Of course, things aren’t so easy nowadays—the competition is steeper. Audiences are splintered across more channels. And the demands put on content teams are greater than ever.

In episode 2 of our new content strategy advice show, Ask a Content Strategist, content strategy masterminds Deanna Cioppa and Kat Lisciani joined me as we dug into your biggest content marketing questions.

You can watch the full episode here, but since you’re already reading this article, let’s watch a few of my favorite moments.

How to grow your audience with “performing-enhancing content”

If your brand is just starting out with content, what’s the best way to grow your audience? That’s a question that Deanna—Contently’s head of content strategy—has heard a thousand times. And she gives some sage advice: Don’t be afraid to use paid, as long as you optimize for converting those visitors to repeat organic visitors.

Making the case for awareness content—even if there’s no direct link to sales

Some business leaders dismiss pitches for top-of-funnel content programs, acting as if you’re advocating for a SaaS slam poetry night. (Please no one do this.) As a senior content strategist, Kat has seen it a thousand times, and here, she shares the simple argument she uses to win over top-of-funnel content skeptics.

Countering a story-hating boss with SCIENCE

What happens when your boss just doesn’t see the need for stories in your content, and instead just wants straight data? Deanna explains how the science of stories can help you win over even the biggest content skeptic.

Want to dig in more? Then check out episode 2—streaming here now!

The post How to Grow Your Audience, Make the Case for Content, and Counter Your Story-Hating Boss appeared first on Contently.

Was Jobs talking about the iPod? Or was he talking about a content strategy advice show tailor-made for modern marketers?

Or was he talking about both?

It’s time to find out.

Today, we’re excited to launch Ask a Content Strategist, a new content strategy advice show inspired by our popular mailbag column. Each episode, I’ll be joined by a rotating cast of content strategy experts in our downtown studio to tackle your most pressing questions and challenges. Tune in to discover which best practices are misguided, the channels you should be prioritizing, how to get buy-in for content, and much more.

You can watch the full first episode here, and in this post, I’ve included a few of my favorite moments from episode 1:

1. What should I do if I’m the sole content marketer at my organization?

A shocking number of content marketing teams are a team of one—even at some Fortune 1000 brands. Deanna Cioppa, Contently’s head of content strategy, reveals why you should avoid taking on too much—or you’ll be spread out like saran wrap over a platter of mediocre content.

2. When should I gate my content?

Way too often, marketers trap their best content behind a landing page with a form—turning off 75 percent of their audience in the process.

Here, I reveal my simple rule to determine whether it makes sense to “gate” content behind a form—and why most marketers get this crucial decision wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERp1InHVKus

3. Which newsletter format works best?

As anyone with a Substack will tell you, newsletters are hot right now. But which format works best? Senior Content Strategist Kat Lisciani reveals the approach that’s working best for the publications of her award-winning clients.

We’ll have a new episode out every three weeks. And if you have a question of your own, enter it below for the chance to be featured on the show!

The post Your 3 Biggest Content Strategy Questions, Answered appeared first on Contently.

Since then, comments and questions have been the content metric I secretly value over likes and shares and views. Did I make people think about things differently? Did I spark enough curiosity to make someone want to learn more?

By that measure, our webinar on the science of storytelling a few weeks ago was a big success. By the time we got to the Q&A, there were nearly 100 questions in the chat. I answered as many as I could live, but I also wanted to give the best of the rest some love in a content mailbag. Let’s dive in.

Should we change anything about our storytelling because of the COVID-19 situation?

-Anthony

Over the past month, the phrase I’ve come to loathe the most is “business as usual.” Nothing about our current situation is usual. Our work and personal lives have changed in very real ways.

As marketers, our top priority right now should be helping our audience overcome the challenges they face. If we do that, we’ll build trust, nurture leads, and have a strong pipeline when the economic landscape shifts. To steal a line from Hootsuite, we need to “do good or make people feel good.”

For most brands, doing good means taking action in the fight against Coronavirus. For example, we’re raising funds for emergency grants for freelance creatives in need.

The easiest way to make people feel good is to create high-quality content that educates and entertains them. As a marketer, think of yourself as in public service. If you’re in finance, help people take advantage of every financial program available to them right now. If you’re in healthcare, follow GE’s lead and share important innovations that can help fight the disease. If you’re in marketing or technology, help people figure out how to work more effectively together.

