#and yet when we send them our assets for review they keep kicking them back with edits stating apparent rules that like. THEIR PREVIOUS

[ectonurites]

does anyone have that ‘sometimes things that are expensive… are worse’ meme on hand. because the branding company we’re working with is pissing me off

[legendarybearstrawberry-blog]

HP ELITE DRAGONFLY (2020)

A year ago's HP Elite Dragonfly was maybe the most pleasant business PC we've at any point tried. The current year's Elite Dragonfly is practically indistinguishable from that machine, which is fine in light of the fact that, once more, the HP Elite Dragonfly was remarkable in pretty much every manner.

This new arrangement to a great extent feels and looks equivalent to a year ago's model; it's as yet one of the sleekest, chicest business workstations available, and it has the most attractive plan of any convertible that HP right now sells.

HP has changed four things. To begin with, the Dragonfly is currently 5G-empowered, however that component isn't coming until mid-2020. Second, it has a coordinated Tile tracker, which is coming to models in mid-May. Third, it has another protection situated screen that incorporates HP's most recent Sure View Reflect innovation. Fourth, its mechanical parts are presently for the most part worked from reused materials.

The new Dragonfly is slender, light, delightful, and pretty much impeccable. You can get the base arrangement for around $1,500, yet the model we're taking a gander at costs $2,179, which is a serious sticker price. (This particular model doesn't appear to be accessible on HP's site yet, yet arrangements with comparative specs, including Tile, an i7, vPro, and the Sure View Reflect screen are in the $2,100 to $2,700 territory, contingent upon RAM, stockpiling, and different highlights.) The new highlights work, however they're extravagances, not necessities, for by far most of individuals. In case you're a C-Suite power client who's consistently in a hurry, they may be a commendable spending cost for you. In any case, you'll likely be okay with a less expensive EliteBook except if cash is actually no item for you or your organization.

HP has been staging in reused materials into the Elite Dragonfly ridiculous year. It's the first ultrabook to fuse sea bound plastics (that is, plastic litter gathered in sea territories, which would somehow have wound up in the sea). The organization said a year ago's model would consolidate 50% PCR plastics (and 5 percent sea bound plastics) in its speaker box and 35 percent PCR plastics in its bezels.

The organization's objectives, from that point forward, have gotten more yearning. It reported at CES 2020 that more than 80% of the Dragonfly's mechanical parts and 90 percent of the magnesium suspension are currently made of reused materials. This activity isn't explicit to Dragonfly; HP says that other new HP Elite and HP Pro PCs will fuse the new composite segments.

The new material hasn't ruined the undercarriage in any capacity. I can't recollect the last time I held a PC this light that felt this durable. (HP didn't react to different requests about the specific weight and measurements of this unit, however it's around 2.5 pounds.)

There's no flex in the console and practically none in the showcase. The suspension additionally feels extremely pleasant to the touch; the magnesium is smooth, and the adjusted edges and corners mean you never get jabbed. Fingerprints are frequently a concern on dull items, however the wrist rests and console remained sans print following a few days of utilization. The touchpad and top amassed a few, however I could just see them under splendid light.

HP has likewise traded out the plastic covers on the console (the material is presently 50% sourced from reused DVDs) and the screen's bezels (presently 35% reused plastic). The keycaps are a piece plasticy yet at the same time feel extraordinary, and the bezels don't appear to be any unique from those on the old model.

The new Dragonfly closely resembles an exceptionally decent PC. Also, hello, presently it's more practical.

The second enormous change is the new screen, which utilizes HP's Sure View Reflect to expand client security. Reflect is the fourth era of SureView, which the organization dispatched with its EliteBook 1050 G3 in 2016. You can in any case get the Dragonfly arranged with more seasoned boards, including the low-power 1W presentation we tried a year ago, a showcase with SureView Gen3, and a HDR 400 showcase with 3840 x 2160 goal. This is only an extra choice.

TheThe Dragonfly has two screen modes, which you can helpfully flip between by squeezing F2. There's Sharing Mode, which conveys up to 773 nits of brilliance and wide review points, and Privacy Mode, which colors the screen with the end goal that individuals passing by can't sneak around.

With Privacy Mode on at 50% splendor, I was unable to see a thing on the screen while sitting opposite to it. I started to make out certain substance at the edge of the showcase at a 45-degree point, yet I didn't get a decent look until I was nearly dealing with it directly. In case you're utilizing Privacy Mode in broad daylight, dubious figures will experience difficulty spying except if they're discernibly peering near. Somebody sitting close to you on a transport or train may make out bits, however they will not draw near to the full picture.

Note, however, that the screen gets dimmer in Privacy Mode. It additionally kicks back significantly more glare, particularly underneath most extreme brilliance. Indeed, even with the screen at max, the glare was generous enough that the gadget wasn't usable outside — and even inside, I wouldn't have needed to utilize it under 50% brilliance. It's so natural to flip back to Sharing Mode, however, that I'm not very animated about that compromise.

Fingerprints do stay on this board (it's a touchscreen) and were difficult when I attempted to clear them off. It was somewhat irritating, however such force clients considering this setup may like to utilize HP's Active Pen, which ships with this unit.

With regards to extravagant screen includes, the inquiry is consistently whether they'll affect battery life. To my alleviation, not exclusively is the new Dragonfly's battery life amazing, however it's quite better than that of the late-2019 model. I took the ultrabook (on the default Better Battery power profile and 50 percent brilliance) through my typical workday of shuffling eight to 12 Chrome tabs, running Slack, web based Spotify and YouTube, and a periodic Zoom call, parting time about similarly between Sharing Mode and Privacy mode. I got 11 hours and 38 minutes, which is the best battery life result I've at any point gotten from a PC. In the event that you need an item that can dependably chip away at the go, you'll experience difficulty discovering better compared to the Dragonfly.

The Dragonfly's really pivotal (yet less business-arranged) new component is the Tile mix. Tile, for those new, makes little Bluetooth-empowered gadgets that you can join to your keys, tote, wallet, or different assets. On the off chance that you lose the Tile-associated object, you can find it utilizing the Tile application on your telephone. This is the main PC with a Tile tracker worked in, which can help you discover the Dragonfly if it's lost or taken.

What's shrewd about the Tile is that it's fueled by its own equipment separate from that of the Dragonfly. That implies it can sound an alert through its own coordinated speaker in any event, when the PC is off. The tracker draws a modest quantity of force from the PC, however, HP didn't react to our requests about the points of interest of the relationship. In the event that the Dragonfly is off when you lose it, HP says the Tile will continue to work for 20 days. On the off chance that the PC's in hibernation, you actually have 2.5 days.

Setting up the Tile is an extremely straightforward interaction. I needed to actuate the gadget through the Tile Microsoft application (it comes preloaded onto the Dragonfly) and make a record with the help. (The Tile plays a great jingle while you're setting it up.) Once I downloaded the Tile application on my telephone and signed in, I was set.

At the point when you open the Tile versatile application, you'll see a rundown of any Tile items you've associated, including the Dragonfly. In the event that you select the PC and press "Discover," its tracker will sound a boisterous caution. (iPhone clients can likewise do this with a Siri alternate way.) You can likewise see its keep going known area on a guide. In the event that you lose the journal outside of Bluetooth range, you can assign it as "lost" and initiate Tile's Community Find highlight, which will send you a caution with its area at whatever point another Tile passes inside its Bluetooth range. On the off chance that you register for Tile Premium, you can get more highlights, including a more extended 30-day area history, and Smart Alerts which advise you in the event that you've gone out without your PC (or another gadget joined to a Tile).

At the point when I concealed the Dragonfly in a heap of clothing in a wardrobe, I could hear the tracker's alert quite well when I was in a similar room, and it was perceptible (however I needed to listen hard) from the following room over. Outside, it was perceptible until around 60 feet away. The Tile would in general remain associated with my telephone until I was around 140 feet away. Those are similar outcomes to those you can anticipate from the independent Tile Pro tracker.

