The following is an early excerpt from my new book Content Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Making Your Content An Effective Marketing Tool from O’Reilly Media—due out early this year. This section is part of the book’s introduction. It is currently titled, “My Path to Content Marketing.” Please bear in mind that it’s a work-in-progress. Enjoy!
It was a desperate letter, written late at night, that got me started in content marketing—long before “content marketing” was even a thing.
I was living and lifeguarding in Orlando, Florida, just after graduating from Emerson College in Boston with a degree in writing and book publishing. For eight hours a day I’d sit in the hot sun at a corporate waterpark sleepily breaking up fights between 6-year-olds over who was going to be the first to slide down the orange 4-foot waterfall into the pool of hot pee that I was standing in. At night, I worked as a freelance web designer, building web sites for stressed out small business owners who urgently demanded that I move their logo three pixels to the left…and then to the right…and then back to the left. I found neither job very satisfying.
When I did get time off, I’d follow my friends into dark clubs downtown where I would watch tan men with blond highlights interact with young women in a way that looked to me like sexual assault, but it apparently was meant to be dancing. Not being a talented dancer myself, I stayed close to the table.
I grew up in northern New Hampshire—surrounded by woodpiles, roaring fires, and swimming holes. This faux-world I found myself in was confusing for me to navigate. After a few months, I grew desperate. In a late-night Hail Mary, I began writing and printing out cover letters and resumes to send to publishing companies back up north.
One such letter pleaded, “I feel like a lumberjack in a dance club down here and would love the opportunity to move back north. Might you have a spot for me?”
Two weeks later, I got a phone call. The day after that I hopped on my motorcycle and tore up I-95.
I started right away as an entry-level editorial assistant for Whitehorse Press—a small book publishing company in northern New Hampshire which specializes in motorcycle touring books. It was my job to manage the unsolicited manuscripts—or “slush pile,” copyedit the books in production, and do all the book layout. Being an avid motorcyclist, I had a blast. I learned as much about motorcycling—use your REAR brake in the corners—as I did about niche book publishing.
Due to my previous abusive experience building web sites, I was included in all the company discussions about the company’s site. And, while I wasn’t at first excited to be back in the web site game, I was lucky to have been privy to these early discussions about the potential combining the web and book publishing. What role did the book content have online, if any? How can we tap into, and translate, the vibrancy and enthusiasm of the motorcycling community to our web site? How can this site show the community that we’re experts in the niche? These were big questions to be asking in a time when most people were still figuring out whether or not web links needed to be double-clicked.
The discussions sparked my imagination for what’s possible online and rekindled my love for the web. So much so, in fact, I left the publishing company—and yes, I will admit that I cried when I left—and relaunched a rebranded web company.
I immediately found myself back in the swirl of small retail companies looking to hire me to build them a simple HTML web site—not with the hopes of climbing the ranks of Altavista, or drawing in new traffic from Lycos—but with the more modest goal of making their phone number easier to find and their location hours more obvious. It wasn’t thrilling, but it was work.
Then, one day, while visiting a potential client’s home and farm, the business owner took me on a tour of the property. He showed me the horses, the blind goat, the murderous barn cat, and an old carriage house that had been converted into a country office—complete with a cast-iron woodstove in the center of the room. His business was book publishing. I had found my sweet-spot.
The client wanted more than a simple web site. He wanted a marketing platform. As he spoke, I squirmed in my chair—conflicted with being desperate for the job while being terrified by the prospect of actually getting it.
“I’ve read all the leading equestrian books out there and ours are better. We just don’t yet have a way to show that to people. We have no marketing budget and we work out of a drafty barn with no phone line! But we have the best authors and editors and books,” he said. “Couldn’t a web site help us prove it?”
He was pushing me—and perhaps because I’m a middle child and prone to acquiescing, or, as I prefer to think, it was because I saw the potential of his request—I agreed. “Absolutely,” I said. A web site can do that. And thus, my terrifying transition from web-developer-alone-in-a-room-wearing-headphones to web-marketer-on-stage-teaching-strategies-to-1000-people had begun. I spent the next several years traveling around New England teaching large and small businesses to see the marketing value of their content, and then helping them to leverage it online.
I returned to book publishing several years later after successfully selling off my second one-man web company for $2,000 and a two-week vacation—both of which I sorely needed. This time, I signed on as the Web Editor at Chelsea Green Publishing—an independent book publisher in Vermont that has been publishing some of the best books on renewable energy and sustainable living since 1984. I felt right back at home in niche publishing, and this time my job and goals were different than before—they were more exciting. I wasn’t there to manage the slush pile and wrestle with Corel Ventura. I was there, instead, to build an enthusiastic online community centered on—and promoting—the quality, expert, and edited content contained in Chelsea Green’s new titles and decades-long backlist.
Margo Baldwin, the President and Publisher at Chelsea Green, bravely set me up with the tools and staff I needed and turned me loose to build, test, and tinker. In the days when publishing companies were debating how best to protect their books from digital piracy, we were copying and pasting large swaths of book text onto our blog. When other publishing companies were building walls around their ivory towers, we were polling our Twitter audience for their book title preferences.
It took several years, quite a bit of resources, a fair number of setbacks, and a battery of refinements, but thanks to the serendipitous intersection of newly available tools, outstanding content, and daring enthusiasm, we were able to prove that content marketing was legitimate, safe, and effective.
This book is for content-producers of all stripes: book publishers, magazines, bloggers, authors, cartoonists, and everyone else. It contains the lessons, strategies, successes, and failures I’ve seen during the little career I’ve made out of content marketing. It is my hope that you find my experiences and goofy anecdotes valuable in your own community-building and web marketing efforts. If you find this book helpful, please let me know. If you find errors or have suggestions for improvement, please let me know. If you find my house keys, I could use those too. As always, I’m available on Twitter as @jsmcdougall or through my web site at http://www.jsmcdougall.com. Good luck and have fun.