A talk about how prolific, creative marketers produce a high volume of high quality work, making "quality vs. quantity" a pointless debate in marketing.
8. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
Create more “stuff.”
Finish our work faster.
Tap into the almighty secrets of the interwebs.
Give our audiences what they want
more quickly, more often, more better..er.
31. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
“Have you ever met
someone with no teeth
and asked, ‘What
happened?,’ and they
replied, ‘Bought the
wrong toothbrush.
Should have done
more research!’”
32. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
“The notion of being
paralyzed and
inconvenienced by the
technology that was built
to make our lives easier
is fascinating to me.”
Source: cultivatingthought.com
52. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
“The device & length are
irrelevant to the story.
Start by asking what
story you want to tell
rather than what result
you want to see and
everything else follows.”
53. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
1. Dive in. Create ugly.
2. Create side projects.
3. Find joy in the process itself.
HOW TO BE PROLIFIC
57. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
TOPIC: ______________________
LEVEL: Intro Intermediate Expert Executive
FORMAT: Text Graphic Audio Video Deck App
STRUCTURE: List How-To News Q&A Op-Ed
58. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
TOPIC: ______________________
LEVEL: Intro Intermediate Expert Executive
FORMAT: Text Graphic Audio Video Deck App
STRUCTURE: List How-To News Q&A Op-Ed
59. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
TOPIC: ______________________
LEVEL: Intro Intermediate Expert Executive
FORMAT: Text Graphic Audio Video Deck App
STRUCTURE: List How-To News Q&A Op-Ed
60. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
1. Dive in. Create ugly.
2. Create side projects.
3. Find joy in the process itself.
4. Turn one good idea into many more.
HOW TO BE PROLIFIC
68. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
1. Dive in. Create ugly.
2. Create side projects.
3. Find joy in the process itself.
4. Turn one good idea into many more.
5. Find inspiration in many diverse places.
HOW TO BE PROLIFIC
70. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
1. Dive in. Create ugly.
2. Create side projects.
3. Find joy in the process itself.
4. Turn one good idea into many more.
5. Find inspiration in many diverse places.
#6…?
HOW TO BE PROLIFIC
75. @Jay_zo • #CMWorld
THANK YOU!
SorryForMarketing.com | bit.ly/TractionPodcast
jay@nextviewventures.com
A Gift For You:
Google “Sorry for Marketing Thank God”
Notas do Editor
So, I’m Italian, which means there are TWO things in the world more important to me than ANYTHING: Family and Food. And the most sacred of all things in an Italian household is….the SAUCE!
So…senior of college, I lived off campus with 6 roommates. And every time my mom would visit, she’d bring with her an entire COOLER of food, not least among which was a few containers of homemade sauce.
One long weekend, a bunch of us decided to go away together. My roommate Tim decided to stay behind. So I said Tim, good news, there’s a bunch of food my mom brought still in the fridge. That’s all yours. Including the sauce. Enjoy.
And I went away.
When I came back after the weekend, I asked Tim — How was the food? And he said great! So I wandered over the kitchen and noticed the pot with some sauce caked onto it. And what I saw horrified me.
I said, Tiiiiimmm…did you add something to my mom’s sauce?
“Oh yeah! I needed more sauce, so I just melted some Velveeta cheese into it!"
(Pause. Speechless. Upset. Bite fist.)
They never found Tim’s body….(Just kidding, but my mom DOES remind him he did this every time we see each other).
My point is this: EVERYBODY in EVERYTHING wants hacks and shortcuts to solve their problems and create MORE STUFF! Some of those are great. They save time and improve your output. Some of those are BAD.
TIM’S was bad.
But here’s the problem: We are all getting pushed, every day, to create more and create better. We’re pushing ourselves. Our peers are pushing us. Our competitors. Our bosses. Our audience.
And SOME people are able to deliver on it with ease…without adding crappy cheese to the recipe. And THAT is what I want to focus on today. When our industry is populated by tons of people who hack the content creation system, AND MAINTAIN THEIR QUALITY… what can we learn? What are the GOOD things in all of that? And how do we all benefit?
Explain
So to DO that…we often seek hacks and shortcuts for things.
Now…
Explain
So to DO that…we often seek hacks and shortcuts for things.
Now…
Did this infographic awhile ago with Boston Content
This is is us in the industry when it comes to creative skills.
Show of hands – how many of you have talked to ONE customer in the past week? ONE.
Pencil icons
Notebook icons
MORE LIKE THIS
Ebook cover designs
Search google
Found this one.
Liked the notepad behind it – Maybe I’ll add a notepad to my cover!
Pencil icons
Notebook icons
MORE LIKE THIS
Ebook cover designs
Pencil icons
Notebook icons
MORE LIKE THIS
Ebook cover designs
----- Meeting Notes (8/23/15 12:22) -----
Look for the BEST notepad!
And then I thought, wait, how should one even design an ebook cover?
Now I have this collection of ebook covers I think look cool….
But, wait…which ones of these are GOOD?
BTW, when I made this slide, I found myself searching for the BEST photo of Aziz Ansari
Too many of us toe the water. We don’t know how to do something. (MIME THIS STUFF) We want to figure out processes and get paralyzed by research.
Yanno what the most prolific among us do? THEY DIVE IN!
And look…it may hurt. It’s probably GOING to hurt until you learn the technique. But you gotta just DIVE IN!
They build processes around what WORKS! They use their intuition and guts to guide them until they have the data.
They don’t want to wait to develop these huge personas. They go talk to 12 customers and CREATE for them.
Story of being brought into the Boston Globe and they’re talking about building infrastructure for these things. Nope. No you don’t. JUST DIVE IN!
They figure it out.
Don’t know design? Canva. PowerPoint. Hack it together!
