The Barbell Strategy for Risk-Averse Content Marketing

“Marry an accountant, but have occasional flings with rock stars.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb The worst thing that can happen to a marketer embarking on setting up a content program is also the most common. It goes like this: The Death Spiral of Nearly All Content Programs You see some success stories, perhaps from competitors … Read more

The 35 Best Content Marketing Tools in 2024

Alright, here we go, another list of content marketing technology products! (Silence from the audience) Well, this one will be different. (Drumroll) The 35 Best Content Marketing Tools in 2024 Google Docs Evernote Airstory WordPress ButterCMS Webflow Ahrefs Clearscope SEMRush Serpapi.com Screaming Frog Yoast Grammarly Mailshake Buzzsumo Sprout Social Mailchimp Vidyard Loom Zoom Trello Notion … Read more

Brand Awareness is Basically a Meaningless Metric. Here’s Why.

“Kmart has plenty of awareness, so what?” -Purple Cow by Seth Godin I hear the term “brand awareness” all the time, but to be honest, I don’t really know what it means. On its surface, it’s somewhat obvious: it’s the amount of people who know about your brand. But that simple, stupid Google search definition … Read more

Content Marketing Strategy: Everything You Need to Know to Build a Growth Machine

Content marketing strategy is something few companies do well. This is something I’ve focused on for years, mostly because all the companies I’ve worked for, from super early stage startups to HubSpot where I work now, have been largely supported by content marketing (in one way or another). However, each company’s content marketing strategy was … Read more

What is A/B Testing? An Advanced Guide + 29 Guidelines

A/B testing (aka split testing or online controlled experiments) is hard. It’s sometimes billed as a magic tool that spits out a decisive answer. It’s not. It’s a randomized controlled trial, albeit online and with website visitors or users, and it’s reliant upon proper statistical practices. At the same time, I don’t think we should … Read more

Growth Models

How do you model and predict growth (and growth opportunities)? There’s all this talk about “growth models” and “growth modeling” but not much talk about how to build them and get value from them. As with many things, it’s easy to see why they’re important, but hard to put them into action. This post covers … Read more

There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Lunch in Content Marketing

“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.” – Milton Friedman (among others throughout recent history) This will be piece inspired by a recent BuzzFeed article that outed contributors at “trustworthy” publications like Forbes, HuffPo, and Inc. To recap the piece: Forbes and others operate using a free contributor model. In addition, their editorial stringency … Read more