Lesson tag: Content Marketing

Content is a nebulous topic, it’s hazy, vague, ill-defined.

Working as a content strategist I’m often asked similarly nebulous questions. For example - ‘what sort of content should we create?’

I’m a firm believer that content should be goal-driven. By this, I mean that what you create should be driven by what you want to achieve.

What do folks ultimately want to achieve?

Two of the most popular trends in marketing right now are growth hacking and content marketing.

Growth hacking is a marketing technique designed to turn clever hacks into fast-paced product growth. Content marketing is also about growth; if you’re creating content, you’re doing it because you want to grow your traffic and reach more people.

Long story short:

Some weird things have happened since the morning of September 12, 2014, the day 1,009,964 people viewed the story of my life.

It was my second article to get big traffic, and since then my life has become a bit intense at the crossroads of freelancing, startup-ing, and blogging.

Headline writing is tricky. Tricky, but absurdly important. Write the wrong headline and your incredible piece could be destined for mediocrity, gathering dust on the far corners of the internet (it is a well documented and accepted fact that the internet is not round and thus has corners. Just ask Al Gore.)

How do you compete against sites that are 25 times larger with marketing budgets that exceed your 7-year-old company’s total historic revenue? You don’t.
For the past two years, the content strategy at Movoto has been about finding holes in our bigger competitors’ strategies and exploiting them. Much like the Oakland A’s fight against the Yankees and Red Sox, we can win if we focus on parts of the market that our competitors overlook.

We’ve all been there. We’ve slaved over our web copy. We’ve carefully crafted and polished each sentence. We’ve rewritten, and edited, and tweaked again.

We finally publish our web copy…and face total letdown. We find web visitors are bouncing. We don’t get the email sign-ups we’re looking for. We don’t get the sales we deserve.