Content marketing tools and training.
You’re a hardworking copywriter who would like to get more clients. You meet a prospect — let’s call him Steve — at a networking event.
You get along pretty well, spending twenty minutes chatting about work, succulent plants, and the crazy behavior of three-year-old Cocker Spaniels.
As this happens, the filing clerk in Steve’s memory pulls out a crisp new index card and starts making notes. (This is a metaphorical file clerk, not an actual tiny person living in Steve’s brain.)
Congratulations, you have a hot writing assignment!
Maybe it’s a proposal that could make your company’s fortune.
Maybe it’s your first professional writing gig.
It could even be a guest post for Copyblogger.
The stakes are high . . . and you know it.
In fact, it’s all you can think about . . . the F.E.A.R. trying to sabotage your aspirations for success. Your fingers are shaking too hard to type anything, and your stomach has sunk down to the bottom of an ocean so deep that all the fish have weird lights on their heads.
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” ~William Morris, poet and designer
Imagine the household you would have if you got rid of every item that was neither useful or beautiful.
Gone would be the plastic doodad with no known purpose, the ugly frame your great-aunt gave you, the Special Free Offer™ you never opened, the collection of someday-useful peanut butter jars . . .
Every room would be so much more pleasant to be in, and every tool so much easier to find.
What if you applied the same rule to the content you wrote? Every email, sales letter, blog post, and comment you wrote would have to be useful or beautiful. Or both.
