How-to guides, worksheets, and strategies and tactics to help you map out your marketing. Plus the odd philosophical musing on the digital world.

Whether you’re hiring a copywriter or writing copy in-house, your approach and philosophy will have nearly as big an impact on your success as the words you ultimately put on the page or screen. Most importantly, your approach to copywriting has to be broader than writing engaging prose. As obvious as it sounds, your copy…MORE >

In baseball, there’s an old-timey expression – “hit ‘em where they ain’t” – which serves as advice to a player about to step up to bat. The goal is to hit the ball where the defensive players aren’t. This is about the worst advice in the world for content marketers, unless we turn it on its head….MORE >

Your prospects don’t care about you. They don’t even care about what you do. They care about what you can do for them. I am fond of saying this to, well, anyone who will listen. (I believe it’s the phrase on which my now-16-year-old daughter perfected her eye roll.) It’s because of this that you…MORE >

You swear you’re going to do them, but they never get done. Not past February, anyway. So maybe we shouldn’t call these resolutions – because they could be the key to your content marketing success in 2017. My latest piece for Target Marketing is posted on that site. In it I look at marketing automation, how…MORE >

You can head over to the Biznology site right now for my most recent article, Is your marketing focus internal or external? Not sure whether your focus is internal or external? A quick count of the “yous” and “yours” on your site vs. the number of times you use me, we, and our is a pretty…MORE >

Readability shouldn’t be just about Flesch-Kincaid scores. Also factoring in are design, layout and user experience. Key among these is an approach that creates a clear differentiation between content and navigation. Other visual cues that will have an impact on how well your site engages visitors are how you create and highlight links, how well…MORE >

My latest piece for Biznology has posted on that site. This month I take a look at the decidedly cool and useful data that your content marketing generates. If you’re not paying attention to it, whether because you think it’s boring, intimidating, or just plain unlikely to yield any actionable insights, you’re leaving a lot…MORE >

Yes, the video is 4 years old and some of the terminology and screen grabs are out of date – for one, Webmaster Tools is now Search Console – but many of the concepts are still really great. Among the best: Account verification and email forwarding so you get Google alerts about your site ASAP. (Unless…MORE >

My latest piece for Target Marketing Magazine is up on that site. This time around, we look at how to find the balance between creating a great user experience and not getting in the way of those user who want to get to the info they need quickly and without marketing fluff. Experience vs. Expedience…MORE >