I know this sounds crazy to all my beach-loving friends, but I’d give up a week at the Outer Banks for a chance to roam Ohio’s Hocking Hills. Don’t get me wrong. My family and I lived it up at our condo in Nag’s Head in 2010. However, there’s something so relaxing about the pastoral landscapes, unassuming small towns and plentiful outdoor activities in the Hocking Hills. For me, that experience can’t be duplicated by hot sand and briny water.

This past summer, we returned again to Hocking Hills and the Spotted Horse Ranch, a favorite stop that’s a stone’s throw from the town of Laurelville.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Shadows of War, Ohio author Mike Johnson again illuminates little-known and long-forgotten fronts during World War II. Integrating historic people and places in Romania and Singapore with a varied cast of fictional characters, Johnson once more demonstrates his passion for meticulous research.

What I like best about this book is Johnson’s continued growth as a storyteller. Since his first novel, Warrior Priest, he’s continued to improve his craft by creating characters that are more believable and well developed.

As with his previous stories about this era, Shadows of War is ambitious in scope. While he maintains a healthy balance between narrative and facts, Johnson does introduce a large cast of characters, inevitably leading to frequent shifts in action.

Some of the information Johnson includes in this book are graphic. Don’t look for a sugar-coated or overly romantic viewpoint in Shadows of War.

I know author and life coach Marykay Moore personally and recognize all the effort she invested to bring this autobiography to fruition. In Stepping Out, she shares her journey from youth to convent life, from teacher to ordained minister and, most recently, from marriage to widowhood.

A story from a heart filled with faith, Moore eschews drama in favor of simplicity and candor about living a life without fear and regret. Anyone who has ever faced difficult decisions, yearned for spiritual discernment or grieved for a loved one will find hope and encouragement in this book.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight isn’t just a compelling story of a neuroanatomist’s struggle to overcome a major stroke (although that alone makes it worth the read). She’s also created an excellent summary on brain anatomy and physiology that’s relatively easy to understand. It’s a true layman’s look into brain design, function and capabilities, as well as some of the science behind healthy positive thinking.

After reading this book, I recognize that my brain has the power to change ingrained, negative emotional responses, better use all that left-brain chatter and experience greater peace and creativity in the right side of my mind. With all that good information, it’s easy to overlook the instances where I disagree with Taylor concerning faith and theology.

I’ve been invited to blog about content marketing and social media strategies at Pole Position Marketing‘s e-Marketing Performance blog. Join me there! @StoneyD has been blogging about Internet marketing, search engine optimization and other topics since 1998. It’s a wealth of information.

On this site, I will continue to blog about my favorite personal topics – books, writers and Ohio writers. If you’re a writer and would like me to review your book here, contact me on Twitter at @martijen.

This week I’m all abuzz about what’s clearly surfaced in my reading as the Golden Rule of Internet marketing: publish content unto others as you want it written unto you. In other words, worry more about appealing to your buyers than crowing about your business – which is, after all, what you prefer when you’re searching the Web for answers.

We humans are self-centered by nature, and that tendency certainly extends to business marketing. What subject do we know best? Our own business products and services, of course. Traditional marketing (ads, billboards, collateral material, etc.) focuses on “our position” and “our message.” Internet marketing strives to answer buyer questions and fulfill buyer needs. Unfortunately, many businesses treat websites as an extension of a traditional marketing plan, like a snazzy, multi-panel brochure. That’s not making good use of this powerful tool.

Like me, you may have heard the phrase, “content is king,” but content that uses the buyer’s words (search engine optimization) and solves a buyer’s problems (a reason to stay on your site) reigns supreme. So, instead of crafting messages about your product or worrying about how to position yourself among the competition, put yourself in your buyers’ shoes and provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions. Figuring out their needs does take work (interviews, research and planning), but in the end, it pays dividends.

I wish I had a buck for every time my daughters have repeated a commercial “pitch” as reasoning for why we should buy the latest toy or food marketed to kids. I also wish I had a buck for every time I responded, “It’s an advertisement. Don’t believe everything they are telling you.”

I can’t help thinking, what’s wrong with THIS picture?

For the past 10 years, I’ve made my living as a marketing and PR writer, and – though I scorn pandering, hyperbole and truth twisting – I’ve had to spin some yarns from time to time. Traditionally, companies have attracted people to their product or service by hyping it. The more alluring or creative (or shocking) your advertisement, the more likely people are to notice it, for at least a second. However, the majority have clearly become jaded by and distrustful of this old approach.

Content marketing, on the other hand, appeals more to reason and relationships than to hype. That’s what happens when consumers – who are usually inclined to educate themselves before buying – now have the power to do so at their fingertips. They’re looking for solid advice, helpful conversations and enough useful information to enable them to make a well-informed purchase. That’s what the Web can deliver.

I like this shift away from hype and toward authenticity. It’s attractive to me personally, and, judging from the growth of Internet communication and commerce, it also appeals to millions and millions of others across the globe.

In his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott says, “The Web is different. Instead of one-way interruption [that's common with traditional marketing and advertising], Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.”

Do writers use the Web to deliver false information? Yes. Do companies still provide biased opinions in their Internet content? Absolutely. (Will my kids still have to be careful of online ploys? Without a doubt!) The key is that there are many voices on the Web, and it behooves a business to be as honest, transparent and responsive as possible. In the long run, this approach will help them build trust with their customers and garner more loyalty than an amusing commercial or billboard ever will.

I am excited to be part of this new marketing strategy and welcome the changes it brings to my industry.

This week I’ve been feeling more like an ant than a bumblebee, which is – believe it or not – an improvement. Digging into David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR, second edition, I’ve been thrilled to find some comprehensible order to the content marketing juggernaut that ran over me last week. Like a good worker (or perhaps drone), I continue tunneling down, unearthing practical, sensible stuff all along the way.

