The How-I-Did-It Content Marketing Model

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

 

“Why don’t you introduce your business and tell us what’s so great about it?” The editor of Start Your Own Business 2025 suggests to the founder of London-based ‘Go Car Shine’, posing three specific questions to guide the entrepreneur’s response:

  1. What made your business perfect for crowd funding?
  2. How was the experience?
  3. What advice would you give somebody with a great idea and a need for funding?

Score.org’s Rieva Lesonsky offers entrepreneurs some dos and don’ts about crowdfunding:

Don’ts include overpromising, launching a campaign before forming an actual entity, and forgetting to pay taxes on monies raised. Must-dos, on the other hand, include:

  • storytelling, sharing why you created your product or service
  • knowing your audience
  • setting realistic goals and timetables

Storytelling is an essential element in content marketing. However, as Seth Godin points out in his book All Marketers Tell Stories, not all stories succeed. The ones that do, he reminds us, are never aimed at everyone, only at an audience that already wants to believe. At Say it For You, we realize, knowing our target audience is the key to marketing success. The “Go Car Shine” story becomes the jumping-off point for offering advice to cash-strapped entrepreneurs, along with advice about marketing auto care services.

Whether recalling the start of your own business or professional practice or creating content for a client, it’s important to remember that recalling past failures can often turn out to be an indispensable tactic. Here’s why:

  • True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to connection readers feel with the people behind the business who overcame tremendous odds on the road to success.
  • By sharing tales of their own struggles, owners and practitioners demonstrate they understand the obstacles their readers are facing.
  • As Jamie Gutfreund once suggested in Forbes, “Gen Zs consider taking risks an important part of life and mistakes as badges of honor.”

The How-I-Did-It content marketing model is all about past failures ultimately leading to success.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Post How the Pros Do It

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

 

 

 

You wouldn’t imagine consulting Golf Digest for tips on content marketing, but ideas are everywhere, as I constantly assure readers of this blog. This week, both our Say It For You posts relate to articles in the March/April issue of Golf Digest. In this second piece,  Mark Blackburn writes about what the game’s best players are looking for when they see a green for the first time….

“A PGA Tour course is like a riddle: It has an optimal way for a given player to make his way around — and it ends with diagnosing the challenges of each green complex,” Blackburn explains, listing things important to notice about a course’s topography:

  • where pins have been during previous events
  • amount of landing area and available run-out
  • grass thickness
  • contours – “banks” and “bowls”

Mark Blackburn is careful to explain why these details could prove important to the reader – “Your scouting report will influence club selection and aim…  Good golf is a compounding of positive, sensible micro-decisions… Just being a tiny bit better in where you leave your approach shots, and a touch closer to the hole with your wedge game, is how you save a stroke here or there.”

In fact, I believe, this article is a near-perfect model of what I call “advice column” content, because the tips Blackburn offers readers are not only highly specific, but practical and do-able. With  no direct tie to any product or services “pitches”, the author is firmly establishing himself as a SME (Subject Matter Expert).

At Say It For You, we sometimes encounter resistance from business or practice owners when it comes to posting content. Owners of personal service businesses, in particular, voice fears of giving away valuable information “for free”. (What happens in the real world, we’ve seen over the years, is that readers don’t want to do it all themselves and turn to the source of the advice they’ve been offered.)

This concept of “soft marketing” is one I keep coming back to: business writing needs to be conversational and informational, not sales-y. Readers understand you’re writing for business purposes. The very reason they have made their way to your site in the first place is that what you sell or what you do is a good match for their needs. It is not necessary – in fact, often it will defeat your purpose as a content marketer – to punctuate the text with Calls to Action – either overt or disguised.

Posting “how the pros do it” (whatever your “it” is), turns out to be a great way to establish trust.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Writing About What Almost Never Was

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Long before the Masters golf tournament became what it is today, Augusta National overcame serious financial woes. Although co-founders Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones had had extensive plans, many never panned out, David Owen explains in Golf Digest. In three years of trying to build membership, the pair had sent out thousands of postcards, had hired salesmen to travel the country, and had bought membership lists from country clubs. Despite all those efforts, when the first National Invitation Tournament was held in 1934, the club had enlisted only 76 members. Then, just as, in 1939, they were beginning to realize some modicum  of success – the country was entering a war!

As a content marketer, I absolutely loved reading this “failure-turned-success” story. There’s an important lesson here for content creators for business or practice owners:  Writing about past failures is important. In fact, true tales about past mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the enterprise. What tends to happen is the stories of failure create feelings of empathy and admiration for those who overcame the effects of both outside forces and of their own errors.

 

Because the Masters Golf Tournament story relates to people no longer living, the story is told in third person by the club’s historian In posting marketing content today,  I recommend using the personal pronouns “I”  and “we”.  As Brandon Royal explains in The Little Red Writing Book, first person is personal and specific.  Readers appreciate knowing how a situation relates to the business owners or practitioners in terms of their personal experiences.

There’s another important aspect to recalling past failures, I explain — demonstrating that you understand the problems the online searcher is dealing with. To the extent you can truthfully say, “I know how frustrating the problem is, and that’s why I’m devoted to solving that problem through my business or profession,” you are infusing your content with more power.

