You’ve decided to hire a freelance writer to help get your content marketing plan off the ground. Good work. Can’t market the content if you haven’t created content, right? And pushing that arduous and very time-consuming task off your plate and onto someone else’s will leave you lots more time for other things.

You can just buzz up that freelance writer your marketing pal recommended, tell them you need a blog post about running shoes, or big data, or apple sauce recipes, and 500 words of genius will appear next week for you to post. Or you’ll get … garbage.

Because if you put garbage into the process, that is precisely what you will get back—garbage. Read the rest of this entry »

I cringe when I hear terms like “content marketing shop.”

Shops are where you go to buy things—commodities. You can put the “things” in your cart, check out, and use them when you get home. Content marketing isn’t a “thing” you can put in your cart and start using right when you get back to the office.

But many companies— at least 44% are outsourcing their content creation, according to the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends annual report—are out there looking for businesses that they may call “content marketing shops” or “content marketing agencies.” Read the rest of this entry »