You've written your heart out and you're ready to publish your 1st blog... but are you really ready? 🤔 How can you know? How do YOU, personally, know your blog is ready to go live?Make a list of what a "ready to be published" article looks like to you.⭐️ What needs to be on this list?⭐️ Who is this article for?⭐️ What stage in your buyer's journey would your intended reader be in?⭐️ What would qualify as "not ready to be published," in your mind?To help you create your very own "ready to be published" list, feel free to borrow mine --->  Blog Publication Checklist. Make your own copy and customize this to reflect your company and your tone. You should be able to say "this article is ready to be published," with pride and confidence... let this checklist be your guide.Happy Writing 📝 🧡

Briana Meisel

44 minutes ago

"For many of us effective multi-tasking is nothing more than just effective delusional thinking." - Brad Stuhlberg, Peak Performance Ouch! For as long as I can remember, I've prided myself on being a professional multi-tasker, gaining pure satisfaction from how many boxes I could check off at the end of the day (and I know I'm not the only one). Yet no matter how many tasks I winded up touching in a week, I often found that I was still not completing my priorities and hitting all of my deadlines. My productivity was tanking! It wasn't until our team began reading Peak Performance that I realized that the thing I was proudly wearing as a badge was my biggest hinderance to my productivity. According to Stuhlberg, "Studies show that multi-tasking can cannibalize as much as 40% of someone's productive time." But why? Because our brains don't work like computers do - they can't process more than one thing at a time with a high level of quality. So instead of getting twice as much done with multi-tasking, we're actually only getting about half as much done. So here's a couple of tips that our team has been putting into practice this week:  Define concrete objectives for your working session  Get rid of distractions (that's right... put your phone and slack on silent) Focus and concentrate deeply on one task at a time Remember... Quality over quantity. 

Janet Mendez

about 1 hour ago

When I was a business of one, I decided to let go of other things that could be easily outsourced like paying bills, Quickbooks, client work, etc. But when it came to the business of drafting initial content, I stayed really close to it. I was able to use that content to eventually build capacity in others and grow. Now we are a company of 25 and we have a dedicated Content Manager. I agree that consistency is key,  Connor DeLaney  ! 

Connor DeLaney

about 2 hours ago

One of the biggest topics in the SEO community over the last few years is E-A-T. If you truly want to set yourself apart from competitors, it's an essential part of your SEO strategy.E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google evaluates these qualities when determining which pages it will feature on a search engine results page. E-A-T is especially important if you write content about topics that Google considers YMYL (your money or your life) topics. In other words, these are topics that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.So, how do you showcase your expertise and trustworthiness to your readers (and to search engines)?Here are a few places to start: Always be sure your content is as accurate as possible. Ensure your sources are credible and link to the original source on your page when possible. Update your content. Outdated information is a liability to the credibility of your content and your website, so revisit your site's most popular pages frequently to keep them current. Make it clear who wrote the article. Leverage author pages and/or bio boxes to showcase your authors' credibility on the subjects they're writing about.  If your content covers financially or medically sensitive information (anything from mortgages to health advice), the credibility of your authors is even more important. You might have noticed that websites like Healthline include not only the author's information (and credentials) but also those of the person who "medically reviewed" the page.  View full-size Download Not every website needs to go to these lengths on every post, but E-A-T is an important consideration for anyone interested in improving their performance on Google. The more information you can provide to establish the trustworthiness of your content, the better. Want to learn more about E-A-T? Here are two great resources for more in-depth information: Dr. Marie Haynes provides an overview on E-A-T E-A-T and YMYL (from Semrush)

Seth Sparks

about 2 hours ago

The essence of They Ask, You Answer is building trust with your buyer through honest, helpful, and transparent content. But one common hesitation I've seen in working with hundreds of content managers is writing content about your own company. This idea likely stems from writing "Best Of" competitor comparison articles where you purposely exclude your company from a list of best vendors in your space. There's absolutely a reason that in that article type you'd want to avoid including yourself on the list - just think about how you'd feel if you were searching for best vendors and you landed on a company website that listed themselves as one of the best. *cringe* But let me empathetically state that you not only can, but should be writing about your company.I guarantee you that at a certain point in the sales process your potential buyers are vetting you as a supplier. And with that comes questions about...you guessed it...you as a supplier. Your sales team likely has heard questions like "Why should I buy from you?" or "What makes your widget different from theirs?" or "Why is your cost more expensive than the other guys?"And if your potential buyer or customer is asking the question - you must answer it. Now here's the trick. You have to address these questions in a way that builds trust. That means you can't answer the question of "Why should I buy from you?" with an article titled "Why you should buy from us". Instead, use a bit more tact with something like "Is X company the right fit for you?"When writing articles about your company keep 3 things in mind: Address the question as factually as possible. Use data and third-party verification to support anything positive you're claiming about yourself. Don't hide your skeletons in the closet either. Strip away your biases. Don't use an article where you're talking about your company as an opportunity to highlight the good things and overload the reader with features and benefits. Don't hide your skeletons in the closet - be open about them. It's better they learn about your downsides from you rather than someone else. Make sure your sales team knows when these articles are published. Articles addressing questions specifically about your company are great for assignment selling at later stages of the buying process. 

Brian Casey

November 26 at 05:01pm