Tips

This week was all about nurturing your creative spark — in new ways that you might not have considered before. On Monday, Stefanie Flaxman reminded us of something that every writer needs in order to do their best work. Easy to forget, important to remember. On Tuesday, Pamela Wilson swung ...

My husband once had the chance to ask novelist James Ellroy where he got the idea for one of his fiendish criminal characters. And the answer was: “I made him up, Daddy-O.” Creative thinkers of all stripes know that it’s not really about having ideas … it’s about capturing and ...

What if I told you there’s a passageway directly into the brains of your readers — and it doesn’t involve copywriting voodoo, ninja video moves, or podcasting magic? It doesn’t involve words at all. It’s all about visuals. Hold on. Don’t run off just yet! I know that using visuals ...

Deadlines can be met without stringent schedules, which are suffocating for writers. It shows in their prose. A writer needs space. Space to explore. Space to hide. Space to philosophize. Space to nourish. Space to nurture. Space to grow. Space to sip coffee. Space to experiment. Space to look ridiculous. ...

Happy Valentine’s Day! Or if you’re not a fan, Happy Fake Emotional Obligation Day! Whether you’re hunting down a table for two or have plans to binge on Russian Doll and cookie dough ice cream, we thought you might enjoy some business and marketing content to go with that. On ...

Last week, Austin wrote a post for us that quoted every copywriting geek’s favorite writer, Eugene Schwartz, and his classic insights on the five stages of buyer awareness. Schwartz observed that in order to sell with copy, we need to understand the stage of awareness of the people reading our ...

“I didn’t have enough time.” More and more, when I hear this common explanation for why something didn’t get done, my BS detectors start going off. This is the case, in part, because I know that it’s sometimes BS when I say it myself. But let’s be real here: Usually ...

Back in the 1950s, a bedridden man faced certain death from cancer of the lymph nodes. Tumors the size of oranges had invaded the man’s neck, groin, chest, and abdomen. The patient’s only hope was a new experimental cancer drug called Krebiozen. Three days after initial treatment, the man was ...

It’s great to be smart. It’s wonderful to have clever strategies and tactics that help us do our work better. But sometimes, it’s also a good idea to think about how we can be wise. This week, we offered up 15 ways to be a wiser writer and content marketer. ...

There’s a lot of content created every day — and most of it gains almost no attention. In 2015, Moz and BuzzSumo looked at more than one million articles published on the web. They found that 75 percent of blog posts had no inbound links, and more than half had ...