You could say I stumbled into my marketing career.

My path looked something like this:

• I got a degree in magazine journalism and briefly worked in that field. Less than a year later, the magazine was acquired by another company and my position was eliminated.
• I landed in the editorial department of New York City tourism. Still not technically marketing, but I was creating content to “ sell” New York City to tourists.
• I moved to Boston and got a job on the content team at a public relations agency. I spent a lot of time working with founders, developers and heads of engineering departments at B2B tech companies. …

… no matter what you’re selling

A couple of years ago, my husband and I started a kitchen renovation. For three months, a sign stood on our lawn with the company’s name and contact information. Earlier this year, we needed our roof replaced. The new company and new roof came with a new sign at the end of the driveway.

I didn’t think twice about those signs. After all, they were small and out of the way.

Then, this weekend we were out on a walk and passed a home on our street with beautiful new landscaping. We’d been thinking about doing some work on our backyard and the person we planned to work with was taking a while to get back to us with a quote. …

I majored in journalism and I work in content marketing. Let’s just say my curiosity can lead me down some interesting rabbit holes.

Also relevant: my colleagues and I in the marketing department are used to receiving email pitches for everything from sales enablement platforms to translation services. And because we work in marketing, a few things are true:

1. The average ones get forgotten (and ultimately deleted)
2. The really bad ones get deleted a little quicker
3. The good ones might get a response if the product is especially relevant
4. The great ones typically get replied to or shared with the team as an awesome example of email marketing — even if the product isn’t the best fit at the…

You brainstormed and strategized and researched. You outlined and wrote and edited. You added the perfect images. You published your work and…

Now what? Cross it off your to-do list and move on to the next thing?

What if I challenged you to create something new every day for a month — without creating anything 100% from scratch? What about two months?

Sixty days of no brand-new content. Maybe you think I’m crazy. But you know what also sounds crazy? Pouring all your time and brainpower into an amazing article, eBook, or video and moving on to the next thing. …

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am not a recruiter and I’m not a certified resume writer. What I am is someone who approaches job applications as a creative challenge. When I’ve applied to jobs in the past, I’ve always thought:

• How can I stand out?
• How can I make it clear I really, really want this job?
• How can I go beyond what everyone else is doing?
• How can I do these things in the most efficient way possible?

I’m also a content strategist by trade, which comes in handy here. …

You’re probably thinking, “of course I’m a person!”

And yet, there are countless ways we seem to remove humans from the equation when we’re working furiously toward answering business questions and solving problems.

This topic came up earlier this year in a conversation with my husband and got stuck in our minds for a while. He’s a computational biologist at a healthcare startup. I manage content and social media at a global tech company. Both of our brains contributed to this article.

Back when large gatherings were a thing, he returned from a healthcare conference with his head spinning from information overload (in the good, can’t-wait-to-let-it-all-sink-in sort of way). As we drank our morning coffee the following day, he told me a story from the conference about a woman who had Parkinson’s Disease. This woman had severe tremors. Yet, when she was asked what bothered her the most about her condition, her answer was “fatigue” — not the tremors. …

In my experience, using LinkedIn for B2B lead generation can be an extremely effective marketing strategy. It can also be an extremely expensive strategy and a waste of budget if you don’t put in the up-front work.

When I started running LinkedIn ads for my company two years ago, this is what I was working with:

1. A company in a very niche industry (digital color management)
2. One of four core industries to target, depending on the campaign. And several other secondary industries
3. More than a dozen industrial products
4. The task of going after leads with job titles that aren’t common enough to appear in LinkedIn’s targeting…

As a writer and social media strategist, I like to think my clickbait meter is pretty accurate. I even had a manager once who changed every single blog headline I wrote to something that was undeniably clickbait. It drove me nuts and made me embarrassed to share my work.

But lately, I’ve been seeing more and more articles and long-form social media posts (looking at you LinkedIn) that exist in a world that’s not exactly clickbait, but not exactly NOT clickbait, either.

They aren’t tempting you with phrases like “you’ll never believe what happened next” and then rewarding your click with something completely underwhelming. It feels like readers have at least partially wised up to this traditional form of clickbait and forced a transition to clickbait 2.0. …