From initial idea to sharing your work, there are seven stages to the writing process. They each require different skills, a different energy, or just a different focus. You might find that some are better suited to different times of day, or even just a different mood. If you can give yourself the time and space to do it, there’s joy to be had at every stage.

If you’re just setting out on your content marketing journey, these tips will get you off on the right foot, and help you avoid some of the key pitfalls that can scupper your success. If you’ve been on the journey for a while it’s good reminder of the principles underlying the valuable content approach.

When it comes to telling stories to build your business, the founder or origin story is one of the most powerful. It can be the hook that pulls in investment, and the glow that attracts the best talent. Founder stories can make brands famous, with the owner’s personal story of how and why they started becoming part of business folklore.

In the old days stuffing your web copy with keywords might have fooled a search engine into ranking you highly, but it never tricked a reader into sticking around for long. The key to pleasing search engines and people is to create well targeted valuable content, written in a natural and engaging tone of voice.

In these turbulent times should you lower your rates or change your offer? Or should you keep holding out for your ideal clients? Tips for attracting your hero clients.

People have always named ‘finding the time’ as the biggest barrier to creating content. There are always so many other things to do when you’re running a business. ‘Finding the time to write’ slips all too easily down the to-do-list. Ideas to help you use your writing time to your best advantage.

If you want to speak out clearly to a big handful of perfect clients, then you’ll be relying on your unique blend of experiences and expertise to create the story that will lead them towards you.

Here’s how to use content to spotlight your expertise and build your reputation.

Building a reputation depends upon getting known. Do one thing well, draw a community around it and you’ll be on your way to building a brand.

But getting known for one thing depends upon you talking about that one thing, not just once, but for weeks and months and years. How can you do that without boring your audience, or, just as importantly, without boring yourself!

Did that headline get your attention? I hope it did. Writing effective headings is not easy. This one is very much of the “it does what it says on the tin” school — and that’s often no bad thing.

But when your audience is skimming through hundreds of emails, posts, tweets and blogs, how do you write headlines that grab their attention?

If your aim is foggy, your content marketing efforts will stumble. It’s easy to get caught up in tactics - I’ll write a six blogs a month, I’ll make the newsletter weekly not monthly, I’ll start a podcast - rather than being really specific about the goal you want to reach. 

Here’s how to focus your marketing efforts and thrive in 2021.

When there’s so much that you could say it can be hard to know where to focus your limited time. You know that digital marketing relies on creating and sharing a steady stream of content, but what content and when?