Fucking Good Content Read online

  "If you've never created anything, but spend time criticising the work of others, you're a prick."

  Mother Teresa, 2014

  Your content’s probably shit.

  Don’t panic. You’re not alone.

  Most people, and companies for that matter, produce content that’s about as effective as a crepe paper condom.

  Don’t believe me?

  Take a look at the social accounts of brands. At company blogs.

  At promoted content that appears on your feeds.

  I guarantee the majority of the stuff you look at will have very little engagement, and from the engagement the content did get, very little of it comes from that company’s ideal customer.

  Why?

  Because it’s probably one of two things (or often both).

  It’s either more boring than bird watching with Bill Oddy, or it’s trying to sell something. And nobody wants to be sold to.

  So how do you make sure your content stands out? How do you use your social accounts, blogs and eBooks to drive new customers?

  Well, I’m not going to tell you on the first page, am I?

  Dan Kelsall

  Fucking Good Contents 1. Fuck Fear

  Why fear is holding you back from creating good content 2. Fuck Impatience

  Why creating effective content takes time, and why you should stop moaning

  3. Fuck Marketing

  A bit about why marketing is on its arse 4. Fuck Strategy

  Why 50-page content strategies are a bag of shit 5. Fuck Campaigns

  The only way to build decent campaigns 6. Fuck Money

  Why you shouldn't put money behind shit content 7. Fuck the Dark Side

  The shady world of dark social and what it means for content marketers

  8. Fuck Viral

  Why going viral isn't necessarily a good thing 9. Fuck Social Media

  Why social media is a pain in the arse for marketers

  10. Fuck Brand Awareness Why brand awareness should never be the focus of any marketing campaign

  11. Fuck Collaboration

  Why collaborating with others may be bad for you 12. Fuck Leads

  Why your content might not bring in any leads 13. Fuck Selling

  The reasons you should never, ever sell 14. Fuck Brand Consistency

  Why brand consistency is dead and personality is everything

  15. Fuck Scheduling Tools Why you shouldn't bother with scheduling tools 16. Fuck Opinions

  Why your opinions mean nothing

  17. Fuck Grammar

  Why good writers aren't necessarily good writers 18. Fuck What I Just Said

  Ignore everything I've just said

  19. Fucking Good Content

  Becoming a fucking good content creator 20. A Fucking Good Voice

  Why the right tone of voice can change everything 21. A Fucking Good Hook

  The reason a hook is crucial for every piece of good content 22. Fucking Good Content Rules

  The rules to follow when creating good content 23. Fuck Sunshine and Rainbows

  Why negativity is the new positivity 24. Fuck This, I'm Outta Here

  In conclusion...

  1. FUCK FEAR

  The biggest hurdle for most content producers is fear.

  Fear of offending customers.

  Fear of bad publicity.

  Fear of looking stupid.

  But it’s all bullshit. The fact is, the more unknown your brand, the harder it is to damage it. And you know what? Most of those

  ‘customers’ that you’re trying so hard not to offend, probably wouldn’t buy from you anyway.

  But that’s not the worst part about producing vanilla shite. The worst part is, for every blog, meme, video, podcast or social media post that you produce that garners no engagement or brings in no new business, you lose money. The time you spent producing that content cost your company.

  Most content that people produce is a loss making exercise.

  Period.

  For any content marketing strategy to work, you have to take risks.

  You have to try things that your competitors won’t. You have to change your tone of voice to something that your industry has never before seen. You have to produce content that adds value to those you want to buy your product.

  Make them laugh. Make them cry. Give them knowledge.

  But DON’T. FUCKING. SELL.

  1

  OK, so it’s easy for me to sit here and tell you to take a risk, when I regularly post polarising, mildly (really) offensive content with hashtags like #chocolatedildo, and #walrussex.

  I appreciate that if you work for a brand, or you produce content for a client, you can’t really get away with the stuff I do. It probably won’t go down well if you run an accountancy firm’s social media account and you suddenly start tweeting “Philip Hammond’s a dickhead.” And that’s fine. I’m not saying you should.

  The level of risk is different in every industry, but one of the things I absolutely guarantee, is that you can push boundaries much, much, much further than you think you can.

  It is pushing those boundaries that will make your content stand out. It is pushing those boundaries that’ll make your customers sit up and take note.

  And, unfortunately, you need to face up to the fact that, when you take a stand, when you say something different, when you stand out, you will get attract criticism. You will attract negativity.

  That’s part of having a voice.

  But if you choose not to have a voice, and you choose to remain dry and corporate, then your audience will become indifferent to your content. They won’t care either way.

