Andy Crestodina quotes: advice and predictions from the content chemist.
“Entrepreneurs understand where they can thrive, and how to create value.”
“There are ‘cognitive biases’ built into all of us. We can’t help it. Marketing either works with or against the cognitive biases.”
“Don’t choose colors arbitrarily.”
“Would sports be fun without a scoreboard? No, it would be kind of boring. One thing that happens is when you measure things, your motivation increases. Your interest in that thing increases.”
“Collaboration equals partnerships. Use interviews to make connections with new potential referral partners. Content can also help create new partnerships. Just find people in non-competitive businesses who work directly with your target audience and include them in your next article.”
“Advertising is temporary, content marketing is forever.”
“You get what you give in content marketing. We are competing to be the most generous.”
“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best-promoted content that wins.”
“When creating content, be the best answer on the internet. If you want to rank for search, you need to create the best answer to a customer question.”
“If we produce something original, that will have a better chance in rising above the noise.”
“A blog is the helpful and useful section of your site, filled with articles, advice, and answers. It doesn’t sell. It teaches. The call to action isn’t ‘contact us.’ It’s ‘subscribe.’ It’s the magazine. It’s the mini-version of Wikipedia for your industry. It’s the news, opinion, and how-to. Without sharing your expertise through blog content, your website is simply a brochure.”
“Blogs are bigger. Year after year, the length of the average blog post grows. Five years ago, the majority of bloggers wrote short posts of 1,000 words or less. Today, the average blog post is 1,236 words. Every year, a greater percentage of bloggers report routinely writing 2,000+ word articles.”
“Other changes? Bloggers are using more video, more images, more research, more collaboration. Blogs are becoming more sophisticated and the process for creating them involves more use of editors and data.”
“High-frequency blogs are on the decline. We know from the survey that more bloggers are now in the several-per-month pace than the several-per-week pace. That wasn’t true five years ago. We also know from the data that blogging more often correlates with better results. But my personal take is that you really don’t need to be an ultra-high frequency blogger to meet your goals.”
“High-performing content marketers use data to decide what to do after publishing. They audit their content to learn what the best opportunity is for each piece. Different content has different advantages, depending on how it’s performing. Traffic champions are getting a lot of traffic. Potential champions are on the edge of greatness. Falling stars are the articles that were getting traction, but are starting to decline. Better mousetraps are the articles with the highest conversion rates.”
“I authored Content Chemistry, the go-to book for content marketers, and I’m been the keynote speaker at more than 100 conferences nationwide. If you view content marketing as giving away tons of information for free over a long time in the hopes that some of your readers eventually will become customers, it sounds impractical. With my concept of ‘zero waste marketing,’ however, you can get value from your content both during the creation process and long after it’s published.”
“I’m known as the guy who gives the how-to sessions at the conference. I teach the practical, tactical, step-by-step process for better results through content. I’m not inspiring. I’m not entertaining. But when you leave my session, you have a lot of notes and you know what to do next.”
“As search, social media, email marketing and blogging all converged and ‘content marketing’ became a big thing, I was one of the ones who knew enough to teach it. So I gradually found myself in front of bigger and bigger rooms, giving presentations and teaching the slightly more technical parts of marketing: SEO and Analytics. In each step, I was pushed forward by the gaps in my knowledge into learning. And I was pulled forward by those around me who wanted me to teach what I’d been learning. It was all necessity, timing and demand.”
“I love collaboration and influencer marketing. I truly do. But I prefer the organic (friendship) approach to the paid side. My best days in marketing are when I ask a thought leader I respect for a contributor quote and they send back 100 thoughtful words that make my article a better piece of content. Such a smart, fun and effective tactic.”
“I love anything that makes brands more personal. So many web pages lack personality completely. There is not personal tone and no people. Here’s a quick tip for anyone who wants more leads: put a face next to your calls to action. It both draws the visitors attention and makes the brand more personal.”
“Seventy-five percent of content gets no links. Original research crushes this.”
“Use your content as a way to start conversations by reaching out to cold leads for contributor quotes. By making your process collaborative, you’ll both improve your content and create allies for promotion and sharing. And, once it’s published, that content will stick around—unlike ads. Reference it, send it to new prospects, and improve it over time. Repurpose content to get value from it in different ways: podcasts become blog posts, blog posts become videos, and all of it can be used for sales collateral or training materials.”
“Best practices aren’t ‘best.’ Best practices are only useful in the absence of first party data. They’re not necessarily the best practices for a particular company, a certain industry segment, a specific audience, or for you or your client’s unique goals. In the hierarchy of what should be driving your decisions, opinions are the lowest, followed by best practices, and then first party data analytics. The top dog? A live A/B split test in real-time, with two versions of the same content shown to the same audience.”
“Want to be a thought leader? Take a stand. The three ingredients of thought leadership are: having a personal brand, being a subject matter expert, and being an opinion leader. Content marketers may have a brand and provide useful, knowledgeable content as subject matter experts, but that isn’t thought leadership if they aren’t also willing to speak out for and against things.”
“All these people who we think of when we think of thought leaders—no one delegated that job to them. They all chose themselves.”
“The job is not just to answer all of your prospect’s questions, but it’s to raise questions they didn’t think of asking and answering those.”
“If no one’s ever disagreed with you and your content, you’re probably not really doing thought leadership. Thought leadership is driven by strong beliefs and opinions, which sets it apart from purely informative content. I think thought leadership as a definition should require that the person is not necessarily controversial, but taking a stand.”
“Don’t content market alone. If you write an article and you leave out contributor quotes or expert input from different points of view, you’re missing the chance to improve the content. You’re missing the chance to get greater social reach because an ally in creating content is an ally in promoting it. They’re very likely to share. And you’re also missing a chance to grow your personal network and enjoy the process.”
“Everyone is creating slowly a lifetime body of work. It’s just the more structured, organized thinker with a bunch of forethought and a plan, a vision, of future outcomes—we do the outline first and then build that lifetime body of work in a directional way so that it’s going to lead to that. You’re engineering a final outcome.”
“Best practices are really just good hypotheses that should be tested.”
“Use analytics the right way. The purpose of analytics is to know which things to double down on and which things to stop doing. It is a decision support tool: don’t use it for reporting. Use it to make decisions about where to invest much, much more and what to quit doing because good stuff is 10x the bad stuff. It’s not good and bad like something’s a little bit better—it’s good and bad like some things are amazing and some things are worthless.”
“Not everyone will agree with you. To publish a strong opinion is difficult for a lot of brands. I think the formula there is to ask yourself, what are people in my industry afraid to talk about? What questions are they afraid to ask or answer? What do I think might happen that other people don’t think will happen? If you begin to publish this kind of content, you’re gonna sound very different. You’re gonna be putting yourself out there. Some people will disagree with you.”
“You have a team of people working for the common goal, but the team always has a new player on it, which is the client. So if the goal is to make success predictable by reducing all variables, there’s a giant wild card that you can’t really take off the table and that is the client themselves. So the reason you’re playing the game is to have this one, sometimes crazy member on your team, right? This client. So it’s fun. It is beautiful. It is challenging.”
“Google saves Twitter. This is a headline I’d like to read. Someone needs to do it. Twitter is an important tool for marketers. It’s also a force for good around the world. Sadly, Twitter doesn’t have a sustainable business model. Someone will have to buy it before it crashes and burns or fills itself with ads. I’d pick Google for the job.”
“And yes, as a digital marketer, I love both Twitter and search. I love the subtle interaction between social engagement and search rankings. I love how quality is at the core of both. I think Google would do justice for the 300+ million active Twitter users. But Facebook? They make money by throttling organic reach. They would change the character of Twitter by adding a pay-to-play algorithm. That’d be no fun.”
“Artificial Intelligence is rapidly evolving and will become a mainstream enterprise solution. It is starting out with many experiencing its traps and trepidations but winning organizations will ‘fail fast,’ learn and use this essential discipline to pave a successful future. At the same time, I expect to see noticeable fallout from organizations who have either refused to invest in data the past few years or who have not had success with data and are just getting by with an accidental architecture.”
