Hello, friend! Welcome to the twenty-seventh edition of The Write Fit, a fortnightly newsletter from Dan Hatch and Sarah Mitchell at Typeset. It’s Dan in the chair this week, pulling the levers on the Wayback Machine in order to share the first content marketing lesson he ever learned.
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A content marketing lesson 20 years in the making
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My God, I was bored.
I was 20 years old, a cadet on a local newspaper in a small regional city (Pop: 30,000) and genuinely shocked no-one had seen fit to hand me a Pulitzer Prize for anything I’d written.
Honestly — the disrespect.
What I didn’t know then — and what I realised last week, after a serendipitous phone call I made for a client — was that the boredom I experienced back then, and how I dealt with it, taught me some of the secrets to successful content marketing.
The rebellious young writer
For nearly two years I was the most junior reporter on the paper (that's me, at the time, in the photo above). While I counted my success and progress by how many front-page “splashes” I got each month, being the junior member of the editorial team meant I had to write all the — how do I put this sensitively? — crap.
Every Thursday morning, for nearly two years, the sales manager would hand me the name and phone number of the classified advertiser I’d have to interview for our “Trader of the Week” advertorial, and the number of a real estate agent who’d take me around the “Feature Home” I’d profile in our next edition.
For the first eight or nine months, it was all an adventure. I was writing for a living — who cared what I was writing? But soon the boredom set in. Did Woodward and Bernstein have to put up with this rubbish?
I started to become rebellious. I’d slip in a few jokes, a pun or a double entendre, to amuse myself. All the copy had to be approved by the advertiser, and I was getting away with it. In fact, they loved it. The local undertaker even dared me to include some of his special deals.
Die this week, get 50% off!
Get buried in one coffin, get your next coffin free!
The lesson for content marketers
I started to really enjoy writing the profiles and soon discovered I could also give them real heart — telling the stories of the people behind the businesses rather than writing a promo for whatever deal they had on that week. I adored doing that. Why wouldn’t the local plumber, mechanic, dog washer or gardener have incredible stories worth publishing?
It was a fresh approach to traditional newspaper advertorials and our advertisers loved it because they could see it working. The public were actually reading these articles and reacting positively.
The lesson I learned back then, the one that is so central to success in content marketing, is that there is always a good story to tell, and a good way to tell it. Even if you think the subject matter is boring as hell.
All of this came flooding back to me last week because a client asked me to interview one of their customers for an article for their magazine. The name of their customer was instantly familiar — I’d first interviewed him 20 years ago, as a cadet, for “Trader of the Week.”
He was kind enough not to mention my non-existent Pulitzer Prize.
Dan Hatch
8 September 2020
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Your writing might be technically good but is it successful in helping you meet your business goals? Sarah takes a deep dive into some research and interviews a couple of experts to find out what makes the most effective communicators more successful than those who are not quite hitting the mark.
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Excuse us for blowing our own trumpet
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The Typeset team are thrilled to announce – okay, blow our own horn – that our work for Murdoch University and LiKa Family Fostering won finalists spots in two categories of the international 2020 Content Marketing Awards in New York, USA:
In addition, we contributed to another finalist category:
Murdoch deserves an extra round of applause this year. In a show of content marketing muscle, Murdoch University won best content marketing program in education for This is Free Thinking and was a finalist in the most innovative content distribution strategy category for the same project.
We love working with all our clients and we’re thrilled to see the hard work and dedication of the amazing teams at LiKa and Murdoch getting some well-earned recognition.
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The use of infer as a synonym for imply is becoming more common, but it’s not considered standard and will probably draw criticism. There’s a little trick that makes it easier to remember their uses. Their definitions are the key to this trick.
imply: verb.
- to indicate or suggest, as something naturally to be inferred, without stating explicitly.
- to involve as a necessary circumstance.
- (of words) to signify or mean.
infer: verb.
- to derive by reasoning; conclude or judge from premises or evidence.
- (of facts, circumstances, statements, etc.) to indicate or involve as a conclusion; imply.
- to imply or hint.
You can see their definitions are closely related and each contains the other word. The trick to remember is that imply is to give a hint and infer is to take a hint. The differences can be seen in these sentences:
My request for a raise should not imply that I am unhappy.
I infer from my manager’s praise that I deserve a raise.
The easiest way to remember the distinction between these two is that one person may imply what another person infers.
Wendy Wood
Proofreader
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Missed a recent edition of The Write Fit?
Catch up here!
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Life after journalism
In late August Dan gave a presentation to the American Society of Journalists and Authors about how to successfully make the jump from journalism to content marketing. (A special welcome to our new subscribers from the ASJA.) On the topic, here’s Dan writing about making the switch in 2016. And here’s a piece he wrote for CMI for any editors struggling to help journalists become content marketers.
The Disney strategy
Former Content Marketing Institute boss Joe Pulizzi was talking at a You Are The Media Zoom lunch last week and pointed out that Walt Disney laid down the blueprint for content marketing strategy as far back as 1957. Mind-blowing! You can read all about it in this Harvard Business Review article.
Andy Crestodina's blogging survey
If you're blogging for your business, please consider taking a few minutes to take Andy Crestodina's blogging survey. It's one of the biggest annual surveys of its kind and the findings are always a great resource.
How they made us doubt everything
This podcast will blow your goddamn mind. It’s from the BBC and it’s called How They Made Us Doubt Everything. It’s very much about the dark side of marketing and PR. It might make you a bit angry. But it will also make you a smarter consumer (and citizen).
I’m afraid expulsion is the only answer
For our traditional music video sign-off we wanted to leave you with a sense of where Dan’s head was 20 years ago. He could have chosen any track. There was early Coldplay, some vintage Radiohead, and classic All Saints to choose from. He picked this. That boy needs therapy.
Until next time,
Happy writing.
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