A coordinated Tile tracker is not really a fundamental component for the normal business client. Be that as it may, on the off chance that you travel a ton and you need the innovation, it works.

We can speedrun through the remainder of the standard PC stuff since it's equivalent to the Dragonfly Elite that we investigated in late 2019. The console is a flat-out homer, with superb travel and almost no clamor. The glass trackpad is comparably great, with a smooth surface and a peaceful snap. The port determination is amazing for a particularly lightweight 2-in-1, including two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, an HDMI port, and a 3.5mm sound jack on the right, just as a USB-A port, a Kensington lock port, and opening for a SIM card on the left. Windows Hello fills in as it ought to, and the webcam has a helpful protection shade. The four-speaker exhibit conveys probably the best encompass sound I've at any point heard from a Windows PC. The PC stays cool significantly under substantial burdens, and the fans aren't noisy in any way.

The new Dragonfly additionally has a similar eighth Gen vPro-empowered Core i7-8665U processor as a year ago's, model. (tenth Gen Comet Lake vPro isn't out yet; we should see that in the not-so-distant future.) It's a bit of a disappointment not to see tenth Gen contributes a particularly expensive machine — the tantamount Comet Lake tenth Gen i7 has six centers, so you're missing out on multithreaded execution ability, which is valuable for assignments like incorporating code and doing elaborate things with Excel. eighth Gen chips are additionally in a difficult situation contrasted with Ice Lake chips, which will improve inventive work, on account of Intel's new Iris Plus Graphics. The 8665U actually took care of my ordinary burden (which for the most part incorporates Chrome tabs and Slack) fine and dandy, yet in the event that your workday incorporates additional requesting assignments, you might be in an ideal situation hanging tight for a Dragonfly model with tenth Gen CPUs.

Other downsides of the past model continue. The force button holds its inconvenient situation on the left side; I inadvertently squeezed two or multiple times when I was hefting the PC around. The screen actually has the 16:9 viewpoint proportion, which is confined for profitability use; I regularly needed to zoom out to 80 or 70 percent to serenely utilize tabs next to each other. A PC focusing on business power clients definitely should be 16:10 or, shockingly better, 3:2.

These are little blemishes contrasted with the things the Dragonfly does extraordinarily well, which is fundamental to all the other things. In case you're on the lookout for a vPro-empowered framework with both an underlying Tile GPS beacon and an incorporated security screen, this is the solitary PC available with that mix of highlights. In the event that you and your organization are super-rich, sure, spend lavishly away.

Be that as it may, this Dragonfly is an extravagance item. It's the Galaxy S20 Ultra or the iPhone 11 Pro Max of business workstations; it's amazing, yet a great many people needn't bother with it. In the event that you can abandon the extravagant highlights, a less expensive arrangement will turn out great. Furthermore, in the event that you needn't bother with vPro and will go for a ThinkPad all things being equal, you can get an advanced processor.

[proufkb-blog]

Ultra Fast Keto Boost

https://ultrafastketoboost.us/

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[anthemnz]

SMEs count on big businesses to do the right thing

Carolyn Kerr urges business community to support one other.

We Kiwis pride ourselves on our community spirit and the way we look out for one another. If Covid-19 has taught us one thing, it is the power and conviction of our nation’s united spirit as we huddle together in our ‘bubble of five million’. We must continue to band together to keep our small business community alive and kicking.

A recent McKinsey report in the US tells us that the challenge of recovery, “is especially acute for small businesses, which account for a disproportionate share of the vulnerable jobs”. The ‘support local’ movement that has surged throughout New Zealand is imperative to ensure the survival of small businesses. But the government and consumers can only do so much. To protect our SME community, the corporate sector and larger organisations need to think about the role they can play in supporting small businesses. I encourage all large entities to act now to protect our future and earn your ‘social licence’ - or society’s acceptance of your business to operate here, earned through your actions or behaviour.

Alert level 2 represents two sides of the Covid coin. On one side we have the world-leading and irrefutable success of our health response, evident in the seismic drop in case numbers in a matter of weeks. On the flipside, there is a rise in the cases of businesses suffering and contemplating the economic Everest we now must climb, to use one of our prime minister’s recent analogies. And we are only at base camp.

We don’t yet know how long or hard the climb in front of us will be, or how many businesses will in fact make it to the top and hopefully ‘knock the bastard off’. Let’s not leave that to chance.

Small businesses face the steepest climb of them all. As the backbone of New Zealand’s economy, small businesses contribute nearly 30% of New Zealand’s GDP and employ 600,000 people.

As a small business owner, I also come from a long line of small business entrepreneurs. I know we’ll get through this, like I experienced as a girl when my family business, built with a whole lot of blood, sweat, tears and love, only just managed to get through the crippling high interest rates associated with the recession of the late ’80s. And then there was the GFC, which we also got through as a country, but this time I was working for a multi-national business that provided a different but valuable perspective.

So, I personally understand the immense sense of responsibility (and personal pride) that employing a team brings with it. On top of this are the other pressures that many people across the country are feeling with the economic uncertainty Covid-19 has brought with it, which we’re yet to feel the full force of. Enter June and the end of the wage subsidy.

Importance of trusted reputation

I’m also looking at this issue through another field of view, that is, as a communications specialist and adviser to a range of businesses of varying sizes. I’m passionate about helping organisations achieve the most important attribute in business, in my opinion – a trusted reputation. Without it you cannot earn a social licence to operate.

These two reasons are why I’m lending my time and insights to Manaaki, the business support platform set up to provide free advice to small businesses wrestling with the impacts of Covid-19.

Mannaki co-founder Andy Hamilton

As Andy Hamilton, one of the founders of Manaaki, explains: “There’s a powerful Māori concept called manaaki. It means putting the needs of others before your own and supporting them with the utmost care and respect. In simpler terms, it means to give. And that’s what we all must do.

“We must all give – every one of us.”

He poses the questions to business: “Are you giving? Are you trading with social license in your business? If not, you will start to see your ability to trade being materially impacted. You have the choice to change now.”

We must all step up and give a bit more to do our bit. We can always do a bit more. If not financially, give your time, advice, ‘in-kind’ marketing, or endorsement of a service, or using your assets and audiences to provide a leg up, not just a handout. Every bit counts.

But what exactly do SMEs need help with? Manaaki has been inundated with visitors since launching just over a month ago. It has more than 36,000 users, 185 advisers signed up across a wide range of sectors and skills, more than 400 questions asked by small businesses, and nearly 1500 replies given.

How and where to go next?

SMEs initially went to Manaaki for help to survive in the first few weeks, moving to a position of stabilisation and now they’re starting to ask about reviving their businesses in terms of  how and where to go next: how to get going, how to grow, how to manage resources. The main issues businesses have been asking for help with, in order of volume of questions, are:

accessing government support;

navigating financial scenarios;

negotiating rent reductions with landlords;

how to ask the bank for more financial support;

managing staff during this time and other HR issues;

strategies to rebuild and enhance their business; and

digital enablement and transformation.

It is heartening to be part of this community doing what it can to help, but it’s also sobering to see some of the questions. I’m answering questions about brand, marketing, and start-up issues, including from people desperate for help to stay afloat, be it asking how to create an online customer channel to how to start a business as they’re now unemployed and the job market isn’t looking too flash.

This one hit home for me [unedited]: “I need urgent help please can I have a website show me how to make my own campaigns for content and email marketing and help with brand and get online e commerce we are nearly homeless with the Covid 19.”

Importantly, small businesses need time. Time to call the bank, the landlord, the telco. Time to fill out stacks of paperwork to be granted the government guaranteed loan. Time to plan their next move. Time to protect their staff.

All in this together

Time and resources are a luxury often more easily held by large organisations, and it’s time to consider how their platform, knowledge, contacts, audiences and expertise can be used to support small businesses. SMEs are the heartbeat of New Zealand’s economy and now, more than ever, we need big business to do good. Partnership and support from the business community is key. After all, we’re all in this together.

