I’ve been trying to get more comfortable with speaking to groups. I took an excellent 3-week public speaking seminar last year to help me learn important things like posture, confidence, organization… and not flipping off your audience through the whole speech. I accidentally did that once.

What I loved most about the class was the importance the trainer placed on knowing your audience. We spent a whole session answering questions about the people who would potentially be sitting in our audience: Why are they there, what other activities might they be missing to hear me speak, what do they really want to hear from me, what will turn them off, what things do we have in common, and so on.

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Several semi-reliable websites credit Leonardo Da Vinci with writing the phrase, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” I love this phrase. Without getting to philosophical, in my opinion DaVinci understood that simplicity doesn’t necessarily dumb things down. On the contrary, simplicity can make our online marketing and content marketing more accessible, more usable and more effective in achieving our marketing goals.

I like things simple, neat, explainable, and relatable. So here I stand in the complex world of online marketing amongst too many search results, too much data, and way too much advice on how to read it. I’m going to come right out and say it: Content marketing and online marketing, in general, have gotten seriously complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.

So, what makes content marketing so complex? And how can we simplify it for the sake of all our sanity?Continue Reading