#whoever designed this template knew what they were ABOUT

[pippenpaddlopsicopolisthethird]

I'm looking through powerpoint templates for a class presentation and was absolutely blown away by this one. I don't care what the topic is supposed to be, all of my future powerpoints have to have the Wizard

[thejanewestin]

Gravity, chapter 1 (Mirandy)

Andy Sachs was not a scientist. 

 She felt that this was an important point to make, particularly in the weekly staff meetings, when the scientific editors’ discussion of the latest endosymbiont or cytokine or whatever devolved into semi-hysterical PubMed searches and emphatic data-set thumping. Eventually, after they’d worn themselves out squawking at each other, they’d turn to her to tie-break. 

 “Guys,” she’d say. “I am not a scientist.”

 But she was the managing editor, and despite having a pay grade significantly below that of the Ph.D.s in the room, it somehow fell to her to figure out which of the six nearly-identical Figure 1s to use. 

 “Your problem is you’re too capable,” Trixie said, examining the underside of her coffee mug with an expression that was half interest and half revulsion.

 “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Andy closed her laptop and scrubbed both hands over her aching eyeballs. “Are you ready to go?”

 “What do you suppose this is?” Trixie held the mug out to Andy, bottom-side first, where a wad of something grayish-blue was firmly affixed.

 Andy made a face. “Walt’s gum,” she said.

 Trixie shuddered. “I was afraid you’d say that,” she said. She reached over and put the mug onto Walt’s desk. “That dude is a sociopath. I can’t believe I dated him.”

 “Stop.” Andy let Trixie pull her to her feet. “I can’t handle any romantic navel-gazing tonight. I need ravioli.”

 They stopped at Trattoria Giulia on the way home, stomping their feet on the cracked sidewalk in a vain defense against the icy night wind as they waited at the window. 

 “Whoever thought a spaghetti counter was a good idea—” Trixie started.

 “Was a genius,” Andy finished, tearing into her bag and finding a breadstick. She crammed half of it into her mouth while they walked the rest of the way home. 

 “SVU?” Trixie asked, once they were ensconced in their apartment. 

 “Nyet,” Andy said, finding a spoon in the pile of dirty dishes in the sink and wiping it on a dish towel. “Too tired. Going to eat ravioli in bed and pass out.”

 Trixie flopped on the couch. “Suit yourself.”

 Andy managed to splatter minimal tomato sauce on the bedspread, which was pretty good for ten o’clock at night, she thought. She scrolled through emails as she chewed. Submission, submission, submission, submission. The journal was pretty successful, even though its impact factor would never break the threes. And she liked her job. It wasn’t the hard-hitting journalism career she’d envisioned when she’d graduated from college, but it was good, satisfying work. 

 It was a little funny, actually, that she’d taken such a roundabout route to end up right back in New York. It had started with a little job in Boston—editing press releases for a medical journal—and when she and Nate had ended it a year later, she’d moved back to Ohio. A colleague from the Boston journal had put a good word in for her in Cincinnati. Eighteen months after she’d started, the whole publication had moved to Queens, and they’d taken her with them. Trixie’s claim that she was too capable had served her pretty well, all things considered, and she’d been promoted to managing editor just before her thirty-first birthday.

 Submission, submission, submission. All things that could be handled at the office tomorrow. She scrolled faster. 

 And then she saw a name. 

 Andy’s thumb slammed on her phone screen so hard she accidentally minimized her mail app. “Fuck,” she muttered, opening it again, and there it was, in bold Helvetica Neue. 

 Every cell in Andy’s body seemed to turn to ice. 

 EXTERNAL, the email said. Submission. 

 And the name above it:

 Cassidy Priestly.

 ***

 They’d be twenty-two now. It was hard to fathom—her brain had put them into a kind of temporal lock, freezing them eternally as bratty twelve-year-olds. She’d spent more time than she cared to admit Googling Miranda, but she had sort of forgotten about the twins.

 Cassidy didn’t have a LinkedIn, but Caroline did. She was following in her mother’s footsteps, apparently—her current position was listed as Photography Intern, Elias-Clark. She looked like a younger, freckled Miranda, all cheekbones and chin and that aquiline nose. Heavy eyeliner. No smile.

 Andy flipped back to Cassidy’s submission. It was a PDF, too small to read on her phone, so she put the ravioli container on her nightstand and reached for her laptop. Cassidy was the first author, so she would have done the bulk of the writing. The last name listed was a Ph.D. at Columbia. It was a name she’d seen in print a number of times, although never at Cellular Function. 

 Andy read. For a moment, absorbed in the text, she allowed herself to forget the paper’s author. It was a descriptive study on regulatory kinesins in microtubules, and although it was quite a bit more specialized than what the journal usually published, the writing was good and the design seemed solid. She skimmed enough to decide which of her colleagues should review it, deidentified it, and forwarded it to Rashad. Her hands, she realized, had become ice-cold. 

 She felt nervous. 

 It was a strange, foreign feeling, like someone had whooshed her consciousness back into her twenty-three-year-old body. She felt exactly like she had for the entirety of the almost-year at Runway, and she knew exactly why.

 Miranda.

 She wouldn’t be the one to decide whether or not the paper would be accepted—that was Rashad’s job, and he’d review it blindly, without knowing the authors. But it would be her name on the letter. She could just imagine Cassidy presenting a rejection to her mother. Would she remember Andy?

 She wondered, briefly, if it was possible to recuse herself from a submission, as an attorney might recuse herself from a case in which there was a conflict of interest. Oh, God. If the paper got rejected, she was going to have to quit her job. 

 No. She shook herself. What was she thinking? Cellular Function had nothing to do with Runway. There was absolutely no overlap between scientific journals and fashion writing. Miranda reigned over Elias-Clark, sure; her reach might even extend to print media beyond New York. But Andy would bet her left pinky that no one in her current sphere—besides Trixie, of course—even knew who Miranda Priestly was.

 She swallowed her anxiety with a few more bites of her now-cold ravioli. Old habits, it turned out, died hard. 

 She showered, turned off the lights, and climbed into bed, but sleep was a long time coming.

 ***

 The paper did not get accepted. 

 Andy had known it wouldn’t. Upon closer reading the following morning, it really was too specialized for their applied-science journal. More suited for Experimental Cell or Developmental Immunology. Three weeks after she sent it to Rashad, she got the email back that it had been rejected. Fuck.

 She copy-pasted the rejection template into an email reply to Cassidy and her coauthors, staring at it for a long time as she chewed on her thumbnail. It was a good study. It would surely be accepted at a different journal, and she could come up with four or five off the top of her head. 

 Cassidy’s mentor would know that. She was undoubtedly accustomed to rejections, and would have a list of next choices to which the article would be submitted. 

 And yet.

 It wasn’t exactly forbidden to deviate from the standard reply, nor was it exactly forbidden to give recommendations for future submissions. But in her seven years at the publication, Andy had never done so; had never seen the need. Now, though, she wanted to, and she had the uncomfortable realization that it wasn’t because she worried about Cassidy’s disappointment. 

 It was because she was worried about Miranda’s.

 She didn’t want Miranda to see Andy’s name at the bottom of that letter and think that Andy was responsible for her daughter’s failure to appear in the journal she’d selected. After all this time, after everything Miranda had put her through, she didn’t want to let Miranda down.

 She sent the template off to Cassidy, just as she’d done for the past seven years, with no additional commentary or suggestions.  Then she did something that was either exceptionally kind or exceptionally stupid: she opened her personal email and sent Cassidy a message. 

 Dear Ms. Priestly:

 Thank you for your submission to Cellular Function. Although your work was not accepted, the writing was — what? Andy thought. Good? No, it was better than good, although Cassidy’s youth and inexperience showed. The writing was more than acceptable. Please consider submitting to the following journals.

 She listed the five she could think of—she had friends at three of them—thanked Cassidy again for her work, and sent the email before she could think better of it.

 Probably exceptionally stupid, she decided, immediately after the soft whoosh of the message zooming away. She had no doubt that her boss would have something to say about her endorsement of journals other than their own. 

 She wondered if Cassidy would tell Miranda about it. The thought made her feel unsettled and uneasy—and, although she didn’t like to admit it to herself, just the tiniest bit hopeful.

 ***

 Cassidy’s reply that afternoon was just one sentence, and Andy’s burst of laughter was so loud that Trixie jumped and glared at her.

 ANDREA SACHS IS THAT YOU?

 Well. Maybe not so stupid after all.

 It’s me, she typed back. Surprised you remember.

 The response this time was almost instantaneous. Of course! Harry Potter! Are you still in the city? Let’s have coffee. And her phone number. 

 The immediate familiarity, such a stark contrast to her mother’s standoffishness, took Andy slightly aback. At least the brevity was familiar. 

 Sure, she sent back. Which was why, two days later, she was sitting in a Starbucks on the Columbia campus, waiting to greet someone she had thought she’d never see again.

 Cassidy arrived at precisely five-thirty, saw Andy at once, and beamed. “Oh my God,” she said.

 Andy got to her feet. Cassidy didn’t quite hug her, but she took Andy’s hand in both of hers and pulled her in for an air-kiss near Andy’s cheek. The residue of high society, Andy supposed.

 “I can’t believe it’s you,” Cassidy exclaimed. Her blue eyes were sparkling behind outsized tortoiseshell glasses. Her bright copper hair had been cropped into a shaggy lob, and she was wearing clothes that Andy was fairly certain Miranda would hate: a gigantic Columbia sweatshirt, leggings, and beat-up Ugg boots. A messenger bag with a seat-belt strap was slung over her shoulder. She looked every inch the graduate student. 

 “I’m sorry about your paper,” Andy said by way of greeting.

 Cassidy waved a dismissive hand and dropped into the armchair across from Andy’s. “Don’t worry about it. Aisha has a publication plan that’s sixteen journals deep for everything she puts her name on.”

 Andy felt a little silly at that, since in her mind’s eye, she had only really seen the disappointed face of a young adolescent. “Oh. Good,” she said lamely.

 “Your email was so nice,” Cassidy added quickly. “I really appreciated it.” She slid her bag off her shoulder and dropped it on the floor, and as she did so, Andy saw the flash of a small diamond on the ring finger of her left hand.

 Cassidy followed her gaze, and for a moment, Andy saw the impish twinkle of so many years ago. She held her hand up and waggled her fingers. “Two months ago,” she said, grinning wickedly. “He’s an engineer. Mom was pissed.”

 Andy laughed, even as something in her chest twinged at the mention of Miranda. “I can only imagine.”

 It was a nice visit—really nice, Andy thought, after Cassidy had left for class. She’d learned a lot about the twins’ lives. Cassidy was, as she’d assumed, in a Ph.D. program in microbiology. Caroline had graduated from the Tisch photography school. They didn’t live together, but their apartments were three blocks apart, and Cassidy was thinking of moving in with the fiancé after her lease was up. 

 What she didn’t mention—what Andy desperately wanted to ask, but didn’t dare—was anything about Miranda, other than a brief roll of her eyes when she mentioned “cohabitation.”

She didn’t say if Miranda was still in the townhouse, if she’d remarried, if she was happy. She’d be fifty-six in November; was she still the formidable figure of a decade ago, or had she softened with age?

 Cassidy hadn’t said; had carefully avoided the topic at all. Andy had the feeling that there was a lot about Cassidy’s life these days that Miranda didn’t know. So she doubted, very much, that Cassidy would mention their meeting to Miranda.

 And she couldn’t quite decide if that knowledge brought relief or disappointment.

 ***

 Cassidy texted her the following week—favor to ask. It turned out she was writing two other papers and wondered if Andy would look over them before she submitted, if she had time. 

 Andy didn’t have time, but she had liked seeing Cassidy and wanted her to do well. And she had to admit, it gave her a sort of gleeful satisfaction to see the apple falling so far from the polished-gleam tree. 

 They met two more times at the Starbucks, this time for revisions. The engineer fiancé, Patrick, stopped by the second time. He was sweet to Cassidy, and cheerfully greeted Andy, and for a moment Andy remembered how in love she’d been with Nate at twenty-two. She hoped Patrick and Cassidy would last. 

 The fourth time they met, Cassidy arrived looking pale and terrified. “I’m sorry—” she got out, just before the door swung open and Miranda stepped inside.

 Andy froze. 

 The Chanel sunglasses rotated slowly and stopped at Andy. One eyebrow crept up. 

 “I don’t know how she knew it was you—” Cassidy hissed, as Miranda took slow, deliberate steps toward them. Her cheeks were bright pink. “I’m really sorry.”

 “Andrea.” Miranda’s voice, cool and aloof, unchanged in ten years. 

 Andy realized she was standing. When had she stood up? Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her toes. 

 Miranda looked—well. Miranda looked amazing. It was still cool enough, in early April, for outerwear, and Miranda’s black fitted coat cut a silhouette far too classy for a college campus coffee shop. A white silk scarf was knotted at her throat—Hermès, no doubt. Her lips were pale pink, a shade entirely at odds with her terrifying deportment. Heads turned. 

 “Miranda,” Andy managed to say. Her voice sounded strangled. 

 Miranda lowered herself elegantly into the chair next to Cassidy’s, as though it was completely normal for the editor-in-chief of the biggest fashion magazine in the industry to be hanging around with graduate students and aspiring playwrights. She tipped her chin down just a little—just enough for Andy to meet her ice-blue gaze. “So you’re the mysterious proofreader,” she murmured, her expression entirely unreadable. 

 Cassidy collapsed back into her chair and put her face in her hands. “Why are you like this,” she groaned.

 Miranda appeared not to notice. “Sit, please, Andrea.”

 Andy sat. 

 “Cassidy, bobbsey,” Miranda said, removing her sunglasses and placing them on the crumb-dusted table, “be a darling and get Mummy a latte, won’t you?” 

 “Oh my God,” Cassidy said, with an adolescent flounce, but she got up and went to the counter. 

 Andy couldn’t think. Literally couldn’t think. How many times had she imagined this scene—reuniting with Miranda, apologizing for her phone-tossing temper tantrum and for her epic Parisian storm-out? Garnering Miranda’s forgiveness? Maybe, heaven help her, even earning a little of Miranda’s respect for the place she’d carved out for herself in publishing? She was, after all, an editor now too. 

 But despite herself, she was just sat here, dumbly staring at the woman whose presence loomed so large in her life even now, and she couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

 Fortunately, Miranda didn’t seem to require much of a response. Or any, for that matter. 

 “Cassidy’s happiness is of utmost importance to me,” Miranda said softly.

 Well, duh. “Right,” Andy said blankly. 

 “She is an extremely driven young woman.” Miranda’s eyes darted momentarily toward her daughter, who was now nibbling on a pink cake pop as she waited for the latte. Then they fixed back on Andy, “And her drive has taken her into a field about which I know very little.”

 I’ll say. Still, Andy was surprised that Miranda was willing to admit any gap in her knowledge, no matter how obvious. She tried to keep her expression neutral, to avoid reinforcing Miranda’s assertion and possibly causing offense. 

 “You, Andrea,” Miranda continued, not quite meeting Andy’s gaze, “are in the unique position to influence my daughter’s career more than I.”

 Ah.

 So that was it. Miranda wanted to make sure she didn’t fuck up Cassidy’s trajectory. Of course that was what it was. She had no interest in Andy’s apology, no interest in Andy’s life. 

 Caught between dismay and indignation, Andy straightened her spine. “Look, Miranda,” she said, “I may not be walking the red carpet, but I’m good at my job. I’m not going to crash her plane into the mountain, okay?”

 Something that looked like surprise flashed across Miranda’s face, but before she could respond, Cassidy appeared at her elbow. “Your latte, your majesty,” she said, setting the cup onto the table. 

 Miranda’s expression morphed into a gracious smile. “Thank you, my love,” she said, reaching for her sunglasses. “I’ll let you two work, shall I?” She stood without a second glance at Andy, taking her coffee, and kissing the air beside Cassidy’s head before gliding out the door to her waiting car.

 Cassidy looked mortified. “What did she say? Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

 “It’s fine.” Andy’s heart rate was starting to come back down into the normal range. “Don’t worry about it.” Although she still felt flushed and angry at the implication that she was going to —what? Get Cassidy blacklisted from Cell? Keep her from a tenure-track position? 

 “I’m sorry,” Cassidy said again, miserably. 

 “Seriously,” Andy said. “Stop. Let’s just finish this draft, okay?”

 ***

 Andrea,

I would appreciate a meeting. Wednesday at The Modern, 8pm?

 “What the fuck,” Andy muttered.

 What did that even mean? I would appreciate a meeting. “Well, I would appreciate a raise and an extra six weeks of vacation,” Trixie said, when Andy spun the laptop toward her emphatically. “Are you going to go?”

 “I mean—” Andy flopped her hands helplessly at her side. She didn’t particularly relish the idea of an encore of the Starbucks conversation. At the same time, the brief interaction had reminded her why she sought—why she craved—Miranda’s approval way back then. 

 Of course, a few other things had come to light in the past few years, as well.

 After she and Nate had reconciled and she’d made the move to join him in Boston, he had been so happy. The new job. A bigger apartment. He’d brought her flowers every week on his way home from the restaurant. Andy had blamed her diminishing interest—and libido—on depression: she’d been unable to find a position with any of the local newspapers, not even in Classifieds, and she refused to call Runway for a reference. Miranda had already handed her one favor and she would not be further beholden. When she finally landed the little position at the medical journal, she did feel better, but something with Nate had been irrevocably lost. 

 There was a girl at the journal. Her name was, improbably, Logan, and she had close-cropped hair and graceful wrists. 

 Andy would gaze at the ceiling while Nate groaned and sweated against her, and she would think about those wrists. She started to close her eyes when Nate kissed her. The feeling of his stubble against her skin made her flinch.

 Nate wasn’t obtuse. “Is there someone else?” he’d asked.

 No, of course not, she’d said, and there hadn’t been, even though her thoughts had wandered long ago to arms, and shoulders, and the brush of short auburn curls against the curve of a downy neck.

 He asked, and she protested. Again and again, for months, until one day he stopped asking, stopped trying to touch her at all. When she told him she was leaving, he didn’t look surprised.

 She kissed a woman for the first time two days after her twenty-sixth birthday, both of them happily tipsy in the middle of the dance floor of a downtown Cincinnati nightclub. Andy hadn’t even gotten her name, but the following morning, lying in bed with a screaming hangover, she thought a lot of things in her life had just become a whole lot clearer.

 It had taken Trixie’s droll observation after her third date in a week—“You definitely have a type”—to make Andy realize that there was a huge, terrifying reason that she had tried so hard to curry Miranda’s favor.

 “I wanted to sleep with my boss,” she told Trixie over the phone, at three in the morning on a Wednesday. 

 Trixie’s voice was thick with sleep, but she sounded shocked nonetheless. “Cheryl?” she said.

 “No.” Andy put her hand over her eyes. “Miranda.”

 “Oh.” The shock dissipated. “Yeah, dude, you and everyone else.”

 Andy blinked. “Really?”

 “Yes.” Trixie sounded like she was rolling her eyes. “Hot and mean? Duh. I’m going back to sleep.”

 ***

“So are you?”

 Andy blinked. “What?”

 Trixie pointed at the screen. “Going to meet Miranda.”

 “Oh.” Andy turned the laptop back toward herself. “Um. I don’t know. I guess so. Yeah.”

 “Good thing you have two days to make up your mind,” Trixie said, sounding amused, and turned back to her own computer.

 Would she go? Of course she would go. Any uncertainty was pretense. 

 She sent back one word.

 Yes.

[the-day-that-wasnt]

commission crush

request: you said you write, right? i had this idea a few days ago and i've just been asking around for anyone to write it. can i request a five fic where the reader works with gloria in the commission and has a lil crush on him? and she helps him escape?

a/n: i use a bunch of quotes from the actual episode (ep. 6) and idk how rights work but this is just fanfiction !! no harm intended !! but for the anon, thanks for giving me some prompts because i don’t think i could’ve thought of this on my own! <3 also, i can’t with titles. i actually can’t. 

word count: 1.8k

Sighing, you rolled in another cart full of pneumatic tubes for Gloria. It had been your third delivery that day, and it was barely even lunch yet. Noting your frustrated manner, Gloria gave you a small smile. “Lighten up, (y/n), break starts in about an hour.” You returned her grin, but lacked the enthusiasm behind it. You hated working at the Commission, even if you had only been there for about 2 years. Ever since your mother, who also had served the Commission, broke her contract early, she signed you off instead for 5 years. Ever since you were 12, day after day you spent sorting tubes into their designated tunnels. It was utterly boring and constantly you fantasised about getting promoted to case managers. They were always reading something interesting, which you would take over your current job any day.

“Based on that determination, the case manager sends instructions via pneumatic tube to temporal assassins like you formerly were, Number Five.” you heard the Handler’s ever so monotone voice. You were sorting through the tubes on the bottom of the cart, but you couldn’t manage to see who the Handler was talking to. “But, as you’re going to be a case manager you don’t have to worry about that.”

As soon as you heard those words, you almost bursted at the seams with jealousy. “The Handler is promoting someone to case manager even though I’m right here??” you thought. Angrily, you stood up to give a death stare to whoever took your spot. The anger disappeared, however, when you realised it was a boy your age.

And shit, he was cute.

You could feel your face heat up as everyone in the tube room looked at you. Gloria, in confusion, The Handler, in annoyance, and the boy, in intrigue. You forced your eyes to look away from the boy, and to the tube you were holding. Even as you did so, you couldn’t get his piercing eyes and his wide smirk out of your head. You listened as the Handler went on with the tour. 

“So, any queries?”

The next time you saw him, you were nearly scared shitless. You were in the middle of polishing the tunnels when you turned around to find him at a proximity too close for strangers. You yelped and stepped back, glancing at Gloria, who was preoccupied with her typewriter. You turned to the boy, who was staring at you as if he was trying to figure you out. “Um, hi!” You started, offering your hand. “I guess you’re the new case manager here at HQ. I’m (y/n).”

He grasped your hand as if you were made of glass. Even so, such a small brush of fingers made your heart rate shoot skyward. 

“Five. Five Hargreeves. You work with the pneumatic tubes, I assume? Although I’m sure you do most of the work; no offence, but you look much younger than your colleague.”

You couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or not. “Oh, um, thanks? Gloria’s been here since I was born. I can’t see why anyone would want to stay here, though; The Commission is utter garbage.” you rambled on. Five’s eyes glinted in curiosity. You stopped your rant when you noticed the smile on his face threatening to widen. “What?”

He chuckled. “Oh, nothing, I’ve just never met someone in the Commission who hated it. Except maybe Hazel.” He gestured to the tube he was carrying. “Do you mind if I send this?” 

You blinked, not having been entirely focused on the conversation at hand and more on how to keep your cheeks from blazing pink. “Yeah! Sure!” You watched as his eyes flickered in concentration over the numbers. Yeah, you definitely had it bad for this boy you just met (to be fair, everyone else in the Commission was either an asshole or looked like an old hobo) [a/n lil did u know that 5 is both lmao].

“I’m afraid that’s not procedure.” Shit. The Handler. She smiled, taking the tube out of his hands and then glaring at you. “Seriously, what is her problem?” you thought. “Five, meet Gloria. Gloria, this is Number Five.” 

Gloria, well aware of your little crush, nudged you. “Look at you! A deadly little thing. So glad we decided to close the contract on your life, right (y/n)?” 

Contract? What contract? You looked at Five, eyebrows furrowed. He stared at his feet unmoving. That is, until the Handler read out the paper. “Karl Weber? Now tell me, why unfortunate Karl?” 

If arrogance could be a human face, it would be the face Five made before elaborating his decision. He looked up, locking eyes with you. “Karl Weber is the butcher at the shop where Captain Ernst A. Lehmann acquires his weekly roast. If he dies, the shop goes down to his son, who never washes his hands, which is disgusting. So he’s the one that gives his captain the roast, and that gives him food poisoning, which makes him late for work, which delays the takeoff. To make up for lost time, the Hindenburg flies to a weather front of high electrical charge and humidity–”

“and the static electricity inside the aircraft makes it a virtual tinderbox, leading to the sparking of the engine which makes it explode!” you exclaimed, finally understanding. Too late, you realised that all three of them were staring at you again. “(y/n)!” the Handler hissed. “Can’t you have enough decency to let Five finish speaking? I told you to stop looking inside files, you fool! This is why you’ll never get to be anything more than a pneumatic peasant!”

Your face crumbled, and even Five staring at you in amazement couldn’t get your hopes up. You were never going to be a case manager if the Handler had anything to do with it. Under Gloria’s orders, you shuffled back to the front office, where you were in charge of typing out templates for the Commission orders. You did notice, however, that Five’s almost starstruck gaze followed you out.

What felt like your 20,395th tube was just put into the last delivery of the day. Time was fickle at HQ, and it had felt like 10,000 years before you could finally go home. You were just putting your overcoat on when Dot stormed into the room. You narrowed your eyes. You never liked Dot, she was way too loyal to the Handler. You listened to her urgent whisper. 

“Gloria! Get this to Hazel and Cha Cha immediately. The handler knows that Five is up to something.” 

“Up to something. Huh.” you thought. “This could be interesting.”

Interjecting, you shot Dot a look. “That’s ridiculous, Dot. Why would he betray the commission when he just got here?” 

Dot scowled at you. “No one asked you, (y/n), just deliver the tube.” She said, sauntering out of the room in a hurry.

Gloria put a hand on your shoulder, flashing a unsettling smile you hadn’t seen in a while. “I’m sorry (y/n), but Dot might be right. Now’s not the time for your crush to cloud your judgement. I think we might have to exterminate him now.” She walked over to the tunnels, searching for the right one. Panic overtook you, and you stormed over, grabbing the nearest thing (which happened to be a stapler) and bashed it on Gloria’s head, knocking her out cold.

“I never would have labelled you as the violent type.”

You whipped around, seeing Five stare at you with a smug grin. Your eyes widened. “I-Listen! I didn’t actually mean to hurt her, but they were trying to–”

“I know. I overheard everything.” He stated, walking past you to take the tube from Gloria. You could feel your heart drop into your stomach as you stammered. “E-everything?” 

He turned back to face you, the smile growing. “Everything. By the way, I think you’re cute too.” 

You exhaled, feeling faint. Blinking, you stared back at him. “So what now?” 

He opened the tube, reading it with a satisfactory expression. “Now, I’m going to save the world. But first, I gotta throw Hazel and Cha Cha off my scent. Do me a favour and order them to kill each other.”

You nodded, understanding the diversion. You ran over to the typewriter and jotted down orders hastily. Putting them into tubes, you handed the orders to Five, who sent them into the tunnels. He turned to you.

“Well, I guess this is goodbye then. I’m off to prevent the apocalypse.” 

You beamed at him, kissing his cheek. “Go save the world, Five.”

Suddenly, you heard a gun cock behind you. Your body froze. You shut your eyes, willing it not to be who you thought it would be. The coarse voice of the Handler made you want to crawl into a ball and never leave. 

“You know that’s not how we do things here.” She spat. You couldn’t see her face, but you imagined it was writhing in caked makeup and rage. 

“You can’t change things to come, Five. I truly find it so odd that you can’t shed this fantasy. You’re a first rate pragmatist! It’s so sad, now, that I’m going to have to kill you and this little traitor here.”

Your eyes shot open as Five grabbed your arm and jumped through space to behind the Handler. You couldn’t even process what was happening when he grabbed a grenade and threw it at her. “Hold on!” He shouted, teleporting again.

The last thing you saw was the Handler’s face being wiped off of all the smugness she had. Then, you were at the briefcase room. You were pulled along by Five, who grabbed a briefcase and threw another grenade into the room. You two ran out, Five setting a date and time. He locked eyes with you right before you were enveloped in a blue light.

When you opened your eyes, you were in a bedroom. You looked out the window and saw a city outside. Your eyes were then drawn to the probability equations that were scribbled onto the walls and ceiling. You knew these equations all too well; they were calculating the likelihood of a change in the timeline. 

Beside you, Five sat up, holding his side. You two stared at each other for what felt like forever before you spoke softly. “Why...did you take me with you?” You murmured, dropping your head down to stare at your lap. “It would’ve been easier just to let me die.”

You heard him chuckle, and his hand intertwined with yours. “I couldn’t do that. Not after everything you did for me. Besides, I have a feeling that I finally found someone who lives up to my intelligence quotient, and I needed your help.” 

Laughing, you smiled at him. “Alright, then. Let’s stop the apocalypse.”

[cheskasjournal-sm]

Goals & Self-Assessment

Goal #1 - Building confidence into my skill set

To improve my communication skills, I want to have more confidence and build trust with my peers . The reason why I lack confidence is when I face something I'm not familiar with. As a stage manager, I should anticipate and be prepared for any sudden changes during the run. It also lessens the chances of making mistakes if I am sure about what to say. I also want to get rid of doubting what I say as it saves time and increases my productivity. To achieve my goal, I have to recognize my weaknesses and know that building this confidence is a constant learning process.

Goal #2 - Working on Making Templates

I would like to make more templates and have them organized so that when I work on a production, I can save time from figuring out what to put and have more understanding on what the show needs to have in the paperwork. I want to improve on making them as clear and effective to whoever receives it. For this show, the prep week is much longer than what it is in the field so that will give me more time to make better versions. To keep this goal in track, I should ask guidance on how to make good templates.

Self-Assessment

I feel like I have improved on my goal to be confident by taking on the role of the stage manager. I want to be more comfortable addressing large crowds of people and making decisions that affect everyone. I also want to take initiative in making paperwork even when I do not know what it looks like. I find that I know what I am supposed to do but also do not do them because of time and also lack of experience. This taught me that there is a lot of hard work to be a good stage manager and that skills can only go so far without the experience. I have a big respect to the designers for creating this show. During tech, Michelle and Maddie were patient when I was getting familiar with the cues. It is also thanks to them for teaching me headset etiquette to be respectful for people in comms. I am also thankful for Sarah for teaching me a lot about the process of being a stage manager and how my mistakes are not so bad. I really like how in the beginning, she will take the lead and help us out when we need it but by the end of the run, she has let me run the tech rehearsals and trust that I can do it.

Having Stage Management 2 during the fall was helpful because the information is fresh in our head while we do crews. For example, our class taped the floor for the fall show which is a practical experience and gives us a better understanding of the set. We also had a cueing assignment that helped me before the show went into tech. This also ties in with my technical skills were up to the work because I knew what to practice when doing timing. My organization skills for the information being passed around could be better. During tech, Richard Lee has taught me that the stage manager should be “the central nexus of information” which means that I should be the go-to person for any information. Honing this skill would be useful in the future and it will benefit the entire production when I am on top of everything.

I think I worked well with the team and they give me the drive to be a good stage manager because they all have some previous experience in this area. I hope my skills compliment people’s work because I always want to help. I feel like the one day where our team had conflict, I did not do enough to settle our differences because it could affect our personal relationships.

The biggest challenge was not knowing everything because of all the uncertainty. In the beginning of production, it was frustrating not knowing what paperwork to make because things were constantly changing and it felt like a waste when the effort was made. I would definitely be an assistant stage manager so that I can work in a backstage track. I wanted to be the running crew for the show with the amount of set and prop pieces but I did not mind calling. I would also make sure to be more prepared with the paperwork. The most significant thing I have learned during the production is having a good support system such as my colleagues and faculty keeps the production running like a well-oiled machine, and I find that even if the show is not in its peak performance, the journey was really the memorable. Outside of the college, I hope to work in a company that is as tight-knit as the people I have met in the college.

