Honest tales from the content marketing climb
We were dropping like flies, wasting away, getting all kinds of weird diseases like Kaposi’s Sarcoma and PCP Pneumonia. We died, sometimes in horrible agonizing pain, sometimes slowly drowning from the fluid in our lungs. And nobody cared. Nobody gave a damn.”
For me, the scariest part of that paragraph is the ending. The loneliness of it. [Read more…]
Imagine you’re the barkeep.
The solid oak bar is your contact point. It’s your website – your social media hub. Your handshake.
The chalkboard above the bar – your ads.
Every adult in town – a prospect.
You’re here to sell cocktails until you run out of ice.
The secret ingredient? It’s coming up … [Read more…]
Something happened to me when I was 20 years old.
It happened to more people in that year (2009) than any year before, or after.
Blindsided me. On an average Thursday, just before teatime. [Read more…]
Imagine you’re choosing between holiday parks for your summer break.
Is a flat surface important to you?
Turns out, it’s important to parents who want to keep their buggie wheels from rattling loose, and give their calves a rest, for once.
I never empathised with that until having kids. Actually stepping into the shoes of the customer for my client (nationwide holiday operator).
Still, I could have absorbed insight like that (without committing to parenthood), just by waking up to these simple research techniques: [Read more…]
When Thomas Harris wrote Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, he shadowed his characters in each scene.
Invisible to them, he took notes on their conversations.
But when creeping into the presence of Dr. Hannibal Lecter for the first time – his skin crawled … as if the doctor knew he was there.
Harris had created a character so REAL, he was acting on freewill.
There’s a muscle fiction writers use to do this:
Instead of dialling 911, Lou videotapes the blood trails, bullet holes, and bodies of a family mass murdered in their home just seconds ago.
And he’s going to flog his footage to the morning news.
Lou’s a ‘stringer’. A freelance video journalist so bloodthirsty for success, he stops at nothing to suck the most shocking images into his camera every night.
If the crime scene isn’t dramatic enough, he tweaks it – maybe drags the body into position for a better shot.
I should’ve said no.
But it was dry season for clients … and her payday loans firm had a bottomless budget (thanks to its 2356% APR).
No pride won that week.
Only thing gained was a lesson – two, actually: