Category: Featured

Data Is Clear: To Be Effective at Content Marketing, Have a Documented Strategy

By Jerod Morris

cover image of CMI 2015 report

Talk is cheap. So it should come as no surprise that when it comes to content marketing strategy, simply talking about it is not enough.

That is the big takeaway from the 2015 benchmarks, budgets, and trends study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, sponsored by our own Rainmaker Platform.

According to the study, only 39 percent of B2B small business marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. The rest either have a strategy that they have only talked about (47 percent), have no strategy at all (12 percent), or are unsure (1 percent).

Here’s …read more      

Read More

How to Learn From Your Mistakes

By Jerod Morris

The Lede Podcast logo

Everybody makes mistakes.

And everybody should make mistakes. They are unavoidable when we step outside of our comfort zones. Avoiding mistakes means avoiding growth.

But we can’t repeat our mistakes. We need to learn from them. When we do, we turn negatives into positives and move forward. When we don’t, we simply run in place.

In this episode of The Lede, Demian and I share personal stories of mistakes we’ve made — some big and some small — and how we learned from them, and we describe the thought process necessary to do so consistently.

We discuss:

  • Recovering from technical errors (notably, a rather embarrassing …read more      
Read More

7 Lessons and 3 New Strategies I Learned From Launching My 5th Blog

By Neil Patel

total traffic

I’ve been blogging for around 10 years, so you would think that it’s easy for me to start a blog and gain traction. Although it’s true to some extent, it’s still difficult for me to start a blog from scratch.

A few months ago, I started my 5th blog on NeilPatel.com as an experiment to see how quickly I could get to 100,000 visitors a month.

Although I’m only at 28,109 visitors and 51,746 pageviews a month, I’ve been learning a lot. Here’s what I learned:

Lesson #1: Great content isn’t enough

If you look at a few of the content pieces on …read more      

Read More

Trolls, Unkind Words, and How to Know You’re on the Right Track

By Sonia Simone

image of Inuksuk sculpture from the Athabasca Glacier, taken by James Pratley

At the end of the day, I just find your persona incredibly grating.

Funny that I can still remember that comment word-for-word. It’s from an unsubscribe note to my email list dating back at least seven years now.

I heard lots of good things back then, too. I was helping people, sharing what I knew in a way that was useful to my (then tiny) audience. But I don’t remember any of the good comments verbatim.

Even back then, though, the note made me laugh.

(Ruefully.)

Because I knew that it was a signpost. A signal …read more      

Read More

The Scientifically Proven Best Time to Think and Write Creatively

By Neil Patel

The Scientifically Proven Best Time to Think and Write Creatively

Do you know when the best time to write is? Is it morning, afternoon, or evening?

Just like you, I was curious, so I decided to do a bit of research. The answer I found shocked me.

Here’s what I learned…

Click on the image below to see a larger view:

Click here to view an enlarged version of this infographic.

Conclusion

I tend to do my best writing in the morning and have been doing so for years. By being consistent with my writing schedule, I’ve trained my brain to be prepared to write during that time.

Funnily enough, I also generate most of my …read more      

Read More