Why personal blogs (easily) outperform company blogs

Why personal blogs (easily) outperform company blogs

Hey Everyone,

Hope you're having a great week. Here are a few things I've been reading, writing and pondering lately. Enjoy!


Sponsored by Clearbit

Part 2/5: From IC to Leader

My friends at Clearbit are in the process of releasing another great ebook. In each of the next few issues, I'll feature a snippet from one of the chapters. This one is from OneLogin CMO Dayna Rothman.

Her journey from sales to content creator to CMO is inspiring. She's taken an idea I believe strongly in—that content can be the foundation of a great career—and proved it out.

"So I was writing about literally everything you can think of that pertained to marketing — demand gen, marketing operations, sales development teams, events — and every time I had to write content about this or that function I would embed myself into that world."

Read his chapter here and check out the ebook here.


1. How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written

This line sums up why this post is worth reading:

I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation.

Why do companies prevent their employees from writing useful, interesting, opinionated content? Dan Luu has some thoughts and even examples of companies that enable engineering teams to write great content.

h/t to Geoffrey Keating for putting this on my radar.

2. Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding

Whether you work in DTC or not (I don't), this is a great read. There's so much to learn about relying too heavily on paid acquisition, venture capital and the differences between strong businesses and weak ones.

The investors bankrolling these companies are discovering one thing in common — that most of their money is going to expensive and ever-rising customer acquisition costs (CAC) via Google, Facebook, and Instagram. As one DTC investor has put it starkly before: “CAC is the new rent.”

3. Corona Panic (Part II)

I know, you've had more than enough Coronavirus news this week. I found this piece to be calming. Hope everyone is safe and healthy.

Uncertainty shrinks your field of vision at the worst time. When the world changes in a 24-hour period it becomes hard to think more than 24 hours ahead. The year ahead is impossible to envision when assumptions you had at breakfastime were destroyed by dinnertime. The irony is that long-term thinking is most powerful when everything is falling apart. The majority of long-term results are determined by decisions made during a minority of times, and right now is one of those times.

4. YouTube Video of the Week

Stressed? Music can help. Start here.

Have a great weekend!

Jimmy

PS - Want to brush up on your content marketing skillz? Check out my course 5 Days to Better Content Marketing. Join 400+ people that have taken and enjoyed it.

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