  And that, my little content creators, is fucking poo.

  For a marketer, there is nothing worse than indifference.

  NOTHING.

  2

  #walrussex

  When people are indifferent to what you're saying, they'll ignore you. And your brand will remain the same as it always has.

  Unknown.

  Let's think about this book for a second. There are probably more 'fuck's in here than any other business or marketing book.

  Am I concerned that this will damage my reputation? Nope. I'm comfortable with who I am. I swear in the pub with my mates, I swear in the boardroom. When you do business with me, you get me. Not a professional version of me. Not a diluted version of me. You get the same guy everyone else gets.

  You could call it authenticity.

  But I hate that word. It lost its meaning because so many people use it without fully understanding what it actually means to be authentic.

  Because if you have a 'professional you' and a 'personal you'

  and maybe a 'you' that only your mates see, then what's real?

  Which one of those personalities is authentic?

  If you have a brand, how can you possibly be authentic when the people representing you are false, 'professional' versions of themselves?

  And that, for many people in the business world, is the ultimate risk.

  Being yourself is hard. What if you get rejected? What if people don't like you?

  Well, there's a little phrase that can help you get over that fear, and that, my chums is, "Fuck 'em."

  3

  2. FUCK IMPATIENCE

  The reason people aren’t able to create brilliant content is generally due to a massive lack of patience.

  They expect results yesterday. Not in a week. Not in a month.

  And if it takes a year, well, fuck that! Am I right?

  “I’m not investing in something that takes a year to perfect! I wanna see ROI now.”

  Well, unfortunately sista, marketing ain’t an exact science.

  It’s a process. Sometimes you’ll find something
that works right away. Other times you’ll be smashing your head against the proverbial brick wall (or literally, if you’re a bit mental) trying to come up with your next piece of content.

  Even for us naturally creative types, producing stand out content all the time is difficult. Writer’s block, or ‘creative’s block’ to be more general, is a pain in the arse.

  And, more often than not (and this applies to marketing in general), it is impossible to know for absolute fucking certainty that something – whether that be a post, an article, a video or a whole campaign – will do well.

  Analytics will only ever tell you so much.

  It doesn’t matter how good you think a piece of content is. How well similar pieces have done in the past. How big your following is.

  You will NEVER be able to say with complete confidence that that particular piece will set the world alight.

  4

  With all marketing, there will always be ups and downs. Peaks and troughs. Hits and misses.

  But the bigger your audience gets, the more trust you build, the bigger the hits get and, more importantly, the bigger the misses get. And by bigger I mean, if a hit was 50 comments on an article and a miss was 5 comments, as you grow your audience a hit might be 500 comments, and a miss 50 comments. The misses are now where the original hits were, and probably drive the same results, more often than not.

  And if that doesn’t make sense, I don’t give a shit, because I’m lazy and can't be bothered explaining it again.

  But, back to the original point.

  If you’re not patient with your content, you’ll fail. You’ll fail to get engagement. You’ll fail to grow an audience. And you’ll fail to bring in anything tangible from your content marketing.

  Getting good at content is about consistently creating, testing, analysing, creating, testing, analysing and so on and so on and so on.

  It never stops. And if you’re not prepared for that, you might as well give up now.

  But don’t give up, because I absolutely promise you (and this is something I can say with absolute certainty because I’ve taught some absolute numpties to do it) that content marketing is not rocket science.

  Anyone can build an audience. Anyone can get results.

  5

  Might be tomorrow. Might be next month. Might be in ten years.

  And that’s the truth a lot of marketers won’t tell you.

  Because if they tell you it might take ten years to perfect, you’re not going to pay them diddly-dick, are you?

  I’ll leave this chapter on a final point.

  I hate the term ‘mentor’, but an old bloke who was pretty successful in his field once told me that the difference between entrepreneurs and ‘wantrepreneurs’ (people who pretend to be entrepreneurs) is that entrepreneurs know in the back of their mind that, no matter what, they will probably never be

  ‘successful’. Given the amount of businesses that fail, they’ll probably never ‘make it’. But the difference between them and

  ‘wantrepreneurs’ is that they’ll keep going anyway. When their business fails, they’ll still get up the next morning and start all over again. And despite knowing that there’s a high chance that they’ll be trying and failing until the day they die without ever building anything particularly game changing, they’ll still keep at it. They’ll keep tweaking, analysing, and trying to better themselves whilst being perfectly comfortable with the fact that success may never come.

  Well, it’s the same with good content creators.

