Adventures in Content Strategy
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin
Yoast and I are in a fight. It began this morning, when I began using the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress for a new client’s site. Our conversation went something like this: Me: Hi Yoast! Yoast: Hi! You should add a focus keyword for this page. Me: Great idea. I’ll add the keyword I think…
What does content strategy for higher education have to do with healthcare or finance? More than you might think! Building on your content strategy education can improve your team’s ability to handle complexity, regulations, and user needs in any industry. Conference Revelations Last week I was lucky enough to attend Confab Higher Ed. As always,…
You’ve just been handed an excel doc with 22,000 lines in it. “Here you go! Go do your content audit!” Your breath comes faster, and sweat breaks out on your forehead. How can you make this enormous mess of data anything useful?! Take a deep breath. It’s going to be ok. Here are a few…
Sara Zailskas Walsh recently made a solid case for content testing. Here’s a blurb from her Medium article that summarizes the benefits: “How Does Content Testing Help Design? Here are three big benefits: It helps designers establish the framework for our conversations with customers. It helps designers understand the words we need to use so customers understand…
It’s been almost two years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Girls Write Now Awards Speech, and yet in the current political climate it’s getting some much-needed press. Today, I’m sharing it both because I think it’s a valuable lesson, and because I want to drive home an important point: the difference between a person and a brand….
Imagine you visit a website, and in the middle of purchasing a new lawn mower, a Spice Girls song began. How embarrassing would it be? How distracting? That’s not the voice or personality of your site! That’s exactly what happened in the February 19th closing Broadway performance of Chicago. The female lead playing Roxie Hart…
Last year, the team at GatherContent gave a wonderful holiday present to the content strategy community: a GatherContent Advent Calendar. The calendar offered a new, 5 minute video each day from a content strategist offering advice. This year they’ve continued the GatherContent Advent Calendar. And I’m excited to share my contribution to the tradition. My GatherContent…
If you’re a content strategist, you have likely heard a lot about the importance of being part of designing and customizing content management systems. But if you’re a developer, you may not have the same perspective. On a recent project, I witnessed this firsthand. I created content templates, identified content types, and designed governance practices….
What is structured content? And who cares? Content Strategists Care About Structured Content At this year’s CS Forum in Melbourne, Rachel Lovinger gave a brilliant talk about 10 (well, 8) things she has learned in 10 years as a content strategist. It inspired me. I started thinking about what content strategists know, compared to what…
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same…
