The Power of a Fresh Start

You never know what a fresh calendar year can inspire someone to do. They might start a new business, lose a zillion pounds, organize the sock drawer.

Or, if it’s Copyblogger’s founder Brian Clark, they just might come back to the blog with a vengeance … and a commitment to write a bunch of new content for us.

In case you missed it, Brian did that last one this week. He hit the blog on Monday morning with a post about why so much content out there is so … uninspiring. And he talks about what we can do to break through and start creating something worth reading again.

This month, we’re getting back to basics on Copyblogger — but “basic” doesn’t mean we’ll get less sophisticated. It means we’ll talk about how you can execute on the most important things in a deeper way.

Because shiny objects are fun … but creating real success is even more fun.

On Tuesday, Stefanie gave us some thoughts on getting inspired about our editing. OK, maybe it isn’t as exciting as some topics (unless you’re Stefanie) — but the polish and excellence that good editing will bring out in your work really is pretty exciting. And if you’d like to get into a rousing discussion about the serial comma in the comments there, I know she’d be into it.

And on Wednesday, I shared a bit of a rant about a “back to basic” that I care a lot about: breaking the habit of writing boring, neutral content that might as well be written by a machine, and getting back to our authentic voices.

Enjoy this week’s goodies, and let us know in the comments if you have any “back to basics” resolutions of your own for the new year! We always love to hear what you’re working on. I’ll catch you next week …

— Sonia Simone
Chief Content Officer, Rainmaker Digital

Reader Comments (6)

Richard England says

January 5, 2017 at 8:58 AM

It would be nice if we went back to the basics of an email going out to subscribers when you publish a new blog! I keep missing a lot of great content �?
- Jett Williams says
  
  January 5, 2017 at 10:52 AM
  
  Hi Richard! We do send out this post as a weekly email digest; I’m sorry to hear that you’re not receiving those updates. Will you please drop a line to our Support Team via the form at the bottom of this page? They can check out what’s going on with that and help you get things sorted.
- Sonia Simone says
  
  January 6, 2017 at 1:23 AM
  
  I hear you Richard — folks were just being crushed by the volume of emails, so after a lot of conversations, we switched to the weekly digest.
  
  Every Thursday you can get this one delivered to your in-box (or you can swing by the blog and catch it here), and it will have links to everything, so you can quickly find the ones you’re most interested in …
Ravi Chahar says

January 5, 2017 at 10:12 PM

Hey Sonia,

I read the post by Stefanie and Brian.

The week was full of informative articles. How you read, edit the content means a lot.

People really need to understand the concept of blog writing as Stefanie has shared her experience.

~Ravi
Michael Gorman says

January 8, 2017 at 6:27 PM

I think the topic of editing has a lot of latent power! I am getting into the habit of reviewing articles written a while ago, and then re-shaping them to address new developments and indeed the quality and content, good call 🙂
Rahul says

January 16, 2017 at 10:27 PM

I think the topic of editing has a lot of latent power! I am getting into the habit of reviewing articles written a while ago.