[sugartownmagazine]

“It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look!”

Designer of Dreams, May 2019, The British Museum, all photos taken by myself

Stepping into this highly anticipated exhibition of Christian Dior’s life and work, I am greeted by the Bar Suit. A straw hat, cream coloured tussore silk fitted jacket and black wool crêpe pleated skirt created a silhouette which would become a classic, ushering in what Carmel Snow described at the time as “a new look”. Dior’s New Look was revolutionary, and this wonderful exhibition showcased his ideas and personality in the most joyful way.

I visited the exhibition in May, so this is a bit of a late response! I knew of the fashion house but really did not know anything about its history or even much about its designs, and I have really enjoyed getting into fashion this year, so I decided to go along and have a little explore! The first room featured a large mock house front with interpretations of the famous Bar Suit by successive leaders of Dior. They soar above us in the windows of the house, beckoning us towards the fantasies within. Each room after that alternated between ethereal, sumptuous, brightly lit themes and darker spaces where the low lighting showed off the sparkling dresses perfectly.

Throughout the exhibition, much was made of Dior’s inspirations and influences as well as his life and work. He named perfumes and outfits after family, friends or landmarks in his life; for example, Maxim’s Ensemble was named after a Parisian café, which I think sounds very chic. I found it interesting that the names he chose would reflect the dominant silhouette.

“I think of my work as ephemeral architecture dedicated to the beauty of the female body” 1957

Dior referenced architecture, historical eras and art movements in his garments. One of the rooms was dedicated to designs which were influenced by 18th Century nobility, Versailles, and neo-classical façades, all of which would have been at home in any self-respecting decadent royal court. Toile du Jouy, made of extremely high-quality cotton printed with bucolic scenes or floral arrangements, was very popular with Marie Antoinette and the rest of the French elite. Apparently, it was also popular with Dior and it is actually being used again in A/W 2019-2020 collections, albeit with wild animals included in the usual pastoral scenes for a little modern update. I took a couple of pictures of this room as it was one of my favourites and I have inserted them below. Obviously not professional quality, but you get the gist. . .

This dress is from S/S 2005 and is made of silk with bright blue feathers to contrast with the patterns and shape inspired by 18th Century design. Whilst I was walking by, I overheard a woman exclaim “well who would wear it?!” The answer is absolutely me, whenever I had the chance.

The above powder blue collection reminded me of ceramics, wallpaper and decorative ceilings.

Fun fact: Dior’s premises in Paris used a shade of grey which had last been used on the Temple of Love at the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

After a day out to the palace gardens I moved into the next room, which was a complete contrast. Jet black walls allowed the designs in this room to shine, quite literally in some cases; the lighting was perfect, and whoever did it is a genius. Low lights focused on the exact areas of each outfit that needed highlighting, allowing jewellery to glint in the most specific way. It also created drama, with each piece seemingly coming to life to strike a pose in front of you. My favourite in this room was a brilliant crimson wool and silk suit, featuring a pleated cape and sharp-edged mask. The off-centre hidden fastenings in the jacket combined with the rectangular mask created a very modern and streamlined look.

“After women, flowers are the most divine of creations” 1954

At the end of this room, once you had torn yourself away from the melodrama, you would notice delicate pastel coloured vines and flowers gently making their way into the darkness. Follow these and you would find yourself in a fairyland inspired dreamworld, with garlands of leaves and long ropes vine snaking around the ceiling. These delicate flowers, leaves and vines were all made of paper, handcrafted and enough to completely cover the ceiling and hang down the walls. The theme here was the feeling you get when sitting on a riverbank under the overhanging boughs of trees. Everything was lit in pinks, greens, creams, inky blues and purples. The gowns in this room could have been worn by glamourous fairy queens with their flowing layers or exquisite, nature-inspired patterns. William Morris was evoked, as was pointillism and crochet. I really enjoyed this room and it had such a sublime atmosphere.

“N’oubliez pas la femme” – Never forget the woman, Marc Bohan 1963

My journey through the house of Dior now took me to a room dedicated to the other designers who have helmed Dior since Christian himself. Fashion photography and illustration featured in this space. I particularly enjoy fashion illustration, as it is so different to other forms of art; energy is conveyed while the wearer remains mysterious. It was delightful to see the work of all the past and present creative directors in one room, to be able to compare their individual styles whilst noticing how they retained Dior’s soul.  

Another dark, corridor-like room featured a cabinet of curiosities which was filled with accessories, posters, and miniature versions of his designs, all ordered by colour. My favourite was a dark navy dress made with velvet and tulle, with the navy velvet shaped like petals over the full open shape of the tulle.

An interesting diversion into behind the scenes territory gave us a room filled with pure white ‘templates’ of each design. The walls were covered in glass boxes with white, cotton or linen versions of every dress or outfit as a base, or test I suppose. It was very interesting to see the early stages of dresses before they have been finalised or had their magical particulars added.