And it looks something like this….
And it looks something like this….
Side projects help you learn new skills
They help you make mistakes safely.
They help you uncover better or new processes and hacks for things.
“MAKE IS A MUSCLE”
This is tennis star Rafael Nadal.
Nadal is a lefty.
That means when he trains and when he plays he’s constantly swinging the racket with his left. His serves are lefty his returns are lefty his every move on the court is done lefty. So yanno what happened to his arm? Have you guys heard this? His LEFT arm is JACKED! His right arm is teeny tiny. It’s WEIRD! He’s LOPSIDED!
Content marketers CAN NOT BE LOPSIDED! Not when this is what we’re in charge of at work: (huge amount of stuff in a list — all the tactics we need to do)
“Making is a muscle” — Todd Henry
Combinatorial creativity
Example side projects I admire
Here’s the beauty of all these things: SOMETIMES they turn into actual work directly. (Gmail was a side project, did you know that? The Muse, a blog generating millions of monthly hits, used by Uber and Facebook for recruiting talent, was a side project. DraftKings, a fantasy sports website that’s now worth over a BILLION dollars, was a side project)
SOMETIMES they just make you better at what you do. SOMETIMES they just help you add new skills and stay well-rounded. SOMETIMES they change the entire course of your career!
This is tennis star Rafael Nadal.
Nadal is a lefty.
That means when he trains and when he plays he’s constantly swinging the racket with his left. His serves are lefty his returns are lefty his every move on the court is done lefty. So yanno what happened to his arm? Have you guys heard this? His LEFT arm is JACKED! His right arm is teeny tiny. It’s WEIRD! He’s LOPSIDED!
Content marketers CAN NOT BE LOPSIDED! Not when this is what we’re in charge of at work: (huge amount of stuff in a list — all the tactics we need to do)
“Making is a muscle” — Todd Henry
Combinatorial creativity
Example side projects I admire
Here’s the beauty of all these things: SOMETIMES they turn into actual work directly. (Gmail was a side project, did you know that? The Muse, a blog generating millions of monthly hits, used by Uber and Facebook for recruiting talent, was a side project. DraftKings, a fantasy sports website that’s now worth over a BILLION dollars, was a side project)
SOMETIMES they just make you better at what you do. SOMETIMES they just help you add new skills and stay well-rounded. SOMETIMES they change the entire course of your career!
And I think as content marketers we love to obsess over the science. But we need to be better artists too.
Who here loves ice cream? What do you like better – eating the ice cream, or when the ice cream is done?
Who here loves to sweep their floor? What’s the best part – sweeping the floor, or when you’re done sweeping the floor?
Treating content like a chore.
Celebrate – We have to notice the small things each other do. Forget the metric for a second – Tyler, I loved how you used XYZ design flourish. Erik, your opening story was AWESOME. Make that a part of your CULTURE!
Study – Creative Review sessions. How many people do this? (We got our startups doing them and they LOVE them – every Friday morning, breakfast, coffee, and content)
Reward – Break stuff!
the device N the length are irrelevant to the story.
If you start by asking what story you want to tell rather than what result do I want to see everything else follows.
Idea pipeline – tech to save it instantly.
one-offs
THE WELL
--------------------
Idea generation (riff)
THERE ARE BLOGS ON EVERY NICHE:
-- NERD FITNESS
-- URBAN GARDENING
-- SOFTWARE PRICING STRATEGY
-- RETRO GAMING
-- THERE ARE DOZENS OF NICHE BLOGS ABOUT NICHE BLOGGING
Whole point of this is NOT to make a chore go away. It’s to make a chore more ENJOYABLE. The mastery you feel is empowering. You start to pursue new and other projects and skills.
Whole point of this is NOT to make a chore go away. It’s to make a chore more ENJOYABLE. The mastery you feel is empowering. You start to pursue new and other projects and skills.
Whole point of this is NOT to make a chore go away. It’s to make a chore more ENJOYABLE. The mastery you feel is empowering. You start to pursue new and other projects and skills.
(QUOTE ABOUT COMBINATORIAL CREATIVITY)
TALK TO CUSTOMERS!! ONE! PICK ONE! THEN CREATE SOMETHING FOR THAT PERSON!
GET PASSIONATE HERE!
(Mock nervousness) – Uhh, uhh, but what if that doesn’t work?!! Then we’ll CHANGE and do something else! Calm down!
Explain
So to DO that…we often seek hacks and shortcuts for things.
Now…
(READ FULL QUOTE)
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel alittle guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to CONNECT EXPERIENCES they’ve had and synthesize new things.
If you consume all the same damn things all the time…and worse think that these are the SECRETS to your industry….then guess what pops out the other end? It’s PREDICTABLE
But if you stay well-rounded, step outside your comfort zone, experience other things, and go WAY deep into some of those things…I have NO Idea what you’ll create, but it’ll definitely be different and memorable!
I want to close on one thing…
No, not that.
FAVORITE MOVIE
“EVERYONE CAN COOK”
….Yeah. But do you want to eat it?
WANT: Live in world where MORE of us are wildly creative, not fewer.
DON’T WANT creativity to be the right of the few. It ISNT the right of the few.
But if audeicnes are gonna want to CONSUME what we put out there, we all have to spend more time and care to what we’re physically cooking. Not just the shortcuts to make more of it. Not just ways to trick people into taking a bite. But genuine care for craft. Genuine care that they WANT to eat it, enjoy it, remember it, and tell others to eat it too.
The 4 things I’ve learned from prolific creators are POWERFUL. But above all else…
So…what’s the opposite of OR?
What’s the opposite of OR?
One more time, what’s the opposite of OR?????
We need to realize this choice is NO choice at all. The only real choice is what you’re gonna do about it.