Barbells vs. Treadmills: A Fresh Take on Content Strategy

When I started building the content marketing team at RJMetrics I did so on the same assumption many content teams are started on: I would hire great people, we would write amazing content that our target market loved. Say hello to search rank and leads!

It didn’t take long for me to realize how painfully flawed this idea was. I coached and trained. I watched my writers struggle through round after round after round of edits, all of us growing frustrated. To their credit, they suffered bravely through the process with me.

Every piece we got out the door was painful. It took long, it involved 5–10 rounds of editing, and it still frequently ended in big chunks of a piece being rewritten. Every now and then we would have a post that would hit. This post about free shipping by Anna Kegler was shared over 400 times and viewed over 5,000 times in 2015. Daniel Levine mastered the expert input roundup like this one, doing two that received over 2,000 page views each. But for the most part we struggled to get the kind of eyeballs we wanted. We were on the content treadmill.

At this point, I’ve talked to enough marketing leaders to know this experience is not unique to my team. Once I started admitting out loud how hard this was for us, I started hearing their admissions as well: “Yeah, I rewrite 80% of…