“In the world today, haute couture is one of the last repositories of the marvellous” 1957

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and my final stop brought me to the modern day. A large circular room took us into the stars with a space theme, perhaps reflecting the soaring heights to which Dior has reached, or the unknowns of the future. The ceiling had a spectacular ever-changing film of constellations, fine art, paintings and explosions of glitter. Orchestral music played between the pillars outlined with light while chandeliers sparkled overhead. A truly great theatrical spectacular which framed the contemporary pieces perfectly! Many of the designs on show here were worn in advertisements or by the great and good, and I could not help but feel slightly envious of those who had the chance to grace red carpets in such magnificent pieces of art.

Christian Dior was undoubtedly one of the best fashion designers of the past century. His timeless ideas, his New Look, his perfumes, his accessories, his beliefs all combined to create a fashion house devoted to the woman. Later adventures in menswear have also proven successful, and the creative directors have proven time and again that classics can be reinvented without losing soul.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition and I really felt that it captured the essence of the house as well as giving us an insight into the creative process. Each dress different from the last but still subtly carrying the original, marvellous heart of Dior. He is certainly the designer of my dreams.

Emily Baker, 2020 

[chrysalis-rp]

Hᴏᴍᴏ Sᴀᴘɪᴇɴ Pᴜᴘᴀʀɪᴜᴍ

After mastering the building blocks of creation and subjecting them to her design, Dr. Oben set her considerable talent and knowledge to something entirely different and far more interesting in her opinion. Rather than trying to control the human template, what if she learned how to untether the full potential of evolution? What was it, genetically speaking, about life on Earth that allowed for symbiosis, for example? How did one’s personal experiencing affect their DNA, and therefore pass along that change to detriment or benefit of the next generation? And, once isolated, could she exploit and exaggerate this particular quirk of life? These questions, and more lead to the creation of Project Chrysalis.

She began to go deeper and quickly discovered that DNA is far more reactive than we thought. With fine needle and even finer thread, she learned, certain elements of our environment and experiences weave themselves into a genetic tapestry that grows more intricate with each successive generation. Incrementally, these experiences express themselves as genetic predispositions and abilities. This, of course, leads to evolution. For any geneticist, this is basic knowledge, so the question became how could Dr. Oben and her support staff amplifying the subtleties of epigenetics. As with her experience with genetic augmentation, advanced AI programs became invaluable in controlling the variable.

Though it took over two decades, Dr. Oben and her team, working in tandem with AI research analysts, gained their first breakthrough in what they were calling ‘dynamic gene expression’. What this came to mean is, an individual with dynamic gene expression has the involuntary ability to genetically react to the world in real time. These individuals are called many things; Homo Sapien Puparium, Changelings, Epigenetically Reactive Individuals (ERIs), and abominations. When pupae experience a significant threat, whether physical or mental, their body’s stress response is adapt and recode their DNA in real time. For example, a pupa bitten by a venomous snake, should he live, might have his body go into what is known as the chrysalis state. This, essentially, is a deep coma induced by the body’s self-reconstruction. Upon awaking, this pupa, in particular, might find that his body chemistry now allows for acetylcholine receptors, making it impossible for the venom to negatively affect him ever again.

In full, this body function is called metamorphosis, and the length and result of the process vary wildly from situation to situation. Project Chrysalis is still a new directive, with its subjects all under the age of twenty-five, and on the leading edge of epigenetic research. As such, the full limits of augmented gene expression are not yet known, and the potential for erroneous mutation is present. Some pupae have underground changes as subtle as a shift in temperament, while other have grown and entirely new kind of organ. Because of this degree of variation, it has been important to control the experiment without contriving all the factors. To that end, and unlike her research into genetic tailoring, where she had to open herself up to whoever could afford to invest in her research, Dr. Oben had full control of candidates.

For this experiment,  Dr. Oben set up a donation program to attract desirable candidates for payment in exchange for healthy eggs and semen. After her volunteers signed ironclad legal documents swearing them to silence and relinquishing them of their parental rights, Project Chrysalis was able to move onto human trials. Cavender School would be the controlled environment the experiment needed while granting the subjects the freedom need to interact with the world. Each child born from Project Chrysalis became wards of the school, with a faculty, staff, and student body making up their admittedly unconventional family. And, as much as possible, this new kind of human was given a life as close to ‘normal’ as possible. Until that is, details of Project Chrysalis were leaked to the public.

Again Dr. Oben found herself being excoriated by the public for ‘farming’ children, except the vitriol was ten times as loud. The idea of scientist raising an ‘experimental brood of inhuman freaks’, as some pundits might and have said, was utterly heinous. She was seen as recklessly playing with life, coldly pricking and prodding defenseless babies. In reality, these children were seen by Dr. Oben as her our flesh and blood, and many on her support staff felt similarly. In her final days alive, it broke her heart to see them so thoroughly alienated by the public. As an African Muslim woman, Dr. Oben knew how it felt to experience backlash and hatred for something you have no control over, and the danger that arises when the masses consume radical misinformation and fail to see the humanity in one another?

Fearing that anonymity was no longer enough to shield them from such danger, Dr. Oben, one of the world’s eight trillionaires, dedicated the full total of her estate to their protection and funded the Cavender School Saltaire and Oben University annexes for the offshore settlement project. There, at least, her children would be safe.

As the newest and rarest form of human variant developed by Ulex Group, there are only a few pupae alive. As such, each player will be limited to one.

[isearchgoood]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[theinjectlikes2]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2Gc5Aem via IFTTT

[drummcarpentry]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[whitelabelseoreseller]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/13177281

[gamebazu]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/2tG2zjJ

[nutrifami]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[lakelandseo]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!