Content marketing tools and training.
One of the most useful skills in business is to be able to look at what someone else is doing in an unrelated topic, and bring it to your own online marketing.
You’ll find fresh angles, new approaches, and compelling ways to deliver your message.
If you run a yoga studio, you can often learn more from an auto body shop or a roofing company than from your fellow yogis.
If you’re in technology, take a look at what artists are doing. If you’re a musician, borrow from accountants.
You’re stuck again.
You know what you’re supposed to do. It’s not a matter of knowing the next steps — you know them, all right. You just aren’t taking them.
You watch while others pass you by. People who aren’t as good as you. People who don’t work as hard as you do.
Frustrating.
Something is holding you back from taking the next step. From doing the scary part — the part that means you might actually succeed.
Welcome to The Lede.
Every week I’ll be digging up and linking to stories, news, and opinion relevant to online marketing and copywriting.
Email, social media, innovation, SEO, productivity, mobile, conversion, publishing, and everything in between.
No commentary, just a fast, single page of headlines that you can grab, scan, and squeeze for all they may (or may not) be worth.
All right then, on with it …
Every writer who has ever lived has lusted after ideas.
Where are they, how do I get them, and how do I keep them coming?
If you’ve been writing long enough, you know that — like Solomon — there is nothing new under the sun.
Try as you might to sweat them out of your head or pull them gently from the stars above, there are no new ideas.
So, relax.
But the page is not going to write itself, is it? Where then do we turn for ideas that work, ideas that move, ideas that persuade?
In short, we steal them.
We live a lonely life out here on the internet.
Sure, we’ve got email and blogs and social media and Skype and the occasional contact via an actual phone, but in real-life terms we’re pretty isolated.
We usually live far away from our “work friends.” We swap ideas in small, discreet blocks — a half-hour IM chat with someone here, an email or two with someone else there.
On Stranger Tides is just one more in the long line of big budget Hollywood movies. Or is it?
Actually, it happens to be just another movie that Johnny Depp refused to appear in for anything short of $42,000,000.
He charges that amount because the movie can’t exist with out him.
Johnny’s the star of the show. Pirates of the Caribbean without Captain Jack Sparrow is like an ice cream sundae with no ice cream.
But if Johnny Depp didn’t act in movies — if he were a regular job-holding guy from Kentucky — nobody would care about him. Nobody would pay him.
