Summer is meant to include BBQ, leisurely strolls, and making a dent in the to-read pile stacked on my desk. Instead, I've spent the past two weeks battling some sort of viral ick—but at least I've gotten to do some reading! This year, however, Summer is ALSO something else really special to me. It's the 10-year anniversary of my taking on hosting #ContentChat and going out on my own as a full-time content strategy consultant and fractional content leader! For those who weren't around here 10...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
What do e-book, Ebook, and E-Book all have in common? They're three variations on the name of one content type, and they're wreaking havoc on your taxonomy. I know, I know! Most content teams don't spend much time thinking about taxonomy. We're focused on integrating into marketing campaigns, content creation, distribution, performance, and proving business impact. Taxonomy often feels like something for website managers, CMS administrators, or information architects to worry about. Until...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Most organizations already have a style guide—it just isn’t documented. Instead, it lives: in Slack messages inside tracked changes buried in old slide decks scattered across Google Docs comments and in the heads of the person everyone depends on to “make it sound right” And while those tiny decisions may not feel strategic in the moment, they add up fast. Every: “Would we say it this way?” Every: “Do we capitalize this?” Every: “Can you make this sound more on-brand?” …creates friction. And...
2 months ago • 2 min read
When I worked in-house as a content marketing leader, I never had enough time to deliver everything to the quality I strived to deliver. Whether it was last-minute requests or late content drafts from contributors, it often felt like the best I could hope for was to just get through the day. When that's your daily reality, it can feel like a luxury to take the time to document your content strategy—let alone the processes and tools needed to bring it to life. But here's the thing—until you do...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Contrary to all the ads clogging our social feeds, most content teams don't struggle with creating content. They struggle with scaling their content operations. To get a clearer picture of why, I asked a simple question in two recent Meetup conversations and then shared the results of my content scalability assessment. The question: Which foundational content elements do you actually have in place today? What Most Teams Are Doing The good news is, as with the respondents to the assessment...
3 months ago • 2 min read
There's a pesky question that keeps coming up in my in-person workshops and webinars: "What if Copilot is the only AI tool our team is allowed to use?" While I usually reply quickly with my condolences, I also acknowledge that for a lot of enterprise and regulated teams, that's the reality. IT has approved Microsoft Copilot, and everything else is off-limits. And while it's tempting to see that as a limitation, it's more than that. It's actually a signal. Your organization isn't saying "no"...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Can you guess what these three intro pitches all have in common: 1) Our AI-powered traffic solution delivers engaged visitors to your site, costing significantly less than traditional paid ads. 2) Are you tired of "generic AI" spitting out robotic, soulless text that readers instantly reject? 3) You've poured months of hard work and your entire soul into your manuscript, but the reality is harsh: your book is effectively "invisible" in the vast ocean of Amazon. All three were sent to me via...
4 months ago • 2 min read
A few years ago, I built what I still think was one of the best editorial calendars I’ve ever created. I even use its format as a template. But the way I position it has completely changed. It was for a client with a growing content program and a lot of ambition. We mapped out the next three months of content in detail: blog posts tied to strategic themes, supporting social content, newsletter features, and even a few assets designed to support an upcoming product launch. Everything connected...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Everyone wants AI to repurpose their content magically. Turn a webinar into a blog post. A blog post into LinkedIn posts. A case study into sales enablement. And when it doesn’t work cleanly, we blame the prompts or the tool. But if your AI-generated repurposing feels messy, inconsistent, or exhausting to supervise, the issue usually isn’t the technology. It’s the infrastructure behind it. Repurposing isn’t just a productivity tactic. It’s a content maturity diagnostic. When derivative...
5 months ago • 3 min read