However, don’t just create coronavirus content for the sake of it. In other words, don’t be this brand.

Bottom line: Everything that’s going on right now should prompt us to reevaluate the stories we tell and ensure that we’re prioritizing the ones that’ll help people the most.

What is your opinion on sending email content regarding the current situation?

-Ryan

Email remains the best way to reach your audience with stories and build a connection. When done well, it amplifies your traffic across all other organic channels. Coronavirus doesn’t make that any less true.

But we do have to be extra careful about the amount of emails we’re sending right now. This is what my inbox looked like for most of March:

Apparently, I have a lot of friends at Via. I also have a second family—the sweetgreen family, and they would like to take care of me during this unusual time. And Target considers me a “guest” because …. yeah, I guess I did get drunk and fall asleep in the camping section that one time in college.

We all get too many emails from brands, in part because it’s one of the toughest things for companies to manage. Product is sending a survey, the content team is sending a newsletter, customer marketing is sending a product update, and the sales team is reaching out with a special expansion proposal. And that’s when everything is normal. In times like this, our instinct is to do more, more, more. We try to drown our business anxiety in hyperactivity.

At Contently, we definitely sent a few too many emails to some folks after the crisis hit. Last month, we quickly spun up new virtual events to address challenges our audience were facing, like remote content collaboration and making the case for content marketing. These events had a ton of sign-ups, but in the course of promoting them, we ended up sending too many emails to people who were already signed up for our weekly newsletters. Once we realized this, we vetted our lists and reduced our email frequency.

In other words: Keep sending helpful content to your audience, but audit your email comms and ensure that people aren’t on overlapping campaigns. Even your most engaged contacts shouldn’t hear from you more than twice a week.

What if I am writing for tech savvy audience? Does it still make sense to write at a 4th grade level?

-Anna

You’ve talked about white papers at the beginning and the “level” at which they should be written—does that apply to brands across the board? We are in institutional asset management and continuously struggle with the “tone” and “level.” Senior management is pushing for academic level and the marketing team is pushing for something lower?

-Herbert

After my last webinar, I got a lot of questions about our research on content fluency. Should all brands really strive to write at an elementary or middle school level? Even B2B brands in niche industries?

The answer: Yes.

Complexity doesn’t equal authority. Whether you’re writing about institutional finance or pharmaceuticals or email marketing, you should make your writing clear and enjoyable to read. Doing so leads to a huge competitive advantage. If you’re the only one in your industry who does that well, people will turn to you first. You’ll earn their loyalty.

Now, your content may require some technical industry jargon. If that raises your reading level, that’s okay. But a lot of jargon can often be simplified into basic terms, so try to keep it to a minimum.

How relevant do you see content marketing being for B2B companies, and which kinds of content would you recommend?

-Herbert

In many ways, content marketing is more important for B2B companies than B2C companies. I wrote about why a couple years go:

People only want to read and watch content about their passions, and those things tend to fall into two camps:

A) Content that helps people enjoy their personal passions, like sports, gaming, wellness, fitness, cooking, travel, health, and, in my case, bouncy castles and large water slides.

B) Content that makes people better at their jobs, where they spend most of their days. These people desperately need to improve if they want to retire before they’re 85 years old and Boca Raton is somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean.

If you’re a B2C brand, you’re likely playing in the first camp. And the competition for attention there is fierce. If you want to stand out, you need to drop someone from space or tell truly unique stories—like Marriott or Dollar Shave Club—to stand out.

If you’re B2B, you still need to create content that stands out, but there’s much less competition. Condé Nast isn’t about to launch a magazine to help content marketers measure ROI. Meredith won’t start a new pub to help healthcare executives navigate the complex regulatory landscape. As a B2B brand, you likely have knowledge and expertise people crave.

This is a topic I’m weirdly passionate about. I even made a video about it!

Obviously every audience is different, but in general, what types of media and placements are most effective for storytelling, particularly for B2B on a small budget?

-Justin

There’s no universal rule here. You should reach your audience on the channels where they’re most engaged.

Our two biggest traffic sources are search and email. Search helps us reach thousands of new people who subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Then that weekly newsletter keeps them coming back. We’re a B2B startup with a pretty small budget, too, so we’re very deliberate about which keywords we target, focusing on terms like “content audit” that bring in readers likely to subscribe.

After that, LinkedIn is our biggest social channel. We have two new LinkedIn newsletters, The Storytelling Edge and The Content Report, that are growing by about 500 subscribers per week. We try to repurpose content as much as possible, so after a few days or a week, we repost our LinkedIn newsletter to our blog, reaching our audience in two places.

The biggest key is to tailor your content to the channel. On Twitter, threads work super well; often, we’ll summarize the contents of an entire article on Twitter, especially if it’s data-heavy, so our audience doesn’t have to click out of the feed.

We're aiming to raise $50,000 in emergency grants for the @freelancersu's Freelancers Relief Fund to help freelancers facing economic hardship during #COVID19. Here's why 1/https://t.co/PV6Rwsn7tb

— Contently (@contently) April 7, 2020

On Facebook, native video is king. Once you figure out where your audience spends their time, study that channel to figure out what works best. Short “NowThis” style social video and animated explainers work really well here, and they’re much less expensive to produce than live-action shoots.

How can I express the value of emotion in advertising to a leadership team that is highly focused on price-based messaging?

-Christine

Every brand needs to find the right balance of short-term sales activation with long-term brand building. The problem is that most organizations invest much more in the former than the latter.

Leading marketing researchers Les Binet and Peter Field have found that the ideal split of resources is 60/40 in favor of long-term brand building. (My ex-colleague, Guissepe Caltabiano, has a great breakdown on it here.)

While price-based offers will deliver an immediate short-term boost, those gains mostly disappear after six months. Brand building efforts, however, deliver compounding returns over time and a long-term uplift in sales. You can still use short-term sales activations to get over the finish line in any given quarter, but brand building is the key to long-term success.

Unfortunately, we’re drawn to short-term sales activations because:

1. They’re easy to measure. You send an offer, people click and buy, and you can measure the ROI.

2. The immediate results make our brains feel good.

But it’s not a great long-term strategy. Ask your leadership team: Do they only care about boosting sales for the next 3-6 months? Or do they want to build a brand that lasts?

What tips do you have about formatting copy? For instance, do bullets kill storytelling?

-Eric

Some thoughts here:

• Bullets are a great way to break down complex information and make it easier for our brains to absorb information. Bullets, lists, and images are a great way to keep people’s attention and cater to visual learners because it mixes up the monotony of long text blocks.
• However, don’t begin an article with bullets. That’s snoozetown. Start with a relatable story or anecdote that invites your audience in.
• Lastly, make formatting choices with intention. I tend to use shorter paragraphs to cater to mobile readers. I also almost always use H2s or bolded questions to break a piece up so it’s easier for people to digest. When in doubt, copy the formatting choices from others that you enjoy the most. And never make a bullet as long as this one. Honestly, it’s just getting out of hand.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s former head of marketing and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask us your most pressing content strategy questions here.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Answers to Your 7 Biggest Content Questions appeared first on Contently.

Over 700 people signed up, and we got a ton of questions. We tried to answer them all, but I spent a little too long breathlessly explaining how to work with compliance teams. So for this month’s Ask a Content Strategist column, I thought I’d dive into some of the best questions that went unanswered.

As a content team of one, I struggle holding onto the roles of creating the strategy, campaigns, assessment, graphics, etc. to avoid the chaos that always ensues. What should my primary focus be? And what are absolutely necessary technologies to invest in?

-Paul, Colorado

It’s never fun being a one-person team. No one realizes you’re responsible for 1,000 percent more than just creating content. And there’s usually that one guy who thinks he could do your job way better than you. (You may think you can write, Chad. But you can’t.)

When you’re a one-person content team, you’ll always be tempted to focus on just creating more. More content. More campaigns. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s much easier to just focus on the rote tasks in front of you.

But to be successful, you need to take a step back and focus on your content strategy. You’re one person. You can’t do everything. So it’s all about honing in on the few channels and tactics that are getting you the best results.

This is essentially the 80/20 rule. If you’re getting 80 percent of your leads through email and SEO campaigns, but spend the vast majority of your time trying to maintain an always-on social and blog cadence, you’re wasting time and effort.