Scott’s “new rules” resonate with me and my personal experience as an online shopper. Moreover, they resonate with me as a business writer, confirming that content marketing is a natural extension of what I’ve been doing for the past decade and an excellent direction for my future. My biggest fear is forgetting all that I’m learning at this juncture (and future ones) in the journey. Clearly, I could use a place to store all my notes.

As I predicted, the Web was not short on options, and I checked out CiteULike, Zotero, JabRef, EndNote, Reference Manager and many others. But some were too expensive and others didn’t look particularly easy to use. At first I thought Zotero was the most promising, but I nixed it because it doesn’t work in any other browser but Firefox. I prefer Chrome.

Finally, I seemed to be getting somewhere with Mendeley. It’s free, works with Chrome and offers me scads of space to store and annotate PDFs both online and on my desktop, which can be synced. Plus, I found lots of great feedback from users. So, I signed up and imported several e-books on content marketing. However, I still haven’t used it much. Why? Because there’s no place in the application to take and organize notes on things I’m reading that aren’t PDFs. Geeeez!

So, I stopped by my old friend EasyBib, which I’ve used for various projects in recent years. As a free tool to create citations from almost any reference imaginable, it rocks! And, I noticed it offered Notebook, a web-based tool for creating notes and tagging, grouping and even color-coding them. Yes! I’m in my anal retentive glory! Although it wasn’t free, $20 per year seemed a small price to pay for sanity.

Going forward, it will be a combination of EasyBib and Mendeley for me. However, I hope someone someday thinks to combine the features of these two great research managers to make things easier on drones like me.

If you’re doing research, what online tool is your favorite?

Perhaps I should have titled this post, “Wanna follow a ridiculously convoluted rabbit trail of content marketing click-throughs?” That’s because my very first move in trying to get a grip on this elephant was to google, “What is content marketing?” Clearly, not the wisest starting point.

But, in the spirit of Rimsky-Korsakov’s lively orchestral interlude (the perfect musical accompaniment for the entire digital age), I jumped in.

I started with Alltop’s landing page for content marketing, where I was greeted by a cacophonous collection of blog posts from “designated content marketing experts.” So, I began clicking on the main link for each featured blog, leading me to Junta-42 (a blog I’m familiar with) and Web Ink Now (I’ve got one of Scott’s books on order), as well as TopRank, Copyblogger, Writing on the Web, Content Rich (which turned me off immediately) and many more. While I was there, I added a bunch of these to my reader list. Now I just have to find time to read all 184 new posts, right? I bookmarked the Alltop page, too.

As a person who prefers organization and structure in learning, I’m starting to get a little nuts. But, then again, content marketing (like me) is evolving rapidly. The information doesn’t seem to come in a nice, neat package. So, motoring on, I decided to go deeper with Junta 42, and – like a second grader with ADHD – began clicking away! From Magnum Opus Awards to 10 Reasons Your Content Marketing is Killing You, I browse with a furrowed brow, catching snatches of stuff I probably won’t remember five minutes from now. Here a case study on Eloqua and there a post called ABCs of Content Marketing (which, by the way, is currently one of the hottest posts on this subject, so I must not be alone in my ignorance).

Toward the end of my time, I ended up joining Content Marketing Institute, subscribing to CMI’s weekly newsletter, Compilation, and signing up as vendor for Junta 42, where my profile still remains woefully incomplete.

Anyway, you get the picture: the opening leg of my journey becomes Picasso and a fuzzy Renoir on one canvas.

My epiphany? I need to start a system of note cards, as if I were writing a research paper. (Gulp!) Isn’t there something on the Web that will help me do that? Hmmmm… Sounds like a good post for another day.

Life’s full of inconveniences and little bumps in the road. Meetings get rescheduled, the kids get sick and, thanks to one of Ohio’s worst winters in recent memory, it seems like schools are closed every other day. It’s the kind of stuff mommy freelancers like me grumble and whine about. It’s the price you pay for flexibility, working from home, yada yada yada. Shut up, right?

But, every now and then, you get blindsided.

After coasting on dependable work from an uber-dependable client for nearly a decade, I get the phone call. Business is bad. Middle managers are getting let go. We can’t justify the cost of outsourcing. Translation: I’m saying bye-bye to nearly 40 percent of my income. Michael Oher, where the heck are you?

But a happenstance Twitter conversation with Lauren Vargas after reading her blog post, Discourse in a Rapidly Changing World, reminded me of the upside of seeing stars: when you’re flat on your back, you have all the time in the world to think critically and test ideas, to slow down a little and ponder things. She called it my silver lining.

So, I’m pondering. Do I continue down my comfortable road, marketing my traditional copywriter gig? Or, to quote the venerable C.S. Lewis, should I go “further in and further up”?

I recently told my good friend Stoney, “I’m ready to evolve. I don’t want to remain that copywriter who waits around for someone to hand her a project they’ve already thought of (although I certainly won’t refuse the work). I want to become the strategist who also creates exceptional content across a variety of channels and platforms.”

At the pace of business, digital communication and content marketing today, this will have to be some crazy fast evolution for me. But, I’m entering into it with Lauren’s wise words:

All of us are experts in some form. So, let’s stop debating on who is calling whom an expert. It is what it is. Anyone can hang a virtual or physical shingle out front and claim to have knowledge on a subject, but it is up to each one of us to start standing up for what we believe, examine why, and in some cases, upon reflection, choose to go another direction. All experts and workers today will need to embrace critical thinking to survive the future.

So, I’m off on a new and unexpected journey, to think critically about content marketing and how I can help others use it to grow their businesses. I have a feeling I may get blindsided again, but that’s all part of evolving.