Three content marketing pillars. 

This is how I do each: 

1/ Ideas: I collect elements. 

For example, on VeryGoodCopy I publish micro-articles, which usually consist of two elements: the lesson and the story. 

The lesson is almost always about a copywriting, marketing, or creativity principle I find valuable (and think others will, too). The story is usually a personal experience — or it can be an anecdote I saw on TV, or read in a book, or heard from a friend — and I use it to frame the lesson (so it’s more engaging and memorable).

Very rarely do both of these elements fall in my lap at once. I almost always have to put them together at different times — weeks or months or even years apart — and therein lies my point: 

Ideas rarely come to you fully formed. So break your format into distinct elements, which you can easily identify, record, and eventually, combine. 

2/ Storytelling: I write vignettes. 

Vignettes capture a moment, a scene:

In college, a professor told me vignettes are like photographs — snapshots — but in writing. “Take a picture,” he said, “and then describe it using figurative language, sensory language. Make us feel the tone of the picture, the mood.”

“The mood?” I said. 

“Yes.”

A vignette doesn’t need to have a structure, or a plot. It doesn’t need a beginning, middle, and end, or a conflict and resolution. It only needs to convey an emotion. So as a copywriter, writing vignettes is great practice: it teaches you how to zoom in on a moment, how to tighten that moment, or expand it. 

A vignette is compelling on its face because it’s emotional. But it’s also practical, lending itself to the nature of social media: “quick, make me feel something.”

3/ Growth: I create loops. 

A “growth loop” is when growth is built into the process of using a product. 

In other words, leveraging your current users to create new users. I’ve done this by asking my VGC newsletter subscribers to amplify my reach on LinkedIn: 

Step 1: I publish a micro-article on VeryGoodCopy dot com.

Step 2: I re-publish a version of that piece in a LinkedIn post.

Step 3: I send the original out in my newsletter with a CTA asking for engagement on the post (e.g., “Please support VGC with a quick 👍 and comment on LinkedIn”).

When my newsletter audience engages with the post on LinkedIn, their connections are notified, creating more engagement, more traffic to VGC, and more subscribers (adding to the audience I’m able to leverage in future posts). 

It’s a virtuous circle — and if you’ve ever been a part of it, I don’t take it for granted. Thank you so much.