Focus on the channels that work best for you, and then put all of your energy into creating a few pieces of high-quality content specially crafted for those channels.

As for the technologies you’ll need: It depends. A B2C startup focused on paid social video has a much different stack than a B2B company focused on email campaigns and partner webinars. But there are a few must-have buckets.

Analytics: The biggest key to growing your program is showing results. If you’re B2B, you need to show that your content drives leads. If you’re B2C, you need to show that people who engage with your content come back and buy something within a 90-day window.

Google Analytics is free, awesome, and can track both engagement metrics as well as basic conversion pathways. But to provide a full picture, you’ll need a good CRM as well. For most smaller companies, HubSpot is the easiest to plug in and get working.

Calendar and workflow: These tools are important for your own sanity and organization, but they also provide transparency to other teams you work with (sales, demand gen, accounts, etc.) so that they can know what content is coming. A lot of Fortune 2000 and fast-growth companies invest in a content marketing platform like Contently, but if your program isn’t ready for that yet, you can use a more general workflow/calendar tool like Asana.

Social media management: The free version of Buffer is awesome for smaller companies. For enterprise companies, Sprinklr and Spredfast are client favorites.

CMS: For owned content, you need a strong CMS that you won’t spend half your time troubleshooting. WordPress remains the easiest platform to design, maintain, and use. Plus, there are tons of great plug-ins to create different content formats (interactive, quizzes, parallax scroll, etc.) and templates that boost conversions and sharing.

What’s an example of a “big rock” asset in the consumer content world?

-Woo, San Diego

Usually we refer to “big rock content” in a B2B context—white papers or e-books that then get repurposed in a bunch of different ways: blog posts, infographics, videos, social posts, and interactive content that relies on the foundational research in the original asset.

But B2C companies create big rock content too—just look at Spotify’s “Year in Music” research, which it remixes as everything from personalized playlists to 100-foot-high billboard ads. There’s also Red Bull’s epic music and extreme sports documentaries, which the brand slices into “social cuts” specially designed for their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

One of our customers, Silversea, creates big rock “Collections” that serve as travel guides for specific destinations around the world. Each component within them—like these awesome Planet Earth-esque travel videos—serves as a divisible piece of content.

Just look at that freaking walrus!

What are the most effective ways to track ROI for each individual piece of content you produce?

-Sam, San Diego

Here’s the truth: I really do not recommend trying to quantify the hard ROI of every individual piece of content that you create, as opposed to your content program as a whole.

It will lead you down a terrifying rabbit hole in which you have to match up a ton of web analytics and CRM data, and you’ll spend 90 percent of your time making those calculations instead of, you know, actually making cool stuff.

That being said, here’s an in-depth guide on one way to measure the full ROI of individual content pieces. And here are some key metrics you can look to in order to identify top performers.

Conversions: Track which pieces of gated content generate the most leads. For instance, in 2015, I wrote a series of five content marketing playbooks for Contently. They were extremely popular, generating tens of thousands of leads.

Each playbook was classified as an individual campaign, which we then tracked as the lead source in Salesforce. If a deal closed as a result of a playbook, it got credit. As a result, we were able to attribute millions of dollars of revenue from that campaign. (I’m still waiting for my cut…) And guess what? We’re rolling out an updated series of playbooks in the coming months to try to recapture the magic.

SEO: Three things I love about SEMRush—it’s cheap, easy to use, and tells you the monetary value of your primary organic keywords. If a piece of content is ranking for a high value keyword and driving a ton of traffic, this is an easy way to show hard ROI for an individual piece.

Here are some other ROI guides that should help:

The content metrics that really matter.

How to show the ROI content has on your brand.

One last piece of advice: Find the friendliest marketing or business analyst in your company, bribe them with booze and cupcakes, and get them to set up an automated dashboard that pulls in your most important KPIs each month. (In all likelihood, they already use Looker, Domo, Tableau, or Google Data Studio.)

It’ll mean the difference between looking like this at the end of every month…

Versus looking like this instead…

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: What Should You Focus On When You’re a Team of One? appeared first on Contently.

