I apologize for being late...

It's been a freaky time - my head hasn't really been in Simply Friday mode.

Of the 1,000+ Design, SEO & Marketing articles I normally read each week, I think I've probably seen about 10 - and none of those inspired any great insight. But it's OK 'cos there's a huge takeaway from all of this:

You and Me - we're not robots

We're human beings running a business and creating content around it so that people will choose us when they need our product or service.

If the content we create comes across as mechanical, as outsourced, as cold and impersonal, we lose the one huge advantage we have - our authenticity.

Personality is everything

The whole point of social media is that it occurs between people, between human beings.

The more of ourselves we put into our content, the more unique and different and interesting and just damn human our message becomes.

Big caveat!

I want to be really clear here - this is not about over-sharing; content still has to reflect your business. But by acknowledging that sometimes shit just happens, you can still build trust and often deepen the relationship you have with your audience.

If you'd like to get your content marketing rolling again, reply to this email and book a session - but maybe, perhaps, you could wait until next week ;-p

Written while listening to Riffing in 59 - Instrumental Study Music

Unroll.me - You're going to love it...

I don't know about you but I'm inundated with email - I wake up and there's 40 or 50 new messages in my inbox and the bastards keep on coming throughout the day.

It's not that I don't want those emails - I just want to get them in a more manageable way.
 

This is brilliant.

You sign up & give it access to your inbox (you need to be using Gmail or Yahoo,) and it goes through and shows all the email lists you are subscribed to.

This alone would be worth it as you quickly see lists that you no longer need and can unsubscribe from with a single click.

But even better, you can take all the remaining lists and add them to a "rollup," one single email that arrives once a day.

And it's free.

I've been using this for the last week; it makes a huge difference.

Once you're up and running, spend the time you save on improving your digital marketing - you know what to do...

Written while listening to Stop Being A Whiny Bitch - Instrumental Study Music

Welcome to your nightmare

...You wake up and it's 2015, your closest competitor has a website with 100 posts that describe your business.

They have a visible presence on social platforms and have earned a reputation for being the "go to" person in your area of expertise.

If you search for your business on Google or Bing, it's her you find...

I know...

Having run this consultancy for the last two years I know how difficult it is for a small business to actually execute on a content strategy; planning is easy but the doing - clearly this is hard.

Bloody blogging!

This is the printing press all over again, it's radio, it's TV, it's Internet banner ads - it's the next wave in business marketing and you're either on-board with it and learning how to do it or you will lose out to someone who's hungrier than you are.

Learn to do it right

Not everyone is a natural creator, let alone writer or videographer, there's a learning curve attached to content marketing that reflects the medium you're working with. It's not rocket science but if you're doing it wrong, you're wasting your time and energy.

How to work with me

Half of what I do is just create time in an executive's calendar where they're forced to look at this aspect of their business; the successful ones use that time slot as an anchor for their activity.

I often feel like a school teacher when they apologize for not getting their work in on time but really, it's not me they should be apologizing to.

If you'd like to get serious about your future and stop the nightmare becoming a reality, reply to this email and book several sessions!

Written while listening to Frustration 2 - Solo Piano - Instrumental Study Music

WTF is tl;dr?

tl;dr

• means "too long; didn't read"
• strangers won't read long form content
• mark up your content; make it easy to read
• call me and I'll teach you how to do it

Are you familiar with the expression tl;dr?

You'll find it in response to a lengthy missive or sometimes at the top of a long blog post. It stands for:

Too long; didn't read

and it's becoming more prevalent

Read me goddammit!

Until you develop a regular audience, you have to earn the right to be read.

A potential customer doesn't know whether you're worth investing the time to read a long post and if all you're offering is a long page of text - they'll move on to something more manageable to digest.

Make it easy

Good online writers are breaking their posts into bite size paragraphs with compelling sub-titles and now, for longer posts, some are even adding a short summary at the top.

See example at the top of this email.

If you'd like to get a jumpstart on your competition - reply to this email and book a session.

Written while listening to Frustration 2 in Blue & Green (Ending) - Instrumental Study Music

More Curation (and no - it's still not about bacon!)

Here's the secret to producing great content every week....

Read like a lunatic!

Yep - educate yourself on your market, your business, read what other people are writing - allocate time everyday to see what's new in your world.

RSS makes it easy

I've written about RSS before; right now I'm able to skim read close to 1,000 articles a week from over 125 different experts and it takes me about an hour a day.

I'm not suggesting you need that much of a fire hose but I promise you, if you start reading the top 10 people in your industry, you're going to come across stuff that you can share with your audience.

Sharing is almost curation

What I do with this newsletter is "distill" or "curate" the good stuff from the massive amount of information that I take on board and then share it with you.

I've written almost 80 newsletters in the last 2 years and I'm pretty sure at least half of them were directly inspired from an article I'd read that week.

Don't plagiarize

Don't just cut and paste the article, you must make the idea relevant to your readership and give it your unique spin - plus it's kinda lame if you're using other people's work and not acknowledging them.

There are multiple benefits

• Saves you from having to come up with a genius idea of your own every week
• Introduces you to influencers in your world who may one day share your content
• Educates you and makes you a better business person

It's not rocket science

This isn't difficult to do, what's hard is committing to the process and allocating time in your day to make it happen.

If you're ready to learn how to do this (and make your life a hell of a lot easier,) reply to this email and book a session.

Written while listening to Frustration 2 - April 17 - More Glow Sticks - Instrumental Study Music

The Physics - it's all wrong!

That's the thing about internet marketing in 2013 - it's all upside down.

Remember this:

It's easier to hit a big target

A pretty basic fact of life & one we all grew up with and yet, in this world, it's wrong.

Communicate to too broad of an audience and your message gets lost in a sea of irrelevant spam.

It's easier to hit a small target

There's the story of the Facebook engineer who created an ad for her husband's birthday; because she knew so much about him, she was able to make it appear on his page alone - enabling her to use some rather racy and "resonant" language.

Less is most definitely more

By focusing on the few instead of the many you not only improve your message, you can prioritize which communities and networks to focus on.

In today's world, a new satisfied customer with a smart phone and a social media account can do more to market your business than you can.

Of course this approach requires some fore-thought, a strategy, some tactics - hell - that almost sounds like a plan. If you'd like some help developing one for your business, reply to this email and book a session.

Written while listening to Frustration - Music to write a paper or essay to