There are some fantastic examples of larger organisations doing their part to support small businesses and communities. ACC has delayed sending out $900 million worth of invoices for ACC levies to firms and sole traders until October, meaning that about 500,000 businesses across New Zealand will have a little more relief during this time. MediaWorks and Sky have released multi-million-dollar funds to provide free advertising to small businesses and community organisations through their channels and reach. This is an extremely generous initiative that does the right thing by Kiwis, considering the media sector’s advertising revenue is estimated to drop between 50% and 75% as a result of Covid-19.

Major banks have waived fees for businesses that offer contactless debit transactions and increased the contactless limit from $80 to $200 to ensure merchants can continue safely trading and prevent the spread of the virus.

Fullers ferry Te Kotuku. Photo: Logan Clarke

And Auckland ferry provider Fullers360 has been running essential transport services throughout alert levels 4 and 3. Despite the dramatic drop in commuters and visitors using transport caused by the lockdown, this private business chose to provide essential workers, its primary customers, free trips to get back and forth to work.

All businesses, no matter their size, will be feeling stretched right now, but I’d encourage corporates, and all businesses in fact, in New Zealand to think about how they might be able to help a little or a lot. Start with communication. Ask your suppliers and partners how their business is faring, and what you could do to help them continue trading should they need it. It could be something as simple as paying them within 10 days not 45, or providing them some time with your accountant, lawyer, communications or HR advisor, or endorsing their business through your marketing channels or your networks.

Ultimately, it makes sound business sense to look out for others. You’re not just supporting other businesses, you’re helping their staff, their suppliers, whānau, community. And, ultimately, how you step up now will influence the future generation of business owners, quite apart from cementing your reputation as a business that went the extra mile and earned people’s trust. Let’s aim to be the generation that the children of the small businesses of today will look back on in a couple of decades with pride.

Article published in National Business Review 

[marvelmom]

The Contest - Chapter 5

As you and the rest of The Avengers test your willpower in an unusual challenge, your attempts to remain Master of your Domain are complicated when James “Bucky” Barnes makes you his mission. Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader Warnings: Chapter 5 continues with the slow, slow build, Lots of dirty talking, Smut to come, Fluff for now, Humour, Swearing, Flirting, Sweetness, Sexual tension, Teasing, Groping, Fingering, Language!, NSFW, Technology, Bucky Barnes

Word Count: 7,142 (I’m so sorry…putting myself on a time-out)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 6

Masterlist

A/N: Thanks so much for your patience everyone! The holidays really threw my schedule into chaos and this one took a lot longer than I anticipated. This chapter was a challenge - I struggled with the length and whether or not I should divide it into two chapters. In the end, I decided to keep it together so as to not disrupt the flow.

Thanks to @evansrogerskitten​ for the beta - I  love you babe! To everyone sending me messages, feedback and requests to be tagged, THANK YOU! You are AWESOME! Tumblr is being a bitch with the tags so I’ve done these manually - I hope I haven’t missed anyone! Please send me a note if I’ve left you off by mistake or if you would like to be tagged.

And always, to my twitter babes: thanks for the support, love and smut ;)

Chapter 5: The Asset

In the nights that followed, you and Bucky could be found sprawled across his bed watching movies, huddled under the covers talking for hours or just wrapped around each other’s bodies in quiet comfort.

Falling asleep in Bucky’s protective arms each night, you felt safe for the first time in years. But while his presence kept the nightmares at bay, the vividly erotic dreams that appeared in their place were just as torturous. Especially when Bucky had made it a habit to hold you close to his body as you both slept. You never would have guessed that the Winter Soldier liked to cuddle.

Each morning you’d wake with your body pressed tight against his bare chest, his metal arm circling your waist and a strong thigh draped across your legs. This morning was no exception.

As soon as you begin to stir, you feel his warm lips start to lazily pepper your neck with kisses and his morning arousal rubbing up against your backside.

“Mmmm, good morning soldier,” you purr as you lightly stroke the cool metal of his arm while backing into his growing bulge. “Someone’s up early.”

“Your fault doll,” he murmurs sleepily into your ear. “All that moaning in your sleep last night got me going.”

“Was I fucking you hard in your dreams again?”

“Hmph,” you scoff as you make a mental note to never tell Natasha anything ever again. “How do you even know I was dreaming about you?”

“Well,” he smirks as he runs his stubbled cheek along your jaw and whispers lowly, “you screaming ‘oh God Bucky right there, touch me right there’ sort of gave it away.”

You shiver as his mouth slowly nips down your neck, his hand sliding over your stomach.

“Now that you’re awake I wanna find that spot,” he teases. “Slip my fingers into your wet pussy and watch you come undone.”

A moan escapes your lips as his metal fingers begin to rub slow circles over your clothed mound.

“Wanna make you scream my name while you cum all over my fingers.”

“Such a dirty boy,” you whimper, squirming as you intercept his hand before it can dip under the hem of your sleep shorts.

You feel him smile against your neck as he lays his hand over yours. He presses your fingers down hard and begins to maneuver them over your covered clit.

“Why don’t you join me in the shower and I’ll show you just how dirty I can get.”

You grip his hand to still his movements and guide it away from your sensitive spot. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“Never,” he growls as his hand slowly travels up your body. You breathe in sharply as it grazes the underside of your breast. “You’re my mission.”

You swiftly roll over and turn to face him; giving him a warning look as you plant your hand on his chest to stop him from advancing.

“Sorry soldier, I’m not ready to comply just yet.”

Bucky laughs and reaches over to playfully smack your ass before rising from the bed. He stands up with his back to you and slides his shorts down his legs.

“Your loss sweetheart,” he smirks as he tosses them at your head and walks towards the bathroom with a confident strut.

As you pull the shorts away from your face and prepare to unleash a string of obscenities, your gaze lands on his firm, naked ass. Eyes widening, your words are swallowed by a low whimper.

Slamming your head back onto the bed, you grab Bucky’s pillow and cover your face to smother your loud scream of frustration.

The past few days had been sheer agony. It was one thing having to participate in the contest when you thought Bucky didn’t give a damn about you. But now knowing that your feelings for each other ran deep, made everything a lot more complicated.

It also didn’t help that you were both so stubbornly competitive and thought nothing of testing each other’s willpower on a constant basis – despite the fact that each new round of teasing drew you both closer to the brink of elimination. The sexual tension between the two of you was off the charts. What had started out as harmless flirting was threatening to ignite into intense passion with every word, look and touch.

Making matters worse was that the rest of the team had begun to notice the white hot sparks that flew between you and Bucky every time you were in the same room, and they began to use this to their advantage.

Suddenly, you found yourself paired with Bucky to review intel, carry out routine surveillance and even for kitchen duty. The two of you seemed to be ending up in the same place alone too often to be considered a coincidence.

Throw in the fact that the other two Avengers left in the contest had consolidated their matchmaking efforts and you knew it was time to tell Bucky that you both needed to cool it or risk being eliminated ahead of Steve and Nat.

As you get up from Bucky’s bed and begin to straighten the sheets, you take stock of the current situation. No surprise that you, Nat and Bucky were still holding strong – your common training and tactical experiences were firmly rooted in self-discipline. Steve however was the dark horse. You never thought he would have held out so long. Little beads of sweat begin to form on your brow as you move around the bed, mentally listing each of your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.

“Why is it so hot in here,” you think to yourself as you bite your bottom lip in concern. The last thing you need is to get sick and have your defenses weakened, especially around Bucky. You had discovered quickly over the past few weeks that a clear head was required when dealing with the super soldier – he could instantly make you wet with just one bite of his lip or sweep of his tongue.

Damn, that tongue. You pause from your task to imagine how incredible that tongue would feel sliding between the folds of your pussy.

You’re so deep in thought that you don’t hear Bucky come up behind you. As he wraps his arms around your waist and rests his chin on your shoulder, you close your eyes and lean back to breathe in his scent.

“Bucky, you’re getting me all wet,” you squeal as cold water from his damp hair starts to drip down your neck and chest.

“Can I feel?” he teases. His hands dip into the top of your shorts and slowly start to pull them down.

“Don’t you dare sergeant!” you scold while you hold them in place.

He hums softly and drapes a towel over your shoulder. “Here, use this to dry off.”

You grab the towel and begin to pat down your neck as you turn to face him. “Thanks. Listen Bucky, we need to ta…”

Your sentence is cut short when he pulls you in tight to his body, your hands landing on his wet, muscular pecs. Mouth agape, you stare as drops of water trickle down his sculpted chest and roll over his abs before disappearing into the space where your hips meet.

It’s only when you feel his hardening cock twitch against your core through the thin fabric of your shorts, that you realize he’s completely naked.

“You were saying doll,” he smirks while you close your eyes tight and fumble out of his solid grip.

“Damn it Bucky,” you cry out while swatting him blindly with the towel. Backing up, your knees hit the bed and you suddenly fall seated onto the mattress. Your eyes fly open in surprise and for a split second your gaze lands on Bucky’s thick, long cock. You gulp harshly and quickly bring the towel up to cover your face as Bucky takes a few steps towards you.

Chuckling, he pries the towel from your trembling hands and wraps it low on his waist. Dipping his head, he brings his lips to your ear.

“I can tell by the way you’re blushing that you like what you see.”

“Just so you know sweetheart,” he murmurs softly, grinning as he watches you bite down hard on your bottom lip. “It can get much harder than that.”

The sound of his laughter rings in your ears as you bolt from the room with your fists clenched, cursing him loudly in Russian.

By the time you wash up and head downstairs to join the rest of the team in the common room, you’re still wound tight and unusually hot – patches of sweat staining your flimsy top and shorts. Tony, Steve and Bruce are huddled around a mid-air projection screen while Thor is seated on the couch watching their efforts.

“Why the fuck is it so hot in here?” you whine as you plop yourself down next to Thor.

“The compound’s climate control system has inexplicably gone offline,” mutters Bruce as he scans the code on the screen. “We’re running a diagnostic but we can’t seem to figure out what triggered this malfunction.”

Steve walks over to the bar and pours himself a glass of ice water before hopping up on a stool. “For some reason the heat has kicked in and we can’t seem to over-ride the controls to turn it off.”

“Something in the program is restricting our access.”

“Something or someone,” you grumble as you shoot Tony a suspicious look.

“Now what would I have to gain by sabotaging the temperature in this place,” Tony asks innocently while pretending to be wounded by the accusation. “Although I must say, hot and sweaty is a good look on you sugar.”

“Feel free to disregard the ‘no nudity during the contest’ rule for the time being,” he offers generously.

“Although something or someone tells me that you and Barnes may have already thrown in the towel on that one.”

“Kiss my ass Stark,” you growl in frustration as you try unsuccessfully to block the image of Bucky’s impressive cock from your head.

“Why so grumpy sweet pea,” Tony questions with a tone of mock concern in his voice. “I think someone needs a good…”

“ Fuuuuuck,” interrupts Bucky as he comes swaggering into the room wearing shorts and a tight, white tank top. “What’s with this heat?”

“If I keep sweating like this I’m going to have to take another shower.”

He sets his gaze on you and winks. You narrow your eyes and mouth “fuck off” before turning your attention to Thor who is thumbing through a cook book.

Bucky smiles widely and climbs up on the stool next to Steve’s. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and swipes at the screen.

“Is this text from you?” Bucky asks while handing Steve his phone. Steve takes it and reads the message.

“No, not from me,” he answers, passing it back to Bucky. “I think that’s Sam’s number.”

“What about this one,” Bucky questions as he brings up another text.

“Geez Buck,” scolds Steve. “You really need to set up your contact list so you know who’s sending you these messages.”

“These things are such a waste of time,” Bucky grumbles as he waves his phone around in annoyance. “By the time I figure out all your numbers and how to use the damn thing, we get new ones. Hate these burner phones.”

Steve shakes his head and laughs. “Here, give me your phone,” he coaxes. Bucky hands it over and watches Steve swipe and tap the device.

“OK, I’ve set up my contact info to get you started…woah!”

Bucky looks up to see Steve’s eyes widen at the screen.

“Shit Steve, did you break my phone,” Bucky huffs as he takes the device back. He glances down at a text message Steve has inadvertently opened.

He furrows his brow as he read the words ‘Hi handsome’ under a photo of a woman’s tongue licking a set of plump, cherry red lips.

“What the hell,” Bucky mutters as he types back a response.

Who is this?

He shrugs his shoulders at Steve and hits send.

A few moments pass when his phone starts to chime.

You don’t remember me?

A sad face emoji pops up on the screen attached to another message.

Maybe this will jog your memory

A picture of a woman’s hand caressing the valley between two ample breasts spilling out of a black lace bra flashes onto the screen.

“Hello!” murmurs Steve as he cranes his neck to get a better view of Bucky’s phone.

Bucky’s mouth falls open for a split second before his eyes flit over to where you’re sitting with Thor. He watches as you sweep your hair off your shoulders and arrange it into a messy bun in an attempt to cool off. His blue eyes flicker with desire as he admires your body which is flush with a thin sheen of sweat that glistens on your skin.

Turning his attention back to his phone, Bucky ducks his head in guilt and quickly types out a message.

You have the wrong number

With a swipe of his finger, he deletes the conversation.

“What are you doing?” Steve questions in annoyance. “This may be one of those groupies Stark was talking about.”

“Just trying to stay alive pal,” Bucky answers nervously as he motions his head in your direction. “I’m not interested in any groupies.”

“Man, you are whipped,” Steve laughs.

Before Bucky can respond his phone lights up with a new message. He tentatively taps the screen and lets out a sharp breath as a picture of a cute, round ass appears, clad in a barely-there black lace thong. Peeking out of the waist band over the right cheek is a small tattoo of a red star.

Steve lets out a low whistle while Bucky swallows hard.

Pretty sure I’ve got your number babe. Don’t lie…I know you’re thinking about how much you want to spank my ass while I call you daddy

Bucky vehemently shakes his head from side to side while he taps on his phone.

Sorry, no. All I can think about right now is how sexy my girlfriend looks and how I want to bend her over that couch she’s sitting on

Steve raises his eyebrows in surprise as Bucky hits send. “Whoa Buck, your girlfriend?”

“Well yeah,” Bucky smiles sheepishly while rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean, I haven’t asked her yet or anything but I want her to be my girl.”

“That’s great buddy,” Steve says approvingly as he places a hand on Bucky’s shoulder and grins widely.

They both look down as Bucky’s phone chimes.

Girlfriend? Too bad, is it serious?

Bucky smiles softly as he types his response.

Yes, very

He looks up and notices you blushing as Thor whispers in your ear. Bucky closes his eyes and grits his teeth angrily, trying to steady his composure, when his phone lights up with another message.

Lucky girl. In case it doesn’t work out, I’ll be here waiting

Bucky quietly moans at a picture of a woman’s hand pulling down on a pair of black lace panties while the other hand fingers a garter belt. As his eyes run down the length of her legs to a pair of black high heels and back up to her covered mound, he struggles to keep his cock from twitching.

“FUCK!” exclaims Steve loudly as he grabs the phone from Bucky’s hand. You and Thor look over with puzzled expressions.

Bucky laughs nervously as he jabs Steve hard in the ribs.

“Cat video,” he stammers in explanation.

“That is one pretty pussy,” Steve mumbles under his breath.

You shake your head and turn to continue your conversation with Thor.

Bucky snatches the phone back from Steve and hastily types out a message.

You’ll be waiting around forever then. Do you like blonds? I have a friend

Steve gives Bucky two thumbs up and waits eagerly for a reply. He frowns at the response that appears a minute later on the screen.

Thanks but no…I prefer my men with long, dark hair…ridiculously handsome and aggravatingly cocky…with stubble…stubble is good

Bucky chuckles as he remembers a similar conversation from a few nights back. He’s about to bid his mystery admirer a final goodbye when he freezes.

“What’s wrong Buck,” questions Steve as Bucky squints at the screen and enlarges the photo to get a closer look. He begins to scroll back and forth through the pictures, examining them carefully, until the realization begins to dawn on his face.

“You little tease,” he growls lowly as his head snaps up and his eyes bear down on you. Sensing his stare, you look up in time to see him jump off the stool, his mouth formed into a tight, menacing grin. A mix of fear and excitement overwhelms your senses as you realize you’ve been discovered.

Bucky slowly stalks over to you, the metal plates on his arm whirling with each step. You quickly jump up from the couch while Thor looks on in amusement. Giggling uncontrollably, you run full throttle down the hall to the elevator.

“Shit shit shit shit shit, come on, come on,” you chant frantically as you press the up button, trying to will the elevator doors to open. You let out a sigh of relief when they finally part and you slip in. You jab repeatedly at the button to close the doors and then lean against the wall to catch your breath.

But just as the doors are about to close tight, a metal hand reaches in and pries them open. Your eyes widen as Bucky steps into the elevator car and the doors slide shut behind him.

He smirks as he steps in close and places his hands on either side of your head, effectively pinning you to the wall. “Where do you think you’re going baby girl?”

You swallow nervously as his darkening eyes hungrily scour your body. His metal fingers trail down your jaw line before wrapping around your throat to squeeze it firmly but gently. Your breath leaves your body in a rush.

“You’ve been a bad girl,” he murmurs as his other hand grips your waist and turns you so you’re facing the wall.

“Are you going to punish me daddy?” you taunt him breathlessly as his hands pull down on your shorts.

“Is that what my kitten wants,” he teases as his metallic fingers trace over your tattoo. You gasp as his flesh hand comes down on your bare ass with a loud smack.

You let out a raspy moan and start to back into his hand when you feel the elevator jolt to a stop.

“What the fuck,” snarls Bucky as he turns toward the panel and starts to push the buttons.

You’re both startled by the sound of Tony’s voice wafting into the elevator car.

“Hey kids, sorry to interrupt but there’s a small problem with the elevator,” he explains. “We’re working on it.”

“Wow, that’s one sweet ass…tattoo…sweet ass tattoo.”

Bucky quickly backs up to shield your backside from the camera as you pull up your shorts.

“How long before you fix the elevator Stark,” Bucky growls into the intercom.

“Oh, maybe an hour or so,” answers Tony nonchalantly. “Feel free to continue where you left off, you won’t even know I’m here.”

Before Tony can finish his sentence, Bucky delivers a crippling punch to the camera.

“That’s coming out of your paycheck Barnes,” mutters Stark in annoyance.

“Add this to my bill too,” Bucky replies as he rips the intercom speaker from the panel.

You shake your head in disapproval and begin to survey the car for options. Your eyes land on the emergency exit hatch at the top of the elevator. As you examine the hatch, you bring the hem of your top up to wipe some sweat off your face – flashing Bucky in the process.

“Stop fooling around Bucky and come give me a boost please. No way are we staying in this hot tin can for an hour.”

Eyes fixed on the ceiling you steady yourself as Bucky comes up behind you and places his hands on your hips. But instead of lifting you up, he maneuvers you along with his body towards the wall until his back is pressed up against it.

“You’re not going anywhere princess, not done with you yet.”

Holding you tight to his chest, his hands slip under your top and start to move up towards your breasts.

“So fucking sexy,” he whispers into your ear, his breath hot against your body. You lean your head back against his shoulder as his lips ghost over your neck.

“Bucky,” you whimper as his hands gently squeeze your breasts, his thumbs circling your hardening nipples through your bra. “We can’t…we can’t do this.”

“I know doll,” he stammers as he grinds his growing erection into your ass. “I just need to touch you…want you so fucking bad.”

“I want you too babe,” you murmur as you tilt your head to the side to give him more access. You feel your knees buckle at the heat pooling between your legs as he presses his lips to your neck. “I’ve wanted you since the first moment I saw you.”

“Just need to wait a little longer, we’re almost there.”

Bucky sighs loudly and buries his head into the crook of your neck. “You’re making this is so hard.”

You chuckle softly and tuck your hand behind you to stroke his half-hard cock.

“I don’t know about that soldier,” you answer cheekily while glancing coyly at him over your shoulder. “I’m told it can get a lot harder than this.”

Bucky groans and starts to slide down the wall, guiding your body with his until you’re set between his legs.

“I don’t know how much longer I can resist you,” he mutters as he fumbles in his pocket for his phone. He brings up the picture of your backside on the screen and holds it up in front of you as evidence. “Especially if you keep teasing me like this.”

“Hey you started it soldier,” you huff indignantly while playfully slapping his thigh. “You and your little strip show this morning.”

Bucky laughs and starts to fiddle with the settings on his phone.

“Bucky, what are you doing?”

He ignores your question and continues to tap at his phone. Your eyes widen when you catch a glimpse of the screen.

“JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES!” you warn tersely. “You can’t make my ass your background picture.”

“Too late,” he murmurs as he traces over the curve of your onscreen backside with his finger.

You reach out to grab his phone but he scrabbles to his feet and raises it high above your head. You jump up a few times trying to snatch the device from his hand but he raises it higher with every leap. He tilts his head and grins appreciatively at your futile efforts.

“Damn baby,” he purrs, biting down hard on his bottom lip. “I love watching your tits bounce.”

Narrowing your eyes in annoyance, you line up determinedly to kick the phone from his hand but he anticipates your move and jams the device down the front of his shorts.

You raise your eyebrows and flash a cheeky smile. “Really Bucky, like that’s going to stop me.”

He throws his arms out in invitation as you take a step closer. Your hands are just starting to slide down past the waist band of his shorts when the phone slips out and lands on the floor. You quickly drop down to your knees in front of Bucky to grab it, one hand still tucked inside his shorts, when the doors of the elevator open.

You freeze as Tony and Steve come into view.

“Going down?” Tony smirks as he crosses his arms and leans up against the wall.

You make a face at him as you scramble to your feet and bolt from the elevator clutching Bucky’s phone. Tony leans over to get a better view of your backside as you run down the hall. Bucky starts after you, pausing first to punch Tony hard in the shoulder.

“Stop fucking staring at my girlfriend’s ass,” he threatens in a menacing voice before taking off in hot pursuit.

“I’m sorry, did he just say girlfriend?” Tony asks as he turns to Steve with an incredulous look on his face.

“Yup,” chuckles Steve as they watch Bucky quickly catch up to you. They listen to you curse loudly when Bucky grabs your waist and effortlessly flings you over his shoulder.

Tony stares hard as Bucky’s metal hand moves under your shorts to squeeze your ass before he kicks open the door to the stairwell. Tony mutters in disbelief under his breath.

“That lucky son of a bitch.”

As evening rolls around, you find the team back in the common room, surrounded by portable fans and ice cold beers.

You grab a bottle and sit yourself down in front of the cool stream of one of the fans – as far away from Bucky as you can get.

You had spent most of the afternoon in your bed propped up against Bucky’s chest, sweating in between his legs while he watched you create his contact list – punishment for teasing him with those texts. It would have probably taken you less time had it not been for the distraction of Bucky’s lips on your neck and shoulders, and his hands roaming over your body. Between the heat and his touch, it was enough to drive you mad.

As you take a sip of your beer, you silently agree that some distance from Bucky is in order tonight. You fall back on the couch and close your eyes to enjoy the rush of cold air rolling over your body when Steve calls out.

“Hey gorgeous, come play with me and Bucky.”

Your eyes fly open and glance over in confusion. It takes a few moments to realize that they are setting up for a game of scrabble.

You smile wryly and curse your overheated imagination. “Thanks, but I’m not in the mood tonight Steve.”

“You boys will just have to play with yourselves.”

Steve shakes his head and smiles while Bucky’s eyes flash in amusement as they land on yours.

“What’s the matter sweetheart,” Bucky taunts while he twists the cap from his beer bottle. “Afraid you’re going to lose your shirt to me?”

He brings the bottle to his full lips and takes a long drink. You throat goes dry as his eyes drift over your body.

“Ummm no,” you answer with a roll of your eyes. “It’s just that most men can’t handle it when I whip their ass.”

Bucky raises his eyebrow and leans back in his chair, legs splayed apart.

“I’m not most men darling,” he replies smugly. “You can play rough with me.”

“Fucking hell” you scream silently in your head as your gaze lowers to his crotch. “Don’t let him suck you in…ugh, don’t say suck…and don’t you dare get up from this couch…stay in your Bucky-free zone.”

You’re about to shut him down when you hear Bucky chuckle. Your eyes snap up to catch him giving you his best shit-eating grin. Bastard. You can’t resist.

“Well then,” you smirk. “How can I deny myself the pleasure of bringing the Winter Soldier down to his knees?”

Bucky inhales sharply as you part your legs slightly and raise an eyebrow in challenge.

“Sorry doll,” he says in a husky tone as he coyly looks down at this lap and then back up at your lips. “You’re the one going down tonight.”

“Please Barnes,” you scoff playfully while you rest your beer bottle in between your legs and start to slowly run your fingers over it. “You know it will be me coming on top.”

“I have words you’ve never even heard before ready to roll off my tongue.”

Bucky’s eyes roam up from your lap to your mouth as he licks his lips slowly.

“Mmmm, let’s see what that smart mouth of yours can do sweetheart,” he dares with a sexy grin.

Rising from the couch you head over to the game table where Steve and Bucky are sitting. You come up behind Bucky and place your hands on his broad shoulders.

“I think you’ll find soldier that I have some pretty impressive oral skills,” you purr as your hands move over his chest and abs, gliding down to palm the bulge in his tight jeans. He moans your name softly at your touch.

“Come on you two, play nice,” Steve sighs as he readies the board.

“We’ll behave,” Bucky promises as he stands to pull out your chair. As you move to take your seat, he leans in and whispers. “Unless you want daddy to punish you again baby girl.”

A shiver runs down your spine as he slaps your ass and nips at your shoulder.

“OK, just a few rules,” begins Steve in a firm tone.

“No names allowed or making words already on the board plural. No suffixes, prefixes or abbreviations. No slang words, made up words or acronyms like LOL or OMG.”

“Plus you’ll score 5 extra points if you use your word in a sentence,” he continues as he starts to shake the bag filled with letter tiles.

“And for gosh sakes, watch your language,” jokes Bucky. “Captain America gets a little flustered with the dirty talk.”

“It happens one time,” Steve replies in exasperation as he holds out the bag to you.

“Wow Stevie,” you tease as you draw your letters. “I would have killed you if we had ever made it into bed.”

“You guys are hilarious,” he mumbles as you and Bucky share a knowing look. “Are you finished or is there a second act to this comedy show?”

Bucky pats Steve’s shoulder in apology and you blow him a kiss. Steve jokingly mutters “jerks” under his breath and starts the game.

“Ok, my first word is ‘sit’,” says Steve as he places his tiles on the board.

“We should sit in front of the fans to stay cool.”

“Your turn Buck,” instructs Steve as he jots down his points.

When Bucky doesn’t answer, you look up from reviewing your tiles and notice his glazed eyes focused on your breasts. It only takes a moment to realize that while you’ve been absentmindedly rolling your cold beer bottle over your neck to cool down, Bucky has been watching your nipples harden with each pass.

He’s deep in his thoughts when Steve calls out to him again.

“Bucky?”

Looking slightly disoriented, his eyes shoot up to Steve for a moment, before dropping down to study his tiles. His frown is quickly replaced with a mischievous smile that spreads slowly across his face.

He spells the word ‘get’ on the board before turning to you with a lustful grin.

“I can’t wait to get my mouth on your gorgeous tits.”

You let out an amused gasp while Steve chokes on a mouthful of beer.

“Bucky,” Steve sighs as he closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“What?” answers Bucky defensively as he points to your breasts. “Just fucking look at them…they’re awesome.”

“Yes…yes they are,” agrees Steve. “But…”

“But nothing,” interrupts Bucky with a wave of his hand. “My word counts, I used it in a sentence and her tits are spectacular…gimme my points.”

While Steve exhales in exasperation, you cock your eyebrow at Bucky and place the word ‘good’ next to his. You look up at him with a devious smile playing on your lips.

“If you’re a good boy Barnes, I might let you fuck them sometime.”

Bucky growls lowly while Steve’s eyes widen, a pale pink blush creeping up his neck. You arch your back and push your chest out for full effect as both men continue to stare.

“Stevie?” you call out innocently, as your fingers glide up and down over a spot in between your breasts. “I think it’s your turn.”

“My turn?” Steve responds hoarsely, trying to clear his throat. “Oh right, the game.”

You notice his fingers tremble slightly as he arranges his tiles on the board.

“Radio,” he mutters while avoiding eye contact with you. “I like listening to the ballgame on the radio.

You turn to Bucky and watch as his eyes dart from the board to his tiles and then back again. He grins widely and begins to spell out his word.

“Sweet,” he says, his tongue running over his lips as he locks his eyes on yours.

“All I can think about doll is how sweet your pussy is going to taste on my lips.”

You hum softly at the thought and slowly reveal your next word.

“Dirty,” you purr seductively.

“Jesus,” mumbles Steve as he shifts nervously in his seat waiting for your sentence.

“I want to feel that dirty tongue of yours licking my clit.”

Hands dropping to his knees, Steve exhales slowly and bows his head to stare at the floor; the blush on his face becoming a deeper shade of pink.

Bucky eyes flutter closed for a moment before he scrambles to respond.

“Were,” he murmurs as he grins wickedly. “I wish you were cumming all over my mouth.”

Steve snaps his head up in confusion and motions with his hands for Bucky to stop.

“Hold on Buck, I think it’s my turn.”

Steve’s protests are drown out by the sound of your heart beating loud and fast in your chest as you press your tile firmly on the board and fix your eyes on Bucky.

“Wrap” you smirk as you bring your beer bottle up to your mouth. “I want to wrap my lips around your thick, hard cock.”

You wink at him as you slowly lick the rim before taking the bottle into your mouth and downing the liquid in one shot.

“Bad” Bucky groans in response, his excited eyes riveted to yours. “I want you so fucking bad right now.”

You smile teasingly as you place the word ‘ride’ on the board. Bucky bites down hard on his lip.

“I want to ride your cock hard until you shoot your load deep into my pussy.”

Bucky tilts his head and gives you one of his sexy, crooked smiles. He stares straight into your eyes and murmurs “pussy.”

“Wanna stretch that tight little pussy with my big cock.”

You squirm in your seat as the wetness begins to soak through your panties.

“Wet,” you whimper as you position your word. “Thinking about you fucking me is making me dripping wet.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you notice Steve discreetly drop his hands under the table.

Bucky grins wickedly as he lays his letters on the board.

“Hard” he growls. “I’m going to fuck you so hard that you can’t walk tomorrow.”

Oblivious to Steve and the rest of the team that have now turned their attentions from the movie they were watching to your game, you and Bucky continue to throw down tiles and the dirty talk.

“I hate you guys,” mutters Steve as he pushes away from the table and gets up from his seat. Tony, Bruce and Thor snicker quietly as they watch him walk stiffly to the elevator.

“Mmmm Soldier,” you tease as you spell out ‘rough’. “All I can think about is you fucking me fast and rough from behind while you spank my ass.”

Bucky’s breath hitches as his tiles form the word ‘prayer’.

“I’m going to have you screaming my name like a prayer while you cum all over my cock sweetheart.”

You inhale sharply at his words and place your remaining tiles on the board.

“I’m going to be your dirty little slut tonight Bucky.”

Bucky’s darkening eyes bear down on yours with such intensity that you feel like your skin in on fire. The heat between your bodies is electric – firing showers of sparks that threaten to ignite the desire bubbling so close to the surface. You both sit motionless; fighting a silent, internal battle as your willpower threatens to collapse.

Bucky opens his mouth to speak when Natasha walks in and quickly scans the room with a quizzical look.

“Which one of you gave Captain America the raging boner?” she smirks. Fingers quickly point to you and Bucky.

With confused looks, you both turn towards Steve’s seat, not realizing that he had left the room. Bucky turns to Nat with a large grin.

“That would be miss porn star mouth over here.”

You throw a handful of tiles at his chest and huff loudly. “Hey you were talking up a filth storm too Barnes.”

“Nicely done,” praises Natasha as she grabs a beer and sits down next to Bruce. “I passed Rogers on his way to his room about 15 minutes ago and he looked ready to blow his load.”

Bucky chuckles and picks up his phone.

“Well then, this should speed things up,” he murmurs as he taps at the screen.

He’s about to place it back down on the table when the sounds of phones chiming around the room make him freeze in place. His eyes dart to his phone and widen in horror.

As you reach out for your phone to see the incoming message, Bucky quickly snatches it away.

“Bucky, give me back my phone,” you scold. “It sounds like we are getting a mission update.”

Bucky ignores your outstretched hand and jumps to his feet.

“I’ll…I’ll read it to you,” he offers nervously, his face flush with fear.

“Yes Barnes why don’t you give us all an update on this mission,” snickers Tony as he taps his phone in mid-air to bring up the picture of your ass on the projection screen.

“Are you planning to penetrate their defenses starting at the back door?”

Your mouth drops open in shock and you turn to look at Bucky with your eyes blazing.

“Bucky…” you slowly growl as you rise to your feet and grip the table. “Did you send that picture to the entire team?”

“Well not exactly,” Bucky confesses, bracing himself for your reaction. “I sent it to the entire team plus everyone on my contact list.”

Watching the anger rise in your expression, Bucky backs away slowly, his hands held up in defense.

“I’m sorry babe, it was an accident.”

“What the fuck Bucky?!” you scream in disbelief as you start to chase him around the table.

“Sam says hi,” he replies matter-of-factly over his shoulder before slowing down to change directions to avoid your grasp as you move to the right and deke left.

You both begin to slowly circle the table when F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s voice stops you in your tracks.

“Captain Steve Rogers has achieved climax at 10:18 pm.”

You clasp your hand over your mouth to stifle a gasp of disbelief while the rest of the team bursts into laughter.

As Bucky turns to high five you, he’s greeted by a flurry of hands slapping at his arm.

“Whoa babe, relax,” he coaxes gently while he wraps his arms around yours to pin them to your sides.

“Let me go soldier,” you demand, struggling to break free from his steely grip. “So I can shove that phone up your ass.”

‘Mmmm, my kinky little girl,” he murmurs as he pulls you in closer to his body. “You’re going to be a handful in bed tonight aren’t you?”

His hands move down into your shorts, squeezing and kneading your ass as he spreads your cheeks.

“So what do I get to put in yours,” he smirks as his metal finger presses against your tight hole.

Bucky chuckles in amusement as you struggle to swallow a moan rising from your throat.

“Dream on Bucky,” you scoff shakily as you try to regain your composure. “You’re not getting anywhere near my ass tonight.”

“Awww come on sweetheart, don’t be like that,” he pouts as he caresses your backside. ”Need to give this sweet booty a little treat tonight.”

“Had I known it had the power to defeat Captain America, I would have called in this asset a long time ago.”

You groan loudly at his bad joke and roll your eyes. Looking at you innocently through his lashes, Bucky leans in and cocks his head; attempting to soothe your anger with a playful smile.

“Ugh, that’s not going work this time Barnes,” you grumble as your hands move up to his chest to push him away.

Bucky lets out a deep breath while you turn your back to him to avoid his persuasive eyes. He wraps his arms around your waist and pulls you back tight against his chest. His chin on your shoulder, he starts to sway your body from side to side.

“What can I do to make it up to you?” he pleads softly, his lips pressing against the pink flush of your cheek.

You lean your head back on his chest and sigh. “There’s nothing you can do Bucky.”

“How am I going to look Steve in the eye tomorrow?”

Bucky dips his head to make eye contact and raises his eyebrows.

“Doll, I don’t think your eyes are what he’s going to be looking at when he sees you again. And I don’t blame him.”

You laugh softly and shake your head as he gives your ass a soft squeeze - silently cursing yourself for giving into his charm.

Brow furrowed, Bucky gazes at the scrabble board, deep in thought. After a few moments, you feel his back suddenly straighten as an idea takes shape in his head.

“I think I know how I can make this up to you babe,” his says coyly as he guides you to the game table.

You look down in confusion as Bucky reaches over you to the tiles scattered on the table and begins to arrange them on the board.

A smirk begins to form on your lips as you watch the words take shape. You respond to Bucky’s hopeful, apologetic gaze with a nod of approval.

Smiling, he takes your hand and leads you towards the elevator.

A half hour later, still gathered in the common room, Tony, Bruce, Nat and Thor hear their phones start chiming simultaneously. Tony creases his brow and transmits the incoming message from your phone onto a projection screen. A collective groan rises up from the men as Bucky’s naked ass comes into view.

“That’s it,” snaps Tony. “I’m confiscating their phones in the morning.”

A small smile tugging at the edges of her mouth, Natasha cocks an eyebrow and mutters appreciatively under her breath.

“That lucky bitch.”

Tags:  @evansrogerskitten @ek823 @pearljamkaren @thewife101cevans @avenger-nerd-mom @virtualgirlfriendsan @mistressjenbradlee @slickblitz @amf71010 @sorryidontspeakgrounder-world @quotemeow @imperfect-scribbles @mckorni32843 @me-myself-and-the-emu @ofmiceandnatasha @carabarnes13 @juliagolia87 @5-seconds-of-sebastian-stan @cassiopeia-evanstan @okaybxrnes @dontgetscared-justgetout @sammedrano @winteraconitum @creideamhgradochas @buckymorelikefuckmebarnes @bovaria @andreaisa7 @4theluvofall @jrubalcaba @hating-life-rn @chisatowa @supersoldier-wifey @avengingnights @colt-eleven-impala-sixtyseven @kaiyaisbae @confidentrose @thatpunkrockfandomchick @deathbyukmen @hip5t3r-m3rmaaidd-biitchhh @burningprincessbird @sgt-jbb-107 @ayeputita @almondbuttercup @fvckingavengers @earinafae @saffreelove @cojootromuelle @lenavonschweetz @badassbaker @ditchesandbitches @marvel-lucy @daddys-lil-monster-17 @octopishisahybridanimal @feelmyroarrrr @dontyouforgetaboutme @chameerah @marvelmaximoff @thexbasketcase @queendade @magnetosgirl

p.s. I actually plotted the words on a scrabble board to make sure the game was legit…yes, I’m aware that I need help lol

[aion-rsa]

How Batwoman Takes on Policing and Social Issues

https://ift.tt/31NtgS3

Police brutality has gone from a niche concern – one most white people considered impolite to bring up at dinner parties – to a compulsory national conversation. It’s long overdue, which has left many playing catch-up, especially white folks and popular media. As David Dennis Jr. pointed out in his excellent Twitter thread (seriously, go read it!) superhero shows have an especially tall order, given that they rely on portraying lawlessness and a fictionalized criminality that the hero can then clamp down on. But that image is out of touch with reality and can send damaging messages.

We’ve long discussed this problematic aspect of the genre in our reviews and features, whether it’s Barry Allen’s personal private prison kept in the basement of STAR Labs or Oliver Queen’s incredibly short-lived interest in reforming the prison industrial complex…before he went right back to adding more people to it. But Batwoman has taken a different tack that other comic book shows could learn from. 

Batwoman has, to greater and lesser degrees, explored gentrification, corruption of police and the legal system, police brutality/the lawlessness of privatized law enforcement, and the wrongful conviction of a Black man. The show is not perfect, and it must be stated that no other show is doing quite what HBO’s Watchmen did in terms of exploring this country’s legacy of race, anti-Black violence, and policing. But Batwoman is a superhero show that spent the last year actively engaging with questions like “was that an appropriate use of force?” and “isn’t this a gross violation of the civil rights of the people of Gotham City?”

