Alex Birkett, Author at Alex Birkett

There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Lunch in Content Marketing

August 26, 2020July 16, 2018 by Alex Birkett

“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.” – Milton Friedman (among others throughout recent history) This will be piece inspired by a recent BuzzFeed article that outed contributors at “trustworthy” publications like Forbes, HuffPo, and Inc. To recap the piece: Forbes and others operate using a free contributor model. In addition, their editorial stringency … Read more

Your Three Days in Austin Itinerary

June 4, 2018 by Alex Birkett

I’m not an OG Austinite, but I’ve been here long enough to have had dozens of visitors come through and ask, “what do I definitely need to do while I’m in Austin for the weekend?” After having answered the question similarly each time, I decided to write down what I would consider an optimal weekend … Read more

How to Capture Email Leads (using Journalism’s 5 W’s technique)

April 4, 2023May 30, 2018 by Alex Birkett

Capturing email leads is one of the primary goals of most content marketing programs. The money’s in the list, you get a million dollars back for every dollar you invest in email marketing, yada yada yada all the cherry picked statistics. Anyway, you know it’s important or you wouldn’t have found your way here. The … Read more

A no-nonsense email outreach manual

April 18, 2024May 1, 2018 by Alex Birkett

I think I’m pretty good at email outreach. I’ve done a bunch of it, for a variety of reasons from link building to strategic partnerships to simply wanting to meet up for caffeinated beverages, and have had pretty good success in general. One time, I even had an unexpected case study written up about my … Read more

Productivity Hacks

February 29, 2020April 17, 2018 by Alex Birkett

The world is obsessed with productivity hacks. Lifehacker gets many millions of visitors every month, the supplement industry is like $50 billion a year, and we all listen to Tim Ferriss’ podcast, which in effect covers the morning routines and productivity hacks of those more successful than us. We all want to squeeze more out … Read more

Content Optimization: How to Make Content Better

August 5, 2022March 23, 2018 by Alex Birkett

They say the third lever of content marketing growth is content optimization.

Content creation, content promotion, and content optimization.

Content Marketing Analytics: 11 Ways Data Can Inform Your Content Strategy

September 22, 2020February 3, 2018 by Alex Birkett

We all want to be data-driven marketers, but sometimes content marketers are left out of the loop and expected to run solely on creativity.

Content marketing is a creative endeavor – just as other types or marketing are – but data and analytics can inform content marketing just like they can paid, social, or affiliate.

2018 Goals

January 6, 2018 by Alex Birkett

New Year’s Resolutions™ are overrated, but time-based goals are nice. I find it’s valuable to put them in writing and in public, mostly for reference and reflection down the line. 2017 Was a Good Year In 2017, I hit lots of personal and professional goals. I started training Krav Maga and taking Spanish lessons (studied … Read more

Content Promotion: Every Single Tactic You Can Use to Boost Traffic

August 26, 2020January 5, 2018 by Alex Birkett

Content marketing works. It works better if you’re good at content promotion.

How to Learn Spanish (My Process)

June 7, 2018December 22, 2017 by Alex Birkett

I’ve spent the last several months learning Spanish, and I’ve actually made tangible progress (level B1 → B2 in a few months, moving towards C1 currently).