  You may never hit on that career-making campaign. But you keep rolling out of bed and doing it all over again anyway.

  Sure, being creative whilst trying to get results is frustrating.

  Sure, it can be difficult to watch one of your campaigns bomb.

  Sure, seeing a load of people slag off an article that you’ve worked on for weeks is painful.

  6

  Now I'm not saying that you'll never produce good content, but you need to learn to fall in the love with how fucking tough it is, because it’ll never get any easier.

  And if not, just go down the route other creatives took to cope with the stresses of producing good material and take drugs or chop off an ear or summat.

  7

  #creativestressrelief

  3. FUCK MARKETING

  There are a multitude of issues with marketing. And by multitude I mean a shit-ton. And by that I mean a bottomless shitty pit of shit problems, covered in shit.

  *Deep breath*

  One of those problems stems from the fact that marketing (a bit like recruitment) has such a low barrier to entry. People can literally post on social media once and go, "Right, I'm in marketing now."

  Well, you'll never fix that problem, because, unless you're going to start making marketing PHDs a requirement prior to working in marketing, you can't really stop any Tom, Dick or Harry doing it, can you? And I'm not saying there should be a requirement for marketing PHDs because, in my experience, a lot of the time those that have studied marketing via our wonderful education system are normally no better than those with natural talent that haven't. In fact, sometimes those educated folks are worse.

  Of course I would say that, because I hold absolutely no quals in marketing. And if that's just stopped you reading this book, that's cool with me. Go and donate it to a charity shop where the word

  'fucking' on the front cover will shock the shit out of old ladies whilst they're combing the book shelves for cheap, used, erotic novels.

  Anyhoo, the real problem in marketing comes from the fact that most companies don't have a fucking clue what they're doing.

  And, as a by-product of that, they're contributing to the waves and waves of shit content that permeate our online world. The following will sound very familiar to a lot of you and, if it doesn't, there's a good chance you're lying to yourself, you massive fibber.

  8

  The 'We Don't Have a Fucking Clue What We're Doing'

  Marketing Process:

  Hire a marketing person who has a

  marketing degree that was taught by

  old blokes that haven’t marketed

  anything since designing WWII

  propaganda posters.

  Spend weeks writing a marketing

  strategy that you don’t stick to

  because it was a pile of shit to

  begin with.

  Set up accounts on every single

  fucking social channel. “Are you

  sure we need Instagram to market

  our incontinence pads, Barry?”

  Lose a load of money on PPC,

  then litter your website and blogs

  with so many keywords that it

  doesn’t even sound like English

  anymore, because a ‘consultant’

  told you it’s all about the SEO.

  Get absolutely no return on

  investment because you don’t

  have fucking clue what you’re

  doing, but keep doing it anyway in

  the hope that, one day, shit “5

  ways to...” blogs will become the

  biggest trend since cat memes.

  9

  Sound familiar? Well, I thought I’d put together a really shit diagram to illustrate what I believe the purpose of a marketing function is. Particularly in B2B land.

  And, in contrast, this, lads and ladettes, is what marketing actually looks like in most establishments. See the problem?

  10

  The issue is, marketing is always supposed to generate a return on investment. It’s supposed to encourage people to buy from you. But, somewhere along the line, the marketing world became fluffy and began to focus on stuff like ‘brand awareness’

  or ‘reach’ without actually measuring what that meant for the bottom line. Meanwhile, sales people, who should be focussing on the thing they’re good at, closing deals, are spending 80% of their time generating their own leads, whilst marketing smoke crack, r
oll the bottoms of their chinos up, sip herbal tea and come up with gifs and shit listicles.

  What a lot of places need to get back to is marketing that actually brings customers to the table. Imagine what completely inbound would feel like. That’s the ideal scenario, right?

  Of course, it’s unlikely that a business’ sales function will ever be entirely inbound. Outbound sales will always have a place in my view. But I honestly believe every business can generate a decent percentage of inbound leads if they get their message right. (Anything past that point relies on your sales team and your product, so don't use this fucking book to beat your marketing peeps around the head if they drive leads that aren't converting because your sales team are pants or you've got a shit product - good marketers aren't miracle workers.) You see, your marketing team are being paid to bring something to the table. I've worked freelance for years, and have clients from Australia to Holland, and I cannot tell you how many marketing teams I come across that are happy to push out shite, cover their ears, sing "La la la" and ignore the fact that what they're producing is pointless. As far as I'm concerned, they have a responsibility to get results, and contribute to the bottom line, just like everyone else. But first, they need to get your brand's voice right. They need to find a message that works.