-Alejandro, Mexico

Content marketing is a funny discipline. It’s been a major movement for the past six years, but some companies are still just starting to take it seriously. And once they do, marketing leaders panic. They turn to the closest living creature and scream, “We need to do content! Now! Someone start typing!”

That approach doesn’t work out great, because the worst kind of content only exists to check a box. Just creating content isn’t a goal. That won’t do anything for your business. Plus, you’ll waste a lot of money if your content fails to impact some larger pursuit like brand awareness, lead generation, or sales enablement.

Alejandro, without a larger strategy, you’re doomed to fail.

So how do we change your boss’s mind? Here are three great stats that could help you make your case:

1. According to a 2017 Contently survey, 98 percent of marketers believe that “having and following a content marketing strategy is important for content marketing success.”

2. Per CMI’s 2018 B2B Content Marketing Trends survey, 62 percent of content marketers who rated themselves as very successful or extremely successful have a documented content strategy. Conversely, if you don’t have a strategy, there’s a good chance you won’t be successful.

This holds true for B2C companies as well, as we see in CMI’s 2017 B2C report. (The 2018 B2C report hasn’t been released yet.)

3. According to SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of all content that brands produce goes unused. There are a few big reasons for why: content is hard to find, unknown to users, irrelevant, and low quality. All of these stem from a lack of content strategy.

Your boss is going to waste a lot of money if you don’t get the opportunity to put together a comprehensive content strategy. If you want to start mapping out where you need to go, check out our whitepaper Content Methodology: A New Model for Content Marketing, which provides an end-to-end guide for building a content marketing program.

How can you best measure content marketing ROI for content that’s distributed via social channels? What are the best ways to go beyond likes and social shares?

Ryan, Chicago

It’s all about setting up the right conversion pathways so you can follow what folks do after they find your content. Do they sign up for a newsletter? Check out your product page? Ask to talk to a salesperson? Your business goals will ultimately dictate what you decide to track. Regardless of what conversions you’re after, this KissMetrics guide to Google Analytics social reports is an excellent place to start.

What are the differences between a writer’s role and a content marketer’s role? Does a freelancer have to know all the technical marketing jargon, or can they just write?

Kate, Las Vegas

Contently has a network of over 160,000 freelance creatives across the globe that we vet and train to work with brands, so this is a question we’ve thought about quite a bit. If you aspire to write for a brand, you don’t need to be a content marketing expert. (Unless, of course, the topic is content marketing.) Just be a good writer who specializes in a certain topic or industry.

That being said, you do need a basic understanding of marketing terms. Writers should be versed in the foundational elements of a company’s content program. (Which is why we create a content strategy for every Contently client and make it accessible in our platform for every freelancer.) Specifically, you’ll want to know:

Business goal(s): What is your client trying to accomplish with this piece of content? What metrics will determine success?

Audience: Who is the target audience for this piece of content? (You’re going to write differently for a 55-year-old CMO than a 20-year-old student.)

Content pillars: What core topics and concepts does your client focus on?

Target SEO keywords: What target SEO keywords is your client trying to rank for with this piece of content?

Writers have to keep these factors in mind when they’re crafting content, and they need a certain level of marketing fluency to reach that point. Alternatively, if you’re a marketer working with freelancers, you need to make sure they understand this information before you start commissioning work.

Over the past five years, tons of writers have gotten hooked on content marketing after upping their marketing fluency, including me. Who knows? Once you start to geek out on content marketing, it could open up a whole new career.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s director of content strategy and editor-in-chief. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

His book, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You, which he co-authored with Contently co-founder Shane Snow, will be published on January 29 by Wiley. Pre-order it here.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: My Boss Wants Me to Write Blog Posts Without a Strategy. What Do I Do? appeared first on Contently.

So let’s get into it. Here’s what you asked this month:

We’ve been using the term “thought leadership” internally for a while. Is it okay to use that term for the general public? Does it mean anything or resonate with people outside of content marketing, communications, and publishing?

-Jason, New York

On Friday night, I was sitting on my roof with some friends when the subject of content marketing came up. Or more specifically, the subject of how I won’t ever stop talking about content marketing with two my friends, Contently co-founder Shane Snow and Jessica “Jess at Contently” Black.

