On my mind:
“When you’re practicing, you’re working toward a specific goal methodically… If you want to sound great, you have to be 100% willing to sound bad.”
– Harry Mack, freestyle rapper
I find my inspiration far outside the B2B space.
For example, I found Harry Mack when Googling, “How to be a freestyle rapper”. In this video, he breaks down the difference between how he practices vs how he performs.
In this session, he uses a random word generator and practices creating setups and punchlines without using “filler phrases” like “Uh huh, yeah”.
Like a musician doing scales, this is all he’ll focus on in this session. He’ll practice another area of his craft at another time.
This is completely undervalued in B2B content.
If we’re being honest, many of us don’t practice or perform.
We create with glossy eyes, then blame the reader’s short attention span for underperforming content, then go home and binge Netflix for 4 hours, oblivious to the irony of it all.
We feed the beast and ignore the basics; like word economy, story structure, and wordcraft.
We still have to hit publish, but how can we, as editors and creators work with a single focus in mind?
Some ideas:
- Focus on word choice, sentence structure, and musicality.
- Word economy.
- Sweater knit copy. One line can’t exist without the previous one.
The next piece you write or edit, try improving only one of these areas.
Every piece is an opportunity for practice.
An interesting tweet:
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On that first bullet, it’s hard to tow the line on every post, video, or podcast that doesn’t push for the hard sell.
The second bullet makes it difficult to not make the excuse “it’s for branding” when you can’t answer the first question.
Tl;dr being intentional all the time is haaaard.
What’s on my radar?
- Primostats is a search engine that research much easier.
- Kaleigh Moore’s book “Write better right now“ lives up to its name.
- Shield‘s robust Linkedin analytics helps you see what resonates.
- Rand Fishkin rails on social media algorithms limiting reach.
- 3% of bloggers include 10+ images in blog posts but are 2.5x more likely to report strong results.
Weekly Update:
You know what stinks?
Approval chains.
Getting Legal, PR, and Product Marketing to sign off.
It takes forever, and usually means endless emails, Slack messages, and sometimes compiling a batch doc for certain people (you know the one) who prefer to work in bulk.
While I can’t help you eliminated needing approvals, this week’s video is all about automating sending those requests out over Slack and creating batch digests to send over email.
If you like it, would you please leave a comment or subscribe? As cliché as it sounds, it really does help the channel.
Bonus:
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I was on the Growth Marketing Toolbox earlier this week talking about content marketing operations and automations. First time I’ve gone really deep in the weeds about the kinds of things that can be automated.
If you’re interested in checking that out, you can click this link to be taken straight to it.
