Every Christmas as a child, I looked forward to receiving a pile of books to read. The pleasure of reading each book was all the greater because I knew there was another in the pile to come.
I particularly looked forward to the books my Auntie Ann sent me from England.
Imagine you get a wedding invitation in the mail. What if you opened it, and it was a few words scrawled messily on a scungy scrap of paper, and your name was misspelled. Would you feel like going to the wedding?
It’s hard to explain the idea of being ‘committed to the content you create’, which is the point of this blog. But I think as readers, we all instinctively know when we are reading a story written by someone who is committed to their content.
Call me a nit-picker, but I don’t think the word “passion” belongs on our CV or in the workplace – at least 99% of the time.
Only yesterday I heard another great example of why. A friend of mine, who works in one of the big banks, told me the bank is using “passion” as a key performance indicator! It is no longer acceptable to come to work, enjoy it, do it well, collaborate with our colleagues, and then go home feeling satisfied (if we are lucky); we must do so with an exhausting emotional intensity!
Do you remember your first byline? I do. It was 1993, and I bought six copies of The Canberra Times, which had published my 1200-word feature about food fads, and I jumped around the room, whooping.
Unfortunately, our precious byline means diddley-squat to most people outside the journalism industry. Hence the need to write our own personal profile.
Just because we are all doing content marketing doesn’t mean we should not think about whether or not it is the right strategy.
My thoughts about what is effective, and how to make it more effective have changed a lot in the past couple of years.
What hasn’t changed is my view that content is a very valuable marketing tool. But my experience tells me that most practitioners of the art are missing its full potential.