In the Gotham of Batwoman, a private security firm called The Crows operates with near-impunity within the city, keeping the incredibly well-heeled secure while everyone else hopes for the best. Gated community is an understatement, and frankly, the firm is closer to a mercenary paramilitary operation.

By the end of the season, The Crows have expanded their reach through an app that’s available to all Gothamites, even those who aren’t clients, so anyone can call in the mercenaries if they see big bad Alice and her brother Mouse, or Batwoman, whom Crows head honcho Jake Kane views as equally villainous. It’s easy to imagine the Crows’ app going the way of SketchFactor in DC and other IRL safety apps, which quickly turned into racial and socioeconomic maps, with white and upper class folks flagging anything that made them uncomfortable – namely, Black neighborhoods.

Read more

TV

Replacing Kate Kane on Batwoman Season 2 is a Terrible Idea

By Lacy Baugher

Sophie Moore, a high-ranking agent with the Crows, continually pushes back against their use of force and in several circumstances when the Crows overstep the rights of citizens, to the point where she is sidelined, suspended, and eventually kicked off the Crows. She questions her mentor Jacob Kane in his vendetta against Batwoman – for whom there is no arrest warrant, the shoot-to-kill order on Alice that comes and goes throughout the season, and the extreme blanket use of surveillance on average citizens. If you’re worried about police breaking the law or the militarization of the police, try the privatization of a police force on for size. While the writing on Batwoman clearly raises concerns throughout the season, Sophie and Kate are among the only people able to effectively check the Crows’ power, largely due to their personal and professional relationships with Jake Kane. 

One of the show’s greatest assets has been the willingness of its writing and its hero to give the supposed villain of any given episode – who is often disenfranchised in some way that turns out to be connected to how they have lashed out at the system – the benefit of the doubt. It’s a benefit that our legal system is based on, but one that we know many people do not get – and one that the Crows don’t often give to suspects. Some so-called villains have turned out to be innocent people manipulated by others, or victims of systems that eroded their humanity.

For example, the season finale deconstructed the media and law enforcement trope of the giant invincible Black man, using the show’s own gossip host (voiced with juicy irony by longtime Batwoman comic fan Rachel Maddow) to introduce a suspect with barely-coded language. The show goes on to deconstruct that narrative, introducing the audience to his brother, who worries about his sibling who was nothing like the man described on TV. Gotham’s professional football league used him for entertainment and several people in positions of power abused their privilege to do serious harm, in this case irreparable CTE that turned a gentle man into someone who literally couldn’t feel pain, yet another harmful stereotype of Black folks that has caused harm from slavery to the medical field.

Gotham’s actual police force is so incompetent as to be a non-factor. They only come up in maybe a handful of episodes, but they feature prominently in one of the season’s best arcs: the wrongful conviction for Lucius Fox’s murder. His father’s murder was a defining moment in Luke Fox’s life. 

Normally the calm, logical, emotionally removed man behind the comms and tech on Team Bat, we watched Luke put together the pieces and realize that a fellow Black man had been set up to take the fall for his father’s death and then pursue the real killer. This wasn’t a clunky after school special one-and-done story so the creators can check a box. The arc was allowed to breathe over many episodes, giving actor Camrus Johnson the space to show the complex and often-changing swirl of emotions his character was experiencing. 

Read more

TV

Batwoman Showrunner Addresses Kate Kane Season 2 Departure

By Kayti Burt

Nothing about the writing or the performance was straightforward or easy. It’s the kind of ambitious writing and gnarled injustice that real people actually face, the sort of thing that we actually need real heroes for. It was a high point of Camrus Johnson’s excellent, season-long performance.

It’s worth noting that simply having the male lead – number two on the call sheet, Batwoman’s professional other half – played by a Black man, makes a big difference. But while other Arrowverse shows have had prominent Black characters – John Diggle on Arrow and Iris and Joe West on The Flash come to mind – Batwoman is different. For one, the writing has made explicit that Luke and Kate are partners, whereas for all that he came to eventually love and respect them, Oliver fought Diggle and Felicity every step of the way, and The Flash has always felt like a lead singer with a backing band. Even then, there’s a hierarchy, and a quick spin around the internet will produce ample evidence that neither Iris West-Allen nor Candice Patton have received the kind of treatment that a show’s leading lady would normally expect. 

At the root of this is the writers’ room. Batwoman is written by a diverse group of people that represents the issues discussed on the show. It includes queer folks, women, and BIPOC. Actors can do their best to convey the work with skill, sensitivity, and depth. But talent behind the scenes needs to be diverse as well, otherwise they’re still going to be talking about Grandma Esther’s noodles. 

While there’s a lot we don’t know about Batwoman season 2, namely the LGBTQ actor who will play the new lead and how they will be written in to pick up the threads from last season, I hope Batwoman will continue working with “villains” who are more complicated than we’re used to seeing on shows with tights. 

I also hope they’re able to portray more of the income inequality that showrunner Caroline Dries discussed in an interview with Den of Geek earlier this season. “One thing we had in Gotham City is this idea of the ‘us-versus-them’ in the districts where people are protected and then other districts where they’re left to their own devices because they can’t afford private security.”

Dries told us that, unfortunately, this wasn’t as emphasized as she would have liked, due to the limitations as production.

“In a perfect world, you’d have a bird’s eye view of the city and you would actually be able to see districts,” Dries said. There were some references to this earlier in the season with checkpoints between neighborhoods, but as the season went on, Dries said those little bridge scenes were the first to get cut due to time and money. Fortunately, it sounds like it will still be part of season 2, and likely more pronounced.

“If I had all the time in the world and all the money in the world, I would have been able to dramatize that disparity better and the segregation a little bit better, visually,” Dries said. “But we’re going to continue to keep that alive, especially now as we’ve seen the Crows sort of becoming more heightened in their power and becoming more authoritarian and scarier.”

Read more

Movies

DC FanDome to Reveal DCEU, Arrowverse, and More DC Universe Secrets

By Jim Dandy

Moreover, homelessness has been part of the show’s narrative since the very first teaser, but Batwoman has yet to engage with the issue of economic inequality or with actual people experiencing homelessness as individuals, rather than as an abstract concept. Even if it’s simply by having Mary, Luke, or the mysterious “Ryan Wilder” develop a relationship with someone who sleeps rough outside Wayne Tower or their apartment building, or if Mary’s clinic starts back up again and a character or two is differentiated that way, it would be nice to see humanity and individualism, rather than a monolith.

Finally, while it’s not an issue involving our carceral systems, it must be said that Batwoman has provided the space for Meagan Tandy’s Sophie to have a truly lovely storyline about her sexuality. While Kate Kane/Batwoman has basically always been out and accepted, that’s not everyone’s story. Not everyone has accepting parents and a family fortune to fall back on if they’re kicked out of the military. Sophie’s journey as a queer Black woman has been allowed to progress at her own pace, allowing the character to unpack what it means for her relationship (she starts the series married to a man), her identity, and her family as she explores who she is and what that means to her. Not everyone’s path is the same, nor do they have to express it the same way. While it’s great for people to see Kate Kane as a role model, I imagine there are far more people who can relate to Sophie Moore.

As television reorients itself around a long overdue reprioritization of Black lives, the landscape will shift, in some cases dramatically, as with the cancellation of long-running show Cops. But for other shows, like Batwoman, there’s an opportunity to continue pushing even further forward on the very social issues that once caused trolls to review-bomb the show with so much online hate. Heading into season 2, as the social and cultural landscape shifts, Batwoman should continue Kate Kane’s legacy of fighting injustice intersectionally, centering the marginalized while upending comic book tropes about law and order. 

The post How Batwoman Takes on Policing and Social Issues appeared first on Den of Geek.

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How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[theinjectlikes2]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2Gc5Aem via IFTTT

[drummcarpentry]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[whitelabelseoreseller]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/13177281

[gamebazu]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/2tG2zjJ

[nutrifami]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[lakelandseo]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[evempierson]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[paulineberry]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[daynamartinez22]

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

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