Hi friends! I've been trying not to drop the ball at work. While building a content marketing course through Maven. And staying honest with other commitments, like this recent article I wrote for Adweek. Somewhere in here I completely forgot to send this newsletter. Doh!

Honestly... there's a bunch of self-promotional stuff here, but I promise some of it benefits you! I made it skimmable so you can tune it out if you don't care. And at the bottom, I included my recipe for Filipino Chicken Adobo — a super easy weeknight meal.

🤯 22,000 pageviews in 2 days

This is definitely a career highlight for me. And though it's not that long ago, I completely forgot about it until it came up in a recent talk I did.

I once created a blog post that got 22,000 unique pageviews in two days. Without any SEO or keyword research strategy.

This was when I ran marketing for ski lift ticket company Liftopia. In March 2020, the stay-at-home orders started and ski season ended early.

Not only did we shut down all paid marketing efforts, I no longer had any budget. So I did what I knew best: Created content that I genuinely thought would help our customers.

One of these pieces of content was purely a Customer Support play. Skiers and snowboarders were unsure whether they'd ski or ride again that season. Resorts were closing quickly.

And of course, we had lift ticket holders who were wondering if they'd get their money back. It didn't take fancy analytics on my part to understand our customers' pain points.

Meanwhile, our Sales and Customer Support teams were in direct contact with some of the ski areas, and began tracking closures in a Google Sheet. I joined in with my own research and added to the spreadsheet. And then I figured: Why not just publish this as a resource for all our customers?

So I did. It wasn't a beautiful post. Just a copied and pasted Excel table with a few lines of context. In fact, you can see it here. It was Liftopia's most viewed blog post in a couple years.

All because it was something all skiers and snowboarders in North America were looking for.

All because of a customer-centric approach to content. Not an SEO-driven one.

The thing about this story is that best exemplifies my approach to content marketing. I didn't even learn SEO fundamentals until a couple years into my marketing career. So... I just don't think about content in SEO terms. 🤷🏻‍♀️ (Which is hilarious because my boss invented Domain Authority. And he's probably reading this and low key shaking his head. Hi Rand!)

📣 And now... you'll be able to learn more about my content marketing strategies! I just opened up registration for my new cohort-based course. This is a course for intermediate content marketers, marketing generalists who want to better understand content, and even for founders of early-stage startups who want to learn how mid/senior content marketers do their jobs.

• Starting March 1, it'll be 2 weeks long (four 90-minute sessions)
• This first beta cohort will be limited to 30 seats (so I can give 1:1 attention)
• And it's $800 — a huge discount from what I'll charge for the next cohort.

All the details, including dates, times, and a "how can I expense this?" template are in the FAQs at the bottom of my landing page.

🙈 Self-Promotional Things That Might Be Useful

​Webinar: Audience Building Without Feeling Like a Douchebag: A few friends from Write of Passage asked me to host an audience building session and it's next Wednesday! I'll share more about my approach to social media, how you can use it to make meaningful connections, and how you can share your ideas without feeling like a fortune cookie account.

​The Menu Show with Khe Hy: Productivity and Notion expert Khe Hy joined my YouTube show and even though we had a planned agenda, we ended up detouring into money, home ownership (and why it's overrated), and we discussed the existential crises behind uncovering your $10K work. Oh, and he walked me through his amazing skinny margarita recipe.

​UPCOMING: The Menu Show with Paul Millerd: Paul was on the traditional finance/Wall Street path and decided to give it all up. He recently wrote a book on his journey, The Pathless Path. And this Friday at 11am PT, we're going to talk about everything we got wrong about the world of work — and all the lies we were told about careers, money, and being adults. Set a reminder and join us!

🍰 Petits Fours

🔸 First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge: This Shane Parrish post is not new. But I read it recently and it's informing much of the syllabus for my content marketing course.

🔹 A tweet: If within 7 days your podcast gets more than 231 downloads... you're in the top 10% of podcasts.

🔸 My 33-hour labor: That previous tweet ^^^ comes from Danny Miranda, who has a popular podcast that he calls "nutrition for the brain." I got to join recently and I talked about my 33-hour labor. Danny is a very kind and open-minded person because he didn't even flinch. Just listened intently and asked questions. Really thoughtful podcast host and I was impressed with his prep.

🔹 A tweet: That feel when you're fighting a stranger on the internet...

🍗 Filipino Chicken Adobo

• 1/2 c soy sauce
• 1/4 c Filipino spiced vinegar (or substitute with distilled white vinegar)
• 1/4 c water
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 4 crushed garlic cloves
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 lb chicken (ideally dark meat because yum)

Whisk together the marinade (all the above ingredients) in a large tupperware. Add chicken. Cover and leave in fridge for at least 4 hours or overnight.

Heat a wok over medium-high. Add a dash of oil. Saute the chicken on all sides to brown. Pour over marinade, bring to a low boil and turn down to simmer until slightly thickened and chicken is cooked through, about 15-20 minutes.

Serve over white rice.

If you have leftover rice, chicken and marinade, save it all and make Adobo Fried Rice the following day.

🛌 Alright. It's Tuesday...

At least, I think it's Tuesday. Have a great rest of the week! I dare you to get 8 hours of sleep every night this week.