10 Steps to Becoming A Better Writer

Hello, Friends!

Cheers from Vishnu! I welcome you to the MarketingSip Sunday Newsletter—December 13, 2020 issue. Enjoy featured snippets and my notes on this week’s stories that I found most informing, educating, persuading, inspiring, entertaining, and unique for content creators and marketing professionals:

#1 Is The Author Bio Necessary?

For every piece of content that you publish on your website, you must include the author bio for three main reasons:

• It’s the right this to do: Author bio gives well-deserved credit to the writers for their hard work.
• Good user experience: Your audience deserves the right to know who wrote what they are reading. You owe them the responsibility to be transparent. Author bio helps you fulfill both.
• Author bio has SEO value: Author bio makes your content more credible. Plus, it adds positive value to the E-A-T score of your content.

Now, you know why the Author Bio is essential. To help yourself write a best-in-class and SEO optimized bio, take time to go through How to SEO Optimize Your Author Bio on Your Blog by James Parsons.

#2 Hacking Growth With Lead Magnet Swap.

This week, I learned about one unique trick for growing an email list. And you’d love to use it. It’s called “Lead Magnet Swap.”

A Lead Magnet Swap is a collaboration where you agree to distribute a lead magnet of another individual or brand to your audience. To download the lead magnet, your audience land on another individual or brand’s landing page and sign up to their email list. In exchange, another individual or brand will do the same for you. So, you end-up cross-promoting each other’s content, exposing your content to the new audience, and growing your subscriber base.

To learn step-by-step how to use Lead Magnet Swap for your brand, check out this article by Greg Digneo — List Building: How to Build an Email List from Scratch.

#3 Week’s Highlight: What Makes A Great Podcast?

“A great podcast from a brand is not a podcast about the brand. It’s about what a brand is passionate about, what stories it can uniquely tell, and what distinct point of view it can bring to a show.” — Steve Pratt, in Medium article 9 Marketing Lessons for Podcasters: Inside the Strategy of Facebook’s New Podcast.

#4 10 Steps to Becoming A Better Writer.

Every writer, no matter how good, wants to become a “better” writer — A better version of oneself. You and I are no different.

Since I started writing on the web in July 2015, I have Googled countless variations of queries on “how to become a better writer?” Then, one day, I got the best advice. And it was from Brian Clark, who I have always admired as a writer, designer, and minimalist:

Takeaway: The best step to become a better writer is to start writing.

#5 Brand Campaign Spotlight: The Muse.

If you have ever looked for any career advice on Google, chances are you have already visited The Muse. The Muse defines itself as “the go-to destination for the next-gen workforce to research companies and careers.” I agree. It is.

Alex Cavoulacos and Kathryn Minshew, two women who are literally changing the rules of work, founded The Muse in 2011 in New York City and made their own mark in the Big Apple.

The Muse attracts prospective candidates as well as the companies to list their job positions. But how? Well, all thanks to its Career Advice section — A content hub of ever-updated expert advice on almost all imaginable issues and situations you may face at the workplace.

Thanks to its solid content marketing strategy, as per SimilarWeb stats of The Muse as on December 13, 2020, it holds rank #50 worldwide in the “Jobs and Employment” category websites with average monthly traffic of about 7 million.

The best part about The Muse content strategy is that all the content in its Career Advice section is evergreen. That means it will not go outdated anytime soon and will keep attracting candidates as well as the companies in the times to come.

#6 Add to Your Toolkit: McAfee True Key.

Can you count the number of personal subscriptions you manage? Can you guess the number of websites you have created an account on? Do you have any difficulty in recalling the last time you hit the forgot password button?

I think for all these three questions, I am gonna hear a “no” for an answer. If your answer is “yes,” then congrats to you for being an anomaly genius!

Going ahead, if your answer is “no.” then I’d recommend you get the McAfee True Key application. It remembers all your account passwords and helps you store private notes with bank-level security.

I am using True Key for more than four years now and have not entered a single password for the repeat visits on any website. All I remember is just one master password. Each time I turn on my PC, I log into True Key, and all my sites are auto-logged in. And yes, it works on your smartphone as well.

With the True Key free version, you can store up to 15 logins. With the True Key premium version costing US$ 19.99 per year, you can store up to 10,000 logins, which, I think, is more than you will ever need.

#7 LinkedIn Spotlight: Be Patient With SEO!

Among other factors, SEO needs patience. Lots of it.

As of now, we have no tool for SEO instant gratification.

So, please be kind to your SEO people + SEO charts!

[P.S.: I see more often mounting pressure on SEO professionals in my network to get “instant” results and boost organic rankings. What number-oriented people don’t understand is that SEO is not an overnight process. Neither it works on a “pay-and-play” model. It’s like growing a plant from a seed that needs consistent efforts, resources, and care over a long period. Like you can’t grow a plant in a day, you can’t get SEO results in a day. Even if you put all the effort today, you’ll get its fruits in the future. Not today. What are your views on it? I’d love to know. So, please let me know on LinkedIn.]

🌱 Keep Doing Good Stuff

Happiness is something we all pursue throughout our lifetime. In 2020, ‘Happiness’ was searched more than ever on Google.

While we all pursue happiness all the time, most of us stay unhappy most of the time. Why? One possible reason: We start with the wrong question about happiness. Yes. We ask: What makes us happy? We never ask: What keeps us happy? There is a difference between the two.

In pursuit of “making” ourselves happy, we keep chasing “big” milestones like a fancy degree, the “dream” job, the “perfect” life companion, and so on. At the same time, we ignore the daily life moments and simple gestures that we can enjoy and keep ourselves happy.

So, how can we reclaim our happiness and spread smiles? Tarun Goyal, IRPS and a great leader, has got a formula for us: 2G! Yup. 2G of Smile! It’s worth your 5 minutes. Give it a shot.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for less, but worthy!

For the love of marketing

—Vishnu Goyal

Creator, MarketingSip