The Content Strategist
In 2010, two Harvard girls set out to create a subscription service for women who wanted to try beauty samples. Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp called their startup Birchbox, with the mission “to help women cut through the clutter of the beauty world to find products that really work for them.” Birchbox’s first recruit was…
When the Minnesota Vikings moved to a new content management system in July 2009, the franchise’s web team vowed to set their content bar high. Minnesota wanted Vikings.com to be the web’s top destination for Vikings news and information, and through that destination they wanted to sell tickets. In order to compete with national and…
What makes your business rank better or worse than the pool of companies just like yours on the internet? This week, we explore why content and distribution are key to building your audience. This week, we’ll recap the ANA Digital & Social Media conference in NYC, explain why The Sydney Morning Herald thinks businesses need…
A company blog can accomplish several goals at once: Establishing your corporate identity or brand, marketing your products, or providing customer service for common problems and solutions. But too many company blogs fail to get read or to attract regular readers, because they make a few mistakes that can be corrected with a small effort…
If you’re like most freelancers, you started your business as a sole proprietorship. Actually, if you’re like most freelancers, you just started finding gigs and didn’t consider your business structure at the beginning. Now and then you might wonder if you should incorporate, but it’s an easy issue to procrastinate ⎯ after all, meeting that…
Creating, conceptualizing, thinking about and writing not good content on the web is easy but not not writing bad content on the web is hard! That sentence is horrible. It’s hard to read. There are double negatives. It doesn’t make a good point, and it rambles. That is the essence of bad blog content on the Web.…
The secret behind most good writers is a good editor. An editor has a dual role as both a manager and a wordsmith. He or she will need to explain assignments clearly to writers, guide them to keep their work up to the site’s standards, and show them how to improve their writing over time.…
Google+, the search supergiant’s blatant Facebook competitor, has already racked up an estimated 10 million users in its first week as a limited-membership service. Content providers should definitely work Google+ into their content strategy, but be aware that Google+ is both like Facebook, and different from it, in important ways. Keep the Same Format as Facebook…
Search engine optimization. SEO. Optimizing stories for search. That’s how they do it at the farm — the content farm. That’s where writers are paid a pittance to write to a formula based on a specific set of words and phrases that some program says people are searching for. It’s like the directions on a…