 

While our Say It For You content writers are often the voice behind the “I” or “we”,  we know that “writing about what almost never was” can help make things happen for our clients – and for their readers!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Nice Try. Do it Again.

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

 

 

(image by Mike Hindle)

I invited friend and writing colleague Myra Levine to contribute a guest blog post for the enjoyment of  our Say It For You readers (and my own, of course!)  …

 

 

We were reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and Mrs. Painter pointed out that when the author wrote dialect, he wrote the way his characters spoke.

“When you write dialogue,” she said, “the reader
wants authenticity, not perfect grammar.”

Naturally, I wrote my next assignment (Discuss three ways in which Dickens develops the theme of self-sacrifice) as a conversation between two semi-literate high school students.  Mrs. Painter handed it back to me with these words in big red letters:

Nice try. Do it again.

I didn’t mind. The smile on her face was a drug. I had entertained her. And the freedom to ignore comma rules? Intoxicating. The smartest thing I did was tell everybody my new life goal—to write novels. It’s harder to give up on a goal you’ve made so public. Enthusiasm comes and goes; pride is eternal.

But writing a good novel turned out to be HARD. I spent ten summers taking writing classes at the University of Iowa to learn what I hadn’t been taught in high school and college creative writing classes.

Inspiration turned out to be everywhere. The germ of the idea that turned into my first novel came from a bunch of gossipy mom friends. The idea for my second novel came from a health scare. It turned out to be no big deal, but the thought How do you raise your kids after you’re dead stayed with me.

Whatever you do for a living might give you inspiration. Think John Grisham. Or you might be one of those “What if…” writers, like Stephen King. Going through a terrible breakup? Get your psychic revenge by writing a murder mystery. I slip people who annoy me into my novels. No lawsuits yet.

And you know more than you think you do. When I had my first hip replacement, I was surprised to learn that you don’t hold a cane on the side of your bad leg. (If you test this, have someone nearby to catch you when you tip over.) It occurred to me that someone could catch a suspect who’s faking a limp when he holds his cane on the wrong side.

What have you learned in your years as a ________ that would make a character feel real? What personal demons could you turn into inspiration? And what did you never learn in English Class that you can ignore… or hire someone else to fix? Think about it.

 

      Myra Levine is a novelist, memoirist, and writing coach. Her free online writing seminars on Eventbrite have attracted over 2,000 writers from all over the world. She publishes as M. E. Levine on Amazon.com & Audible.com.

Find her at www.MyraLevine.com

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Gwawdodyn Hir Content Marketing

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

In Writer’s Digest, I was introduced to Robert Lee Brewer, who created a series called Poetic Form Fridays, sharing, each week, an example of a different kind of poem. The Gwawdodyn Hir, for example is a six-line Welsh poetic form characterized by five things:

  • Each poem is a sestet (it has six lines)
  • There are nine syllables in the first four lines
  • There are ten syllables in the final two lines
  • Lines one, two, three, four, and six end rhyme
  • The end of line five rhymes with a syllable in line six

Brewer advises writers to try different formats for their own writing, setting the example by writing his very own Gwawdodyn Hir love poem called Languish:

Move the blood around your beating heart
and provide our love a chance to start
as if you’re the horse and I’m the cart
or lost explorer without a chart
to know the universe or words to say
through these silent days when we’re both apart.

As a marketing content creator, what I found so fascinating about this article and about Brewer’s original poem is that, staying within such almost over-restrictive Gwawdodyn Hir guidelines, the man was able to create a highly original piece of content, expressing a message of his own choosing.

In creating blog posts or articles, working off a “grid” can help writers organize their thoughts while still creating unique content:

“Consider the following steps and tips to write an article,” ExcelTMP suggests.

  • Choose a topic
  • State your point of view on that topic
  • Write the title.
  • Each section of the article should:

Describe what the section is about and why it matters.                                     Give detailed research or examples                                                                        Provide a “takeaway” thought for the audience

HubSpot offers its own grid:

  1. Why the topic matters: Explain the importance of the concept or task.
  2. Who it applies to: Identify the audience, industry, or sector that will benefit from the post.
  3. What to expect: Summarize what the post will cover (e.g., “In this post, we’ll explain why [term] is essential, outline how to [task], and provide practical tips to get started”).To stand out from the crowd, try incorporating your own expertise or examples as it relates to the term.

It’s interesting that, just one year ago, in this Say It For You blog, I quoted another Writer’s Digest author, Mariah Richards, who said, “There are no original stories, but there are always original ways to tell old stories,”

In the field of content marketing,  one concern I hear a lot from business owners or professional practitioners is that sooner or later, they (and we, their writers) will have depleted the supply of new and different ideas to write about. It’s true that, by its very nature, periodic messaging will involve repetition, with the variety coming from the “e.g.”s and the “i.e.”s, meaning all the details you fill in around the central “leitmotifs”.

Just as Robert Lee Brewer was able to be creative with the restrictive Gwawdodyn Hir guidelines, in our mission as creators of marketing content for our clients, we can create highly original pieces of content to convey our clients’ marketing messages to each of their targeted audiences.

 

 

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail