This may well see me prodded with red hot pokers, by a whole host of content marketers I follow/work with, but here goes…
I saw a talk, this morning, by a retired-accountant-turned-business mentor. I have a soft spot for accountants as I feel they – often unfairly – get labelled as ‘boring’ or people only see them as someone to turn to in April or October.
I’ve been labelled many times, too: tell people that you’re a copywriter (particularly if you mention any work at agencies) and they often think you’re too ‘wacky’ or leftfield to work with their brand – like you have no concept of how business works and you’ll try to squeeze a dancing bear into every brief, regardless of relevance.
Anyway, this (retired) accountant gave a talk that was, essentially, a series of anecdotes on how not to approach HMRC/paying tax, and how he’d gotten clients out of sticky situations, in the past.
The whole talk lasted 15 minutes, and it was bloody funny throughout.
To those that have never written a blog post before, or think they don’t know how to, or think that content marketing is ‘scary’, all you have to do is what this accountant did, but in written form.
His talk contained – to my mind – at least four blog posts, all equally engaging and all highlighting an area of expertise without overtly selling, which is the basis of a solid content marketing strategy: building a following, and trust, over time by consistently posting interesting, relevant information (or stories) that shows people how/why you’re good at what you do, without saying ‘buy me, buy me, buy me!’.
Better still, you don’t have to suddenly use fancy vocabulary just because you’re writing something: if this accountant typed out his content exactly how he’d spoken it, it’d be just as good as his talk.
There are the whys and wherefores of optimising content, back links, relevant images etc when writing content, but the basic premise is: relevant business stories well told.
If you haven’t tried posting content before, give it a go – what’s the worst that can happen?