuts down Facebook so you can’t sneak onto Facebook. Get yourself ready for it. But get yourself ready for it the day before.

What to Do If You Forget to Work on Your Prompts for a Few Days (or More)

That’s the habit for this month, is identifying the task the day before. It would be wonderful if you do the task. That’s really good, do your best. But the habit is to prep the task the day before. If you mess up a couple of days in a row, you just get right back on it and do it again.

Sometimes you might need to reframe it. You might say, This doesn’t seem to be working, so I’m going to have to reframe it, I’m going to have to rethink it, or I’m going to have to restructure it.

Your habit prompt for this month is that every day, you’re going to decide what is your first-thing task for the following day. And you’re going to try hard to do that by lunch time and set up any reminders or timers that you need to do, so that you remember to do that.

Your writing prompt is to sit down, write out 20 or 30 draft headlines. Some of them will be great. Some of them will be dopey. Use all of the materials that we have to help you come up with ideas, and then every day brainstorm a couple. Brainstorm two or three, four, or five, if you’re feeling super ambitious.

If you’re into it, either right here at Copyblogger.FM or over at Copyblogger.com on the blog, you can let us know what kind of amazing headline ideas you come up with. We’d be happy to see them and hear from them.

We would also love to hear how is that going for you, identifying your first-thing task for tomorrow. By the way, when I say task, I think sometimes we get too big with it and we think, Well, my first thing tomorrow is going to be spend four hours cleaning the garage or something crazy like that.

Try and make it something that can be contained within one, let’s say, 20-minute session. A Pomodoro Technique session.

I’m going to give you guys a link to a nice article I found taking exactly that approach. And he calls it frog legs in a tomato reduction, and you’ll see why when you read the article. Very nicely done. Just a good little frame, if you need a frame or you need a little bit of productivity motivation to get you rolling.

So that’s it for your January prompts. Please do drop by. Let us know how they’re going. Let us know on the blog or the podcast how it’s working for you, and I’ll catch you next week. Take care.

The Transcript

Bad Writing Advice: The Post Truth Episode

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190 thousand website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s RainMaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always find additional links, additional resources, and the complete show archive by going to Copyblogger.FM.

Today I thought I would have a slightly depressing episode for a word person, which is the Oxford dictionary’s word of the year for 2016. If you haven’t seen this yet, the word of the year is post-truth. Their definition being: Denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

This is related to a quote that is often attributed to Mark Twain, probably not correctly, interestingly enough, in keeping with the theme of the show, It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so.” That’s really the post-truth world, is lots and lots of people who are absolutely certain about things that do not happen to be grounded in the real world.

Today, instead of being depressed about it, we’re going to treat it as a celebration of the good old fashion fact and we’re going to celebrate those who challenge conventional wisdom and actually check things out for themselves and think critically, because we are all about that.

Jason Miller s Smart Article About Why the Goldfish Attention Span” Myth is Dangerously Wrong

I actually got the idea for this episode by reading a really truly nifty article written by Jason Miller about the goldfish attention span and you may very well, if you ever go to marketing conferences, you’ve probably seen a slide with this statistic on in. This idea that your content and your marketing need to be geared toward the fact, supposedly supported by research, that human beings are now so distracted and pathetic that we have an attention span of eight seconds, which actually makes us worse than goldfish. The phrase research proves often accompanies this slide.

Jason did a really nice job doing a little bit of investigation of where this wacky statistic came from, because honestly, if you think about it for eight seconds, you’ll realize that it’s just not true and it can’t be true. What he found was that Microsoft Canada did some actually very interesting research on human attention spans and how they are changing. That research came from 2015. That research included an infographic that mentioned this, that claimed that human attention spans had dwindled to eight seconds, which put them one second behind goldfish.

I’ll quote from Jason here: “The only problem is that infographic wasn’t actually based on findings from Microsoft’s own research.” Then I’m going to fast forward a little bit: “When you look at it in any level of detail, the stat that has dominated a huge amount of marketing discussion since May 2015 isn’t based on any recognizable research at all.” End quote.

If I didn’t put this factoid into a slide, I could have. I certainly easily could have. It makes a great story. It makes a great slide for a conference. But it’s not consistent and, in fact, I’m not sure why on earth Microsoft would have put the infographic into their report. It’s not consistent with what their research was actually finding, which was not that attention spans were dwindling to something terrifying, but rather that attention was evolving, that it was changing, that how we pay attention was changing. I think we all know that, we all know that from our own experience, from simply looking around.

Devices probably are changing. They’re certainly changing how we pay attention. They could be changing how we’re physically wired, you know. Reading a prevalence of books changed a little bit of how the brain is structured, and so probably our devices are changing our wiring in some ways that might be pretty profound. However, that does not immediately turn us into goldfish.

I’m not going to summarize the whole thing for you, because it was a really good article, very to the point, nicely written. I will send you a link to go read the article in full and get a look at what the research actually did say. You know, what actually should we be doing with our content or with our marketing when we’re thinking about the new attention span and, spoiler alert, mainly it points to your marketing not being pointless or irrelevant. I think we already knew that. But there are some interesting facts and some interesting research findings there that I invite you to go investigate.

In the spirit of Jason’s article, and thinking about this theme of advice or truisms that we’ve all heard, we’ve all thought about, we’ve all seen, that may simply be wrong. Just flat out wrong, or at least not helpful in all circumstances. I went to my good friend Twitter and I asked some people what their favorite piece of bad writing advice might be. Or bad marketing advice would work also. Due to negativity bias, which is our innate tendency to pay more attention to negative things than positive things, I got lots of answer.

I’m going to present some of them for you here, and then in the interest of not making this podcast like an hour and 20 minutes long, I’m going to also compile some of the responses into a blog post. If you boogie on over to Copyblogger.com and check out the blog, you’ll find my post on the same question with some additional answers and also some thoughts from the Copyblogger editorial team.

Why It s a Terrible Idea to Dumb Down Your Content

The first answer I got was from OneTiredEma who has a great Twitter account and actually a wonderful blog, and I will give you a link to that in the show notes. You can just type Copyblogger.FM in your browser and it’ll take you right there. She had kind of a multi-part tweet. Worst advice: Dumb down content. So many fields are complex/technical, but worth exploring (for business or edification). There are middle ways of exploring complex subjects in intelligent but non-jargon language, such as a series of posts. Oversimplifying or skipping or leaving the content rarefied does everyone a disservice.”

Then she had a postscript on that: Also, dumbing it down leads to its own special sort of bad writing, in my experience.” I heartily, heartily concur. I thought that was lovely that that happened to be the first response I got back. This idea that it’s very related to Jason’s point about the goldfish. This idea that audiences are just dumb. They’re just stupid and they can’t pay attention to anything and this is often served with a giant helping of bashing against millennials, and they don’t have attention spans, and, Get off my lawn you annoying kids.” This whole idea that audiences are dopes and you have to just make your content really stupid so that they’ll understand it. I am not seeing this actually work.

Now, there are some kinds of popular content that are stupid. For example, I was reading about the YouTuber PewDiePie, who is the most popular YouTuber in the world. His style has been described as aggressive stupidity. Based on my exposure to his channel, I think that’s a pretty good description. Some things that are stupid are popular. That does not mean you should make your content stupid, because doing that will make you popular. That does not follow.

Now, clarifying things, simplifying things, presenting things in a way that’s clear, and you’ve done the thinking, and it’s well organized, and it’s properly formatted so we don’t have these walls of tiny grey text, those are all things you can do to make your content more accessible to people who are rather distracted, without making it stupid or dumb or boring. Stupid content just tends to be dull. Make it lively, make it interesting, and make it relevant, but don’t dumb it down.

My Suggestion That You Might Find Extremely Dumb For Reframing a Piece of Content

I’ll give you an example of what I mean and you may very well decide, once you’ve heard my example, that I am an idiot. Which is okay, I am cool with that. But I am with my son taking one of these free courses that you can take on Coursera, a college course. It’s an introductory college course on genetics. My son is 11, so it’s a little challenging, but it’s good. It’s an interesting course, and the guy’s talking about recombinant DNA. He’s talking about fruit flies.

First of all, these things are repulsive. I mean, they’re fruit flies. They’re hideous. He’s giving this example and this one has red eyes, and this one has shriveled up wings, and they’re just these gross, dead flies on one side of the screen and you’re trying not to look at them or you’re trying to understand the example. Honestly, if he had used examples from the X-Men, now I know the X-Men are not real, but I would have found that much more memorable. Right? If Mystique and Magneto had a baby, then which genes are recessive and which genes are dominant? Now I realize this is dopey, but it’s the same basic idea that the idea about recombinant DNA is the same idea. The numbers are the same, the math doesn’t get easier, but just presenting it with an interesting metaphor instead of hideous pictures of dead fruit flies makes the information just more appealing.

That’s what I mean when I talk about formatting it or packaging it to be appealing without making it stupid. You can very often find an interesting metaphor that makes your point. I don’t want you to dope your point down, and you probably think that that was doping it down, but I thought it would have worked pretty well. But, if you can associate your ideas with something that is interesting, that does meet the person where they are, then that idea is going to be easier to learn, easier to retain, and easier to recall. That’s kind of what it’s about, especially with content marketing. It’s actually teaching people something that they can remember and that they can use. Hopefully, Ema doesn’t kill me for suggesting that genetics professors talk about the X-Men in their lectures.

Why Long Form Content Still Has a Place

The second response I got was from Kelli Brown and interestingly, it was thematically, I thought, kind of close. Her example of bad advice was: Long blog posts cannot do well, bore readers, don’t get shared, et cetera, and are therefore a bad practice by default.” Again, I thought this was interesting because she had no idea that I had just read the Jason Miller article about the goldfish attention span. Her observation on this was very much to the same point.

Now, long boring blog posts or videos or podcasts are a bad idea. Boring content, irrelevant content, is not a great idea. If it’s long, then there’s just more not-a-good-idea to go around. But there’s nothing wrong with long form content, it has a place. Some content creators are known for it and always have been. There have always been some content creators who went for long and complex and in depth over the short and the punchy and the super easy to grasp, the super bite size. Both of those content types can work, and if you feel so moved, you can have both of those content types within one content marketing program.

You can have some things that are bite-sized, and you can have some things that are longer and more thought out, really supported with more evidence. Just make sure, again, that it’s presented in a way that’s easy to consume. If it’s text content, things like: make sure you have plenty of subheads and make sure that your blog setup has plenty of white space. Things that make it easier to read online, easier to consume. But yeah, long form content can work really, really well. It tends to work for fewer people, but the people it works for tend to be the people who are actually going to do something with what you’re talking about. They’ll be the really good customers or they will create the most change in the arena that you’re trying to create change in.

Publishing Frequency Myths and Truths

I’ll wrap up with a thought from Rae Hoffman. If you don’t follow Rae you should, on Twitter she is SugarRae. Rae spelled R-A-E. Very smart woman, just very tough and brainy and smart at business, smart about SEO, and smart about business. Her suggestion for bad advice was: Write as much content as you can.” Then her thought accompanying this was: A plumber doesn’t need to publish three blog posts a week, nor does the world want them to.”

TJ had a thematically related addition to this that I thought was interesting. His bad advice was: Publish constantly … Google wants to see lots of fresh content.” Then he expanded on that a little bit with: Before Penguin, SEOs pushed publish weekly. Google wants to see fresh content and active sites. Now it’s Less is more. Quality! ”

TJ and I just had a little Twitter conversation about that. It’s true that Google likes fresh content. They do like content, they like sites that are publishing reasonably frequently. The kind of observation that I made in this conversation is, A pile of crap that’s steaming is fresh but it’s still crap.” If you are publishing a lot because you think that Google cares more about freshness or recency than it does about something good, you are making an error. I know it’d much rather see you publish less often, but publish something worth, really, really worth publishing than push out a lot of mediocre stuff. Volumes of mediocre thin content have a very hard time getting any traction and a very hard time actually getting any business goals accomplished.

There’s always that one guy who’s like: “I’ve been pushing out weak, thin, terrible content for, you know, 10 years and I’m a millionaire.” I think that’s great, but I gotta tell you I’m not seeing that work for the people who are in my communities and the people whose sites I’m looking at and helping them out with. Thin, weak stuff, really, most of the time it just doesn’t work well. If it’s working well today, it probably won’t work well next year.

Publish good stuff and then your publishing frequency is at least in part dictated. Well, how often can you publish good stuff and how often can you make that happen? I think Andy Crestodina has really articulated some lovely things on exactly that point in both of the interviews he did for this podcast. I can give you links to both of those again if you just drop Copyblogger.FM into your browser, you’ll be in good shape.

All right, well as I said, I don’t want this podcast to go on forever and trust me, it could. When you ask people for their favorite piece of bad advice, you get lots and lots of feedback. I am going to be compiling additional Tweets into a blog post along with a few of these and a few thoughts on these, and some thoughts from the Copyblogger editorial team, because they also had lots and lots of thoughts on their favorite piece of bad writing advice.

The Most Important Thing You Can Learn From Bad Advice

For me, the recurring theme, the thing that keeps coming back to mind as I read these and chuckle at them and agree with them or, in some cases, only agree with them partway, is that a lot of these pieces of advice have their place. They do have contexts in which they are good advice. It is a good idea to publish content reasonable frequently. It does help you out, not just with Google, but it helps you out with your audience. Now, don’t create more content than people want to hear from, but yeah, creating content more regularly really is helpful.

It’s not so much that these are always bad advice, but that they can be taken too far or they can be applied in a context that doesn’t make sense. What I want you to take away is: when you get a piece of writing advice, and it might very well be an excellent piece of writing advice for many people, if it just doesn’t work for you, then you just have to sort of use your observational skills and your critical faculties and say, “That’s probably a great piece of advice for a lot of people. I have not found it works well in my situation.” And go on from there.

Our observation, not about what we believe to be true, what we know that just ain’t so. It’s not about that, it’s about paying attention to what s working and what’s not working. It’s about moving forward on what’s working well and it’s about paying attention always. Just keeping your eyes open to the situation as it is, rather than the situation as you think it ought to be.

That’s it. Hope you will join me over on the blog. If you have a favorite piece of bad advice, and I know you do, please share it with us. You can share it either in the comments at Copyblogger.FM or feel free to drop something into the blog post over at Copyblogger.com. Either way, I d love to hear from you. You are welcome to Tweet me always @SoniaSimone and I am looking forward to hearing your favorite pieces of bad advice and if you want to let me know your favorite piece of good advice, I’ll take that one too.

That’s it for today, talk to you soon. Take care.