My roommate Brandon, who doesn’t work in content marketing, looked at us and ranted: “I go to the bathroom for thirty seconds, and when I come back, you’re screaming at each other about thought leadership and brand storytelling. What the hell are you guys talking about?”

We laughed, but there’s an important lesson here: You have to remember that not everyone lives in your industry-speak bubble.

True thought leadership consists of thought-provoking ideas, perspectives, and research. It should pique people’s interest and make them think about concepts in a new way. There’s no situation where you should have to tell people that they’re reading “thought leadership.” That’s incredibly pompous and lame—it’s the equivalent of going around telling people that you’re really smart.

In my experience, people outside of marketing and communications have no idea what thought leadership means. Media professionals may not have any idea either. Yesterday, I asked some editor friends if they’d heard of the term, and they thought it was absurd.

The term definitely has value for those of us who work in marketing because it’s part of our common language. But it should only be used inside that bubble, and we should use it carefully. A lot of what we call thought leadership isn’t thought leadership at all, It’s one of the most poorly used buzzwords in marketing (as I explain here, in GIFs.)

Are there negative repercussions to repeating messages/content/posts across your media channels all at once versus sharing the same message at different times?

-Michael, Chicago

I’d question whether you want to share the same message across all of your channels. Each channel is unique. An effective LinkedIn update will have different copy than a tweet, which will have different copy than an email blast. It helps to think about the context of your message when planning these posts.

While there aren’t any major repercussions for blasting out an update across channels, it’s not a good strategy. There are a lot of tools that’ll make educated guesses about when your audience will be most engaged on each channel. For social, we rely on Buffer to automate the best time for posting on different networks. For newsletters, a lot of email service providers (such as MailChimp) have this functionality as well. This is one of those situations in which it helps to trust the algorithms.

Where is the best place, virtual or otherwise, to take classes for content writing/creation/strategy for those of us who are not digital natives?

-Margaret, Providence, RI

Most people would suggest that you take an online content marketing class like Copyblogger’s well-regarded Authority course, but I’d suggest that you start somewhere else: take an in-person writing workshop.

We’re in an era when only the best content breaks through. The top five percent of branded content garners 90 percent of the attention. As a result, the first step for anyone interested in content marketing is to get your writing and storytelling skills up to that level.

I went to Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts school just outside New York City. Although I left college a happily employed journalist/blogger, I didn’t take journalism classes. Instead, I took a number of non-fiction and fiction writing workshops where my writing was torn apart. In the process, I developed my voice, tightened my language, and became a better editor. Those skills made me a more effective editor of our college newspaper and helped me pick up digital media gigs in New York.

Once you start to develop those skills, then look into a content course like what Copyblogger offers. Additionally, you should just start writing on your own. Storytelling is like any skill—you’re going to struggle at first, but with practice you’ll only get better.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s director of content strategy and editor-in-chief of The Content Strategist. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Does Thought Leadership Mean Anything to Regular People? appeared first on Contently.

This is a dangerous month for marketers. Finalizing budgets, surviving SXSW’s endurance test of booze, buzzwords, and barbecue. Making it through March Madness without getting fired for running a gambling ring and sports bar out of your cubicle. On top of all that, there’s a good chance your CMO is about to stroll by and ask about your content calendar. Forget hiding the whiskey and stacks of cash—what the heck are you going to say?

As always, I’ve got you covered, starting with the first question of this month’s mailbag.

How much content should I actually publish? Like how many stories should be on my calendar each month? No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer.

—Jamie, London

Most content marketers struggle with this question. I still remember my first meeting with Sam Slaughter, Contently’s VP of content. A day after Sam hired me to run this blog, we were going over the content strategy one-sheeter he’d asked me to put together. Almost immediately, we got into an argument over how much we should publish. I proposed three pieces per day. He disagreed, countering with one story per day.

“One piece a day?” I shrieked. I’d just spent three years running a news site, The Faster Times, that published over 30 pieces every day. (Half of them were crap, but still.) One piece per day seemed insane.

After another 20 minutes of negotiation, Sam agreed to let me publish twice a day. Before long, I was pushing out three or four stories a day and hoping he wouldn’t notice. After all, I wanted us to be a real publisher (we even launched an award-winning print magazine!), and pumping out a lot of content was part of what made you a real publisher, right?

