I’m not sure what the current state of content marketing is today, but when I used to do that for a living in 2013-2018, there was a period of time where infographics were really popular. So much so that it made sense for my team to hire a couple of illustrators. And working on infographics was some of the most fun I had at the time. Lots of mainstream infographics were really sloppy; sometimes people would just tack on some statistics and quotes onto some stock images and call it a day. I guess today we’d literally call it like, business content slop. But I was determined to make stuff that we felt proud of as creators.

A formula that repeatedly worked really well for us was:

1. I’d look for already popular business content that quoted lots of people. It wasn’t uncommon to find posts that quoted 30-50 people, say asking them for advice on how to promote a blog, or how to do search engine optimization, things that business owners cared about.
2. I’d then take all of that information and lay it out in a spreadsheet to look for common themes and patterns. Oftentimes the original posts hadn’t done much more than simply list out the quotes in any random order. I would find, for example, that 50 quotes might fall under 7-9 broad categories. Figuring out what those categories even were was an interesting intellectual and creative challenge.
3. I’d then try to find a way to arrange those categories in a linear narrative of some kind.
4. Once I had the narrative, I’d recruit one of our illustrators and we’d discuss how to come up with visuals that served that narrative. We’d come up with some kind of theme and style. We’d also try to illustrate the concepts that the quotes brought up.
5. Once done, we’d post it on our blog, linking to the original post, and also share it individually with everybody who was quoted. They were typically delighted to see themselves quoted in illustrations, and would share it with their own audiences. This would get us traffic and engagement and linkbacks that helped us achieve our marketing goals, building brand recognition and ultimately selling more software.

All of this was just one part of the content marketing engine that I helped to put together. I was very good at it. When I joined the company we were getting under 1,000 hits/month on the blog, and when I left, we had months that exceeded 100,000 hits/month. I could talk for hours about all the things we did and all the things I’d learned– and I have! But when I left my job mid-2018, I was quite determined to get away from all of that. I was good at it, but I didn’t want it to be the primary lens through which I viewed the world. I missed the more fanciful meandering chaos of my teenage years, where I’d just write whatever I felt like writing without giving a rat’s ass about delivering value to target audiences or whatever.

And so I’d say I spent most of 2018-2024 not using my marketing skillset. I know there are some people on Twitter who’d laugh at this– those who think of me as a relentless self-promoter and so on. To which I can only say: I barely even made the slightest effort. You haven’t even seen me try. Everything “self-promotional” that I’ve done on Twitter has been done completely naturally, incidentally. I just talk about the things that I like to talk about. I have links to my books in my bio, but I hardly even promote them otherwise.

Abandoned. I feel like this was going to be something about going from hobbyist-to-pro but I got tired before I even got there.