Thoughts on content, community, technology, and small business.
Hamilton is a new portfolio theme released by Swedish designer and developer Anders Norén during his summer vacation. It was created for photographers, illustrators, designers, and image-heavy blogs.
I’m a big fan of Norén’s work and had the pleasure to interview him for the GoDaddy blog last year. Glad to see he’s still churning out new free themes for WordPress users to enjoy. 🙂
You can grab Hamilton in the WordPress.org theme directory.
If writing a book is the most difficult, the editing process is the most grueling. Young aspiring writers like to point to Jack Kerouac, who supposedly wrote On the Road in a three-week drug-fueled blitz. What they leave out is the six years he spent editing and refining it until it was finally ready.
Source: Here (with 2 Years of Exhausting Photographic Detail) Is How To Write A Book
Superb breakdown of what it takes to create a book. (Sidenote: This is/was one of my goals for 2017. I should probably get moving on that…)
Let me make this very clear: you do not own your audience. Regular monthly visitors, big subscriber lists, well-trodden conversion paths give us the illusion that we own the attention of our audience — but it is only an illusion. Attention is fleeting, and must constantly be earned.
Source: What We Learned From Our First Year on Medium – Context – Medium
~~~ Like tears in the rain. ~~~
Psychologizing your audience doesn’t have to be some big ordeal. I can see how surveying would be interesting if you have a group of very loyal customers, or pre-customers helping you finding product-market fit. I would definitely ask them what kind of information they need. I think that’s the key, it’s not the content their WANT to see… it’s information they feel they NEED to succeed. Where are the gaps they see in front of them, standing between them and their definition of success, or the metrics they want to maximize. How can you help them fill this gap? Really, you’re looking to provide utility, utility, utility. I think where a lot of content strategies misstep is providing customer stories, or trying to demonstrate value without considering what their customers’ goals are and how they can help with that first.
Source: AMA with Camille Ricketts, Head of Content and Marketing at First
Love this advice. I’m pushing myself to take a step back when someone hits me with a content request and ask a few questions first:
And then we go from there. 🙂
Coding, or designing, or writing pitch decks, or making sales calls, or preparing spreadsheets, or writing blog posts, or social media marketing, or buying ads, or choosing the right color, or picking the right paper, or making a layout responsive, or investing in companies, or doing due diligence, or making decisions, or coming up with a strategy, or allocating capital, or figuring out how to spend the budget, or reading up on a subject is not hard work. That’s just work. If you can do it in an air conditioned room, with no physical threat to you or someone else, while seated, it ain’t hard work.
Source: If you’re reading this, you probably don’t do hard work
I know that “branding” is not a singular project. Being a brand is kind of like being a rapper. Not a lot of rappers are loved because of their name and their first album. People love rappers because they put together a body of work over a period of time that they continuously find themselves connecting with.
Source: Design Director Alex Center Got a Masters in Branding at Coca-Cola – 99U
I also really like the follow-up statement to this:
Every single thing you do, every album, every tour, every tweet, and every decision you make, amounts to people either loving you and wanting to be a part of your orbit or not.