Before long, though, I realized I was wrong. Along the way, I developed a few rules that helped dictate how much we should publish.

Rule 1: Quality trumps quantity. Plan your calendar with that in mind.

Shocking rule here, right? Still, this cliche needs to be said. Five percent of branded content gets 90 percent of all engagement. Mediocre content is pretty much useless for SEO. And it’s also detrimental to your brand.

In the early days of The Content Strategist, I was supplementing our meatier stories with a fair amount of AdFreak-style blog posts that only took me an hour or so to produce. They generated short-term social traffic but did nothing long term for our business. I could have spent that time on unique, memorable stories. I was just checking the box.

I had this epiphany one afternoon over tacos with Sean Blanda, who was then the editor of Behance’s legendary blog, 99U. Sean successfully challenged my thin logic, and soon after I focused all my attention on high-quality, original stories. Before long, our readership skyrocketed.

Rule 2: You need to publish at least enough to fill a regular newsletter.

I don’t care if you’re B2C, B2B, or B2J [note] business-to-journalist [/note], which definitely doesn’t sound right but is a real term I heard used multiple times this year at SXSW. No matter your business, you should have a newsletter for your content.

As I explain here, a newsletter is often the most important aspect of content marketing. It’s the O.G. of distribution tactics—a direct line to your audience that requires few resources and can’t be sabotaged by Facebook’s or Google’s algorithm. Most lasting content marketing success stories attribute their effectiveness to the newsletter.

At minimum, you want to send a content newsletter once a month, which means you should produce at least 2-4 pieces of content per month. You’re still at the crawl stage, but at least you’re moving—and beginning to build a relationship with your target readers.

Rule 3: Be realistic about your resources.

I’m a notorious Contently loyalist. Sometimes, people point this out by mentioning that I once actually slept in the office because I was still there writing at midnight. (I also had no idea how to lock the doors and was afraid all the computers would get stolen if I left.)

What they don’t mention is the reason I was still there is because I offered to produce a half dozen new e-books in Q1 2014—in addition to running the blog. This was insanely unrealistic, and the quality of my work suffered. So did my lower back—our couches really sucked back then.

When deciding how much content to produce, I recommend following the conservative chart below, which comes from our popular content methodology white paper and lays out the dedicated staff, freelance resources, and technology you need for each content marketing maturity stage.

One thing to note: Freelancers can be a really effective way to scale your efforts when you don’t have a lot of internal resources. Companies will often be much more willing to commit budget for freelance help than they are for full-time headcount. Back when I was the only full-time editor at Contently, I leaned heavily on the skilled writers in Contently’s creative talent network to produce high-quality stories that helped us build our audience. It’s a strategy that’s been incredibly effective for our clients as well.

How can I measure the result?

Milad, Tehran

I love cryptically existential questions. Measure the result of what? Our personal journeys? Our brand new buyer personas? The thousands of dollars I’ve clearly wasted on my West Village therapist over the years? I’m just going to assume you’re talking about content marketing and link to this measurement advice column before I try to quit Contently and move to the jungles of Panama again.

How will content marketing change with Facebook’s removal of “fake news” and the emergence of “alternative facts”?

-Sydney, San Diego

This is a great question—one that I could easily answer with a 3,000-word rant. But I already did that on CNBC, so I’ll keep it short here.

First, we should establish that Facebook hasn’t removed fake news; it’s still fairly pervasive, although the social network is taking steps to crack down on it. One of the good things that came from the fake news controversy, however, is that people are more skeptical about the stories they read. That’s good for media literacy.

With this in mind, brands should follow a simple rule: Don’t trick people. Don’t publish content on some unmarked microsite that hides your logo. Acknowledge the inherent bias in your stories; readers will respect you more for it. (This is your friendly reminder that The Content Strategist is the blog of a really great content marketing software company!)

If the removal of fake news changes anything, I expect us to see more good content. And I think we can all get on board with that.

Update: Contently developer Ryan Morlock slacked me this cartoon from The Marketoonist, which perfectly encapsulates one other rule I forgot: As you publish more content, track how your audience responds and look for the point of diminishing returns. Also, the guy in this cartoon is totally me.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s director of content strategy and editor-in-chief of The Content Strategist. Ask him your most pressing content marketing questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

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