It’s December 2—do you know where your budget stands for the year? In many organizations, you lose it if you don’t use it. This makes today, #CyberMonday, the best time ever to put that last little bit of budget to use. When I was in-house, I always had a running wish list of projects and tools that I’d love to prioritize but didn’t have the budget for. While I didn’t get to do all of them, it made it easy to be the fastest finger to respond to those all-team emails asking if anyone could...
24 days ago • 7 min read
In the past decade, every content audit I’ve conducted has resulted in very different recommendations and documented content strategies—except for one really big thing. Almost every company I’ve worked with lacked a well-thought-out and documented taxonomy. Before you tell me that’s not the content team’s job and scroll on down to the really juicy job listings we’ve curated, give me a minute! As I shared in my content governance session at MarketingProfs B2B Forum last week, the lack of this...
about 1 month ago • 8 min read
Do you have the peer support and network you need to grow and sustain your content marketing career? That’s one of the things my colleagues and I included in the content maturity assessment we launched as The Content Academy for Operations and Strategy (CAOS for short) at the Content Marketing World in San Diego. In the midst of questions delving into how much leadership buy-in you have for your content strategy (and whether it’s documented), this question may have caught some of those taking...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
It’s hard to believe I’m getting settled in for my 10th CMworld conference in 11 years! I always call this event my content marketing family reunion because it’s the one time every year I get to see so many of my friends and colleagues in one place (many of whom have been #ContentChat guests). But this year is different from any of the prior years for one HUGE reason—it’s being held in San Diego instead of Cleveland. While that’s fantastic for me and my West Coast folks, I suspect we will be...
2 months ago • 6 min read
I was a little surprised by some of the key findings from the latest edition of the Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 Content Marketing Career and Salary Outlook. I expected these stats: 33% company laid off marketing employees in the last 12 months (that happened with three of my clients last year) 11% personally experienced a layoff in the last 12 months (this happened to more than a dozen of my content marketing colleagues and friends) 68% believe that finding a job in marketing today is...
3 months ago • 6 min read
Hi there! I’m a week late getting this edition of the newsletter to you. Last Monday, I planned to schedule this newsletter so it could zoom into your email inbox right before a #ContentChat conversation with my friend Jason Schemmel on his day-to-day AI use cases. Instead, I spent most of the day in bed, still getting over whatever crud my partner brought home from his job as an elementary school nurse. Yes, it upends my editorial calendar to send our newsletter out a week late. But it also...
3 months ago • 8 min read
I’ve got a confession to make: there was a time when I thought that a creative brief was a waste of my time. Today, as someone who loves figuring out how to streamline processes by creating templates and other tools, I finally understand why. It’s because the creative brief wasn’t the right tool for the job (my job). First of all, it didn’t reflect the B2B side of the business. The creative team created it for consumer brand projects. It never felt relevant to the operational,...
4 months ago • 6 min read
I’ve been a gamer since I got my first TI994A computer and popped in a racing game cartridge my uncle sent me for Christmas. I’ve had over a dozen computers and game systems since then and played hundreds of games over the decades. Eventually, I settled into being a Mac person, which is great for the work that I do. But it’s incredibly limiting when it comes to the online multiplayer games I like to play, which is part of the reason why I’ve been a World of Warcraft player for 18 years. I...
4 months ago • 7 min read
Early in my career, I was asked to ghostwrite an important all-employee message for an executive I hadn’t even met yet. It was my second day on the job, so I didn’t feel like I could say ‘no.’ So, I wrote the email. The executive liked it well enough to make minor edits before their admin sent it out. But, unfortunately, it set a precedent. I wrote dozens of emails from the executive over my tenure on the job. But I never had a 1:1 with them or had an opportunity to interview them before...
5 months ago • 6 min read