The How-I-Did-It Content Marketing Model

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“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.

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Gwawdodyn Hir Content Marketing

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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.

 

 

 

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The Convenience Factor in Content Marketing

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This week, in our Say It For You blog, we’re sharing insights from the book Prove It, in which authors Melanie Deziel and Phil M. Jones teach readers how to use content as a tool to earn audience trust… 

Even before you get to the “proof” stage in your marketing, according to RevLocal, there are five pieces of primary information that consumers use to either learn more about a business, or reject it out of hand. These include price, products and services offered, the availability of both, customer service, and (for services in particular) – location. Coupons and special offers may be important, the authors add, as are testimonials and reviews.

“Claiming to be convenient is making a promise that customers’ interactions with you will be frictionless,” Deziel explains, quoting statistics from the National Retail Federation showing that 9 out of 10 customers choose a retailer based on convenience, with that observation holding true for groceries, electronics, personal care items, and pet supplies.

As head of a team of content marketers at Say It For You, I found those observations about convenience especially important. Creating a steady stream of content takes time and patience, which is precisely the reason many entrepreneurs employ ghost writers. “Winning back time” is the way Doug Karr and Chantelle Flannery, co-authors of the book Corporate Blogging for Dummies describe the big advantage for business owners, or professional practitioners in “hiring it done when it comes to composing, researching, and editing content”.

 

On the other hand, what I’ve experienced over the past eighteen years is that, if the content is to succeed in demonstrating that the business owner or practitioner is staying in touch with what’s happening in the community, as well as in his or her field of expertise, the process  of creating content cannot be a matter of  “do-it-for-me-and-wake-me-up-when-it’s-over”. Even as they offer maximum convenience to their customers, the owners themselves should not expect to enjoy the “convenience” of non-involvement in the process of creating content.

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Unravel Acronyms, Accelerate Engagement

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Some letter combinations are such a familiar part of everyday life that they almost fade into the background. Every day we see markings on food packaging, clothes, water bottles, electronics and elevators, Sarah Anne Lloyd writes in Interesting Facts. Examples include:

UL – The Underwriters Laboratories Company conducts product safety testing on electric plugs, heaters, and smoke alarms.

FCC – Mobile phones, earbuds, and televisions stations are checked by the Federal Communications Commission to make sure devices don’t overexpose users to electromagnetic radiation.

YKK – The Yoshisa Kogyo Kabushikikaisha manufacturing company delivers high-quality zippers, and has become a go-to in the garment industry.

SKU – Stock keeping units are used to keep track of products for sale online, helping sellers be precise about exact color, size, and model of goods.

Many times, authors introduce new acronyms when they develop a novel technique and want to give it a catchy name, believing that this increases the chances of accepting and remembering the technique, Dr. Shweta Murudkar of the Enago Academy.explains. However, one must use abbreviations with caution, Murudkar warns, because overuse may in turn reduce readability, especially for a non-technical or non-specialist reader.

In content marketing, as I explained last month in this Say It For You blog, once you’ve established common ground, reinforcing to readers that they’ve come to the right place, it’s important to add lesser-known bits of information on your subject, which might take the form of arming readers with terminology and acronyms common in your field.  That not only adds value to the “visit”, but increases readers’ sense of being “in the know”.

I remember, more than ten years ago, Vogue Magazine publishing a glossary of terms, teaching prospects to feel like “fashion mavens” who understood the meaning of “boxy” and “dirndl”. Every trade and every profession has its own technical terms and acronyms that are used for the sake of convenience.  Now we content writers can help readers feel part of our client’s “inner circle”, all through unraveling those acronyms and sharing those industry-specific “secret words”.

 

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Helping Prospects Deal With the Stranger Come to Town

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Offering advice to writers, in a Writer’s Digest article Sharon Short suggests a “trope” or model to consider called “a stranger comes to town”. The protagonist of your novel, Short tells novelists, are doing quite nicely where they are – until a different, perhaps threatening, fish plops into their pond.

The “stranger” might be a shark (think “Jaws”), a tornado or other weather event, a detective, or a space alien (think E.T.). That “stranger” can be shooed away or cause the local fish (or ‘townspeople”) to learn from the stranger and embrace new ideas.

“Unique blog ideas not only help carve a niche for yourself but also engage your readers in a way that generic, overused topics often fail to do,” is the advice offered by Webstart Ventures. Unique content does more than merely rehash existing topics, but offers a fresh perspective, a novel approach, or explores uncharted territory, the author explains. Where do these “stranger” ideas come from?  “These ideas often stem from personal experiences, insights, and creative brainstorming, fueling content that is not only informative but also captivating and engaging”. 

When it comes to content marketing for businesses or professional practices, we know at Say It For You, positioning our clients as Subject Matter Experts is a worthy goal. We might be able to go one better, though, moving them to a position of  thought leader. Mere semantics?  Years ago, I read an article in Speaker Magazine in which Neen James presented the following definition: A Subject Matter Expert or SME (pronounced “smee”) knows something; a thought leader, in contrast, is known for something. They are the “strangers in town who “shift conventional wisdom.”

Do we then, in our content marketing efforts, position our owners and practitioners as the “strangers in town” bringing new ideas and a fresh outlook? Perhaps not. After all, readers were guided to the content because what they needed corresponded with what those practitioners and owners sell, what they know, and what they know how to do. Those owners and practitioners inspire trust by demonstrating that they are keeping up with the latest developments, helping their readers filter the new ideas the “stranger” is bringing to town.

While the focus of a business blog will always be on the trusted “local leaders” along with the services, advice, and products they offer, the content can reflect current happenings in the world, and “threats” posed by “strangers come to town”.

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