Originally appeared on Marketing Trenches and the Content Marketing Institute Blog (June 30, 2011).
All content marketers can learn from what Yoda said to a young Anakin Skywalker: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” This very same destructive sequence, which turned Anakin into Darth Vader, all too frequently derails content marketing efforts.
Why? Because, horror of horrors, content marketing involves a large amount of writing, and for many people, writing is terrifying (they may say they hate writing, but thanks to Yoda, we know they’re just scared). Even worse, someone has to gingerly edit that writing without hurting psyches already fragile from the writing struggle. Particularly for content marketing campaigns that involve a lot of blogging, the fear and hatred of writing can cause complete content marketing paralysis.
That way, it does not have to be. To help minimize the fear and suffering in your content marketing—particularly, blogging—efforts, I’ve provided some tips to turn you and your team into writing Jedis: