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1/ How did you get started with content marketing? How was the journey to The Content Studio?
I started my career after getting fired from a retail job over a pair of pants. Having never been fired before, I decided I’d never put myself in a situation where someone else had that kind of control. With zero prospects and a laptop with a crack in the screen from corner to corner, I started studying what was going on in internet marketing, which I had a small background in.
Two weeks later, I was introduced to my first client by someone I met at a random Super Bowl party. I took whatever work that’d pay, which led to running a Facebook page for a client where we grew from 0-150k followers in the first month shortly after Facebook introduced Pages to the platform.
A few years passed, and I eventually started writing for the site CXL.com where I would become the most trafficked author in my first year of writing, which I then negotiated into becoming the full-time editor. We built that blog to a pretty considerable size, and eventually, I was recruited into an unknown startup called Shopify (pre-IPO).
Within a few months of working on the core product’s blog team, the CMO asked if I’d be interested in running the enterprise blog, where I had the unenviable task of
1.) Distinguishing Shopify Plus from the rest of the enterprise ecommerce market, and 2.) Distinguishing Shopify Plus from Shopify when there were very few differences in features
Fortunately, I was able to do both and helped see Shopify Plus to their first 1,500 customers.
Eventually, I left Shopify Plus to work with Intuit where I went from running the U.S blog to running Global content spanning 16 markets with 45 contributors across multiple disciplines. This was an amazing learning experience where I learned how to build content operations that could scale quickly and efficiently. Sadly, Intuit eventually ended up laying off 7% of their entire business portfolio, of which I was one of 117.
Shortly after the announcement, deciding I never wanted to be put in a position to be laid off again, I registered my business - The Content Studio, and in the past two years have had the pleasure of working with clients like GoDaddy, Twitch, and LinkedIn.
In late 2021, The Content Studio also launched a web series called The Cutting Room, where we talk to industry-leading marketers about their content marketing philosophy, process, and pre-game before they edit an audience member’s article live on the stream.
2/ What is a lesson from The Cutting Room which is relevant as AI tools see increased adoption?
The biggest thing my guests and I have talked about is differentiation. Having a point of view and taking a stance on whatever industry it is you’re in.
A.I. has been an excellent research tool, and works well to provide inspiration and help position your thoughts, however the idea itself has to be born of market research and tap into some kind of desire, which can only be done by a person.
We’ve heard people recommend using A.I tools for tasks like generating headline ideas and recommended semantically related keyword clusters, which have genuinely been great use cases.
For my part, I’ve been experimenting with improving the specificity of my prompts to give the A.I a far clearer direction, which has, in turn, has helped me to give better feedback to the people I collaborate with the most.
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Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century. (SparkToro) MUST READ!
Subscribe now to grow your content marketing and writing muscles! Each week, you'll get an expert interview from a leading content marketer (free consulting—yay!), quick & actionable writing tips, and content marketing trends you may have missed delivered straight to your inbox. It's an easy decision—join 7000 other content marketers now!
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