nanowrimo16

#NaNoWriMo16 is upon us! For those of you that don’t know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, sponsored by a nonprofit organization. It’s a worldwide, “virtual” contest for writing a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and November 30. If you’re successful at that many words inside a month, you earn the NaNoWriMo badge and trophy. It’s a cool idea to get writers out of their shells, great books written, and creativity out into the open. Express Writers, NaNoWriMo16 & Cinderella I hadn’t participated since I was a teenager on Writing.com, but this year when I received an invitation from our content marketing friends at addmustard, I couldn’t resist! They were putting together a 10x style content marketing series and were inviting the top content marketers to get involved and contribute a fairytale-esque piece with top ideas for 2017 content marketing, running one story each week of November for NaNoWriMo. Mine was the feature for the first week. The story I put together for addmustard was: How Well Does the Shoe Fit? 5 Strategies for Finding Your Content Sweet Spot. I correlated the Cinderella story with finding your niche audience-fit as a content marketer. Addmustard turned it into a beautifully designed book! In my Cinderella-inspired content marketing piece, I discuss five key strategies to find your sweet spot as a content marketer (like putting on Cinderella’s shoe): Fit your content to the unique attributes of your reader (know your reader’s demographic and behavior) Focus on just one person instead of a group (similar to going house to house, person to person, to find the perfect fit for the Cinderella shoe) Narrow down your niche to find your exact-match, and find the keywords that bring in this traffic Know the competition trying to squeeze into the same shoe (so you can do better and be the successful shoe messenger) Know the magic of your shoe (what to offer your customer when the shoe fits–their ideal products should align to what you offer them) I had so much fun participating in #NaNoWriMo with addmustard, and creating a piece around a story in my favorite genre, fiction. (One day I’ll retire and just write fiction.) Writers: thinking of getting involved? Need a way to hone your writing skills and join a community of like-minded writers? It’s only mid-November, and NaNoWriMo is open! Get involved at NaNoWriMo.org.