Founder, Bread and Circuses Inc.

The Deadly Middle: Why the Content Wasteland Is Riskier Than Going All In

In the world of business, marketing and content strategy, one truth is evident: the middle ground often leads to mediocrity. The concept is simple yet often overlooked. For those in content marketing, the middle can be a safe place for moderate success, but it’s also where innovation stagnates, and returns can plateau. During my early […]

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How to Hire a Great Freelance Writer: A Comprehensive Guide

Thinking / By Ryan Johnson

You’ve built a great product, found product-market fit, and now need to activate the marketing levers that get your product noticed by the right audience. You’ve heard how an effective content strategy can connect with potential customers at different points in their customer journey, help lower your customer acquisition costs and help retain customers once

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Common Content Mistakes That Companies Make

Thinking / By Ryan Johnson

In the process of auditing content at different companies, I’ve seen some common mistakes that companies make. Here are a few that frequently repeat: They Create Islands vs Ecosystems If search is an important channel, then companies should think about Ecosystems vs Islands. Ecosystems mean content that is built in thematic clusters and hubs and

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How To Develop a Content Plan

Thinking / By Ryan Johnson

As Benjamin Franklin once said: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. From the largest media company to the smallest startup, every company that understands it needs to create and distribute content to serve its customers needs to know how to develop a content plan. Whether it is created on a popular content

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Short-Form Video and How it fits into Your Business’ Content Strategy

Thinking / By Ryan Johnson

If you have spent time on just about any major social or content platform over the last year, you’ll know that the dominant format-de-jour is short-form video. From a business perspective, if you are an entrepreneur, executive or marketer–you intuitively know that reaching your target customers in a meaningful way on social platforms is going

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The Benefits of Developing a B2B Content Strategy

Thinking / By Ryan Johnson

Leadership teams at growing B2B companies have a lot going on. After establishing their product/market fit, the most important challenge for early-stage companies is often not in understanding what they need to do– but what to focus on first. At this stage, opportunities can seem to be everywhere but resources–and attention–are scarce. Success comes from

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The Evolution of Product Search: From Cave Man to Amazon

Thinking / By Ryan Johnson

A consumer in the swinging paleolithic era would have loved Amazon Prime, and the possibility of getting meat delivered to their cavestep, without the inconvenience of being eaten, beaten, dying of starvation or from exposure to the elements. It would have been a pretty compelling value proposition for $119 a year. A caveman, we can

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The Race To Copy: What Motivates Social Media Platform Feature Wars?

Thinking / By Ryan Johnson

Bob Dylan once sang: Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king. While its unclear whether executives of social platforms are Dylan fans, it is clear that they’ve taken his message to heart. We’ve seen it repeated over and over again, starting in the early days

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Author name: Ryan Johnson