A Content Marketer’s Diary
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You’re reading a content marketing diary.
Sounds a lot more compelling to me than the Content Marketing Carnival, right? That’s content marketing 101 – always go with what sounds most compelling.
Regardless of what it’s called, I absolutely love this weekly roundup, and every Sunday night I love the idea more. It’s a tremendous way for me to immerse myself deeper in the content marketing process, while passing our collective experience forward. It’s like content marketing with an exponent.
I brought some of my enthusiasm for the Content Marketing diary over to Writer Dad this week, starting by sharing what we’re doing with David’s brain child over at the Things My Child Says site on Monday with the post, The Awesome Stuff Your Child Says. Then I went whole hog the following day by posting about the Content Marketing Carnival itself.
Though I did this in part for SEO and the cross linking between the two sites, I also believe that there is a portion of the Writer Dad audience, mostly quiet but always there, who are genuinely interested in the business side of what I do. This belief was validated by the jump in Ghostwriter Dad subscribers after Tuesday’s posting on Writer Dad. Today’s roundup is our fourth, but I shined a light on all of the previous three.
1) Quality Content Marketing
2) Content Marketing for HIgher Profit
3) Content Marketing Behind the Scenes
On Wednesday I posted another entry in my Syllable Soup series with Lucky Chuck the Chicken Duck. Lucky Chuck is almost two years old, and one of the first rhymes I ever wrote. It was also my single biggest disappointment for the week. It garnered a couple of comments and a couple of tweets, which is likely one percent of what I would’ve managed if I’d posted something like “10 Ways to Make Sure Your Farts Don’t Stink,” which I might try next week.
And though this response was disappointing, it is not in any way discouraging. You never know who is reading or where something might lead. I’m posting the Syllable Soup entries because I have dozens and dozens of them written and would like to see the entire book in print by the end of the year. I believe in the concept of the book 100% and see a void in the marketplace where David and I can easily enter.
The entries are short, catchy and a lot of fun. I will continue to post Syllable Soup on Writer Dad every week or two, and it will be a part of Children Write the Future as well as eventually moving to its own domain. I think one thing that might help a lot is in the way I structure the headlines. I’m running another one this coming week with that specific experiment in mind.
On Friday I posted my Valentine’s Day card for Cindy, entitled “I Mostly Thought of You.” The piece waxed poetic about our first Valentine’s together. Though there was a bit of content marketing behind it as far as bonding, its only real purpose was so that my wife opened her email on Friday morning with something written specifically for her. It did, however, manage one of the ultimate goals of content marketing by gathering a link.
The author of the site stated, “I’ve found him! A husband, dad – a man revealing his emotions for Valentines Day in such eloquent fashion! So happy to have discovered this blog, it’s not often I’m enthralled by men’s writing but this blog’s a bit special.”
Bonding with the audience – muy bueno!
David dropped just one post at Blogger Dad this week, but it was a sequel to his really awesome “Classic Valentine’s Day Cards” from last year. This one, “Valentine’s Day Cards for the Sick and Twisted” was equally funny and an excellent opportunity for him to show off his wonderful way with visuals as well as his own unique brand of humor.
Things My Child Says had one entry with a funny quote about Star Wars. There is some mild disappointment that this site hasn’t taken off as quickly as The Creative Copy Challenge, especially given the quality of both the idea and the design, but some things just take a while to catch on. The concept is great and can provide constant user generated content once it gets going, as well as being a nice hub to many of our other projects.
With so much going on, I always try to have a trick or two up my sleeve to make each piece of content go as far as possible. My Content Marketing secret trick this week was handled in the comment sections of both Collective Inkwell and Creative Copy Challenge. At the Inkwell we ran “The Cure For Writer’s Block,” where we tried to fuel some of the same creative spirit we’ve been seeing at the Triple C.
Response was lower than we’d hoped, but David’s story was terrific and I’m sure we can use it again somewhere someday, and the one I wrote is a piece that I will later insert into my Once Around the Sun manuscript which is slowly being written throughout the rest of the year. This is also what I did for the entries I wrote for both Creative Copy Challenge #13 and Challenge #14.
Response dipped a bit for Challenge #14. It’s difficult to say whether or not this was due to the slightly more challenging set of words, or just the overall personal rhythm of the contributors.
Our first Inkwell post of the week was far more successful, pulling in three links, multiple subscribers and a handful of tweets. We’re glad, as we thought it was a terrific post: 51 Questions that Can Take Your Book From Good to Great.
Available Darkness was right at home on its new site with the release of Chapter 40. It seems rather unbelievable to David and I that we’ve been publishing the story for 40 weeks now. Time does fly. We’ll be starting podcasts for both Available Darkness and Penny to a Million within the next couple of weeks. That will allow us to move both of those projects to the next level which is really exciting.
As far as Penny, the site is now live and will start getting marketed this week. We’re trying something different by giving the marketing voice to Kelly, the main character of the book. He’s going to “give his book away” to the first 1,000 people who want to download it in exchange for their email address. Otherwise it’s $4.95. Same goes for the audio. It will be completely free by podcast, or $4.95 for the full audio file which we will upload to E-Junkie.
The entire book, however, is available to read on the site and is 100% for free. It will remain so, probably forever.
In addition to adding more to our content bank for Children Write the Future, we finally went into official production on one of our most exciting projects. It’s called Chef Happens, and will be a Vegan authority site set to launch at about the same time as the Children Write the Future reboot. The author of Chef Happens is celebrity chef Roberto Martin, who currently works as the personal chef to Ellen Degeneres.
We did manage to get out of our own little content marketing bubble, while still keeping our name on the byline with our spot on Copyblogger this week. Following last week’s Alfred Hitchcock post, this was part one of a three part series on Dan Kennedy’s Ultimate Marketing Plan. It was originally written as one long bear of a post, but Sonia thought it seemed sensible to break it into three.
Yes, you probably thought you would escape the week without my talking about potty training, but as of now, that’s our biggest content marketing project. So sorry, maybe in a month or so these roundups will be potty training free. For now, I’ll be brief and simply say that we published the “103 Reasons to Potty Train Your Child.” We’ve written this as a pillar post and hope it will invite a few links that will help to strengthen the overall site.
That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading and we look forward to seeing you next Monday!
