Internet Marketing Archives

The Freedom to Be Real: Why Authenticity Is Your Best Content Strategy

Authenticity is what’s present when the content you create is genuinely yours.

Everyone says ‘be authentic.’ Almost nobody explains what that actually means—or how to do it consistently.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Authentic content marketing is the practice of creating content that genuinely reflects your organization’s real perspective, earned expertise, and distinctive voice—rather than content optimized to appear credible, sound authoritative, or match what competitors are publishing. It’s grounded in what you actually believe, what you’ve actually experienced, and what you genuinely understand about your audience—not in what performs well in the abstract.

Authentic, admittedly, is one of the most overused words in marketing. It’s also one of the most important and consistently misunderstood.

When most brands say they want to be ‘more authentic,’ what they usually mean is: they want to seem more relatable. More human. Less corporate.

Those are reasonable goals. But that’s not really authenticity.

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Mid-Year Content Audit: 6 Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Right Now

What’s working? What’s not? A content audit can help you answer these questions.

You don’t need to review every post you’ve ever published. You just need to ask the right six questions.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

A content marketing audit is a systematic review of content to evaluate performance, relevance, and strategic alignment. An audit identifies what’s working, what needs updating, and what’s no longer serving your audience or your goals. Mid-year mark is an ideal time to conduct one: enough of the year has passed to generate meaningful performance data, and enough time remains to act on what you find.

We’re at the halfway point of 2026. If you’ve been publishing consistently, you now have a body of work worth examining. Not obsessing over, not rebuilding from scratch. Examining.

A mid-year content audit doesn’t require a team, a consultant, or a spreadsheet with a thousand rows.

It requires six honest questions and the willingness to act on the answers.

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From Blog to Brand: The Smart Content Repurposing Playbook

Strategically repurposing your content helps drive greater exposure and optimizes your budget.

Don’t let your carefully crafted content die a slow death.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

Content repurposing takes the approach of “create once, use multiple times.” It’s designed to extend the life of your copy to both leverage exposure and gain efficiency. By adapting a single, well-crafted piece of content into multiple format and channels you maximize your return on every hour invested in creating that content.

Done well, it’s one of the highest-leverage moves in a content marketer’s toolkit. Done poorly, it’s just copy-paste.

The difference is strategy.

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Content Calendars That Actually Work: A Practitioner’s Guide

The calendar is infrastructure. The content is personality.

The goal isn’t a perfect plan. It’s a plan you can actually keep.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

A content calendar (also called an editorial calendar) is a planning tool that maps out what content an organization will publish, in what format, on which channels, and on what schedule—typically planned one to three months in advance. An effective content calendar balances evergreen and timely content, builds in flexibility for responsive publishing, and is designed around a publishing cadence the team can sustain—not around an aspirational schedule that collapses on contact with competing priorities.

Many companies and individuals these days continue to be focused on creating and distributing content in a never-ending cycle. It’s a cycle that demands new ideas, new copy, new images, new hashtags, new social media posts, new, new, new, new, new…

At the same time they need to ensure that their content is relevant and, to the extent possible, capitalizes on current events, news cycles, holidays, and emerging audience interests.

That can be a challenge.

Content calendars can help. Or hurt.

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The 2026 Content Marketing Imperative: Know Your Audience

If you can understand who your shadow buyers are and what they need, you’ll get to a place where you truly know your audience.

Copy that resonates requires knowing your audience—intimately. How are you doing with that?

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

Audience understanding in content marketing is the practice of developing specific, research-grounded knowledge of who your target readers or customers are—their challenges, motivations, behaviors, and preferences—and using that knowledge to create content that resonates precisely rather than broadly. It is widely considered the foundational competency of effective content strategy: content that doesn’t know who it’s for cannot connect with anyone in particular.

Every day, without fail, two very different kinds of content appears in my inbox and on the various social media channels I follow.

One kind captures my attention and gets me to start reading, sometimes dragging me down a rabbit hole that I really wish I hadn’t been dragged down…

The other kind: meh. Generic, boilerplate, trite. Copy that literally any brand could have created. It’s not personal. It’s not specific. It doesn’t speak to me.

The difference between those two experiences has nothing to do with budget, production value, or even writing skill. It comes down to one thing: how well the brand actually knows its audience.

This is not a new principle.

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LinkedIn Newsletters: Best Practices for Success

You should be using this cost effective marketing tool

LinkedIn suggests that LinkedIn Newsletters are one of the most effective features for content distribution, and they’re certainly growing in use but individuals and companies. But, do they really offer value, and in what way?

We sought input from LinkedIn experts who are using LinkedIn Newsletters—some with a great following and some just starting out—to get their insights, best practices, and actionable tips on how to make the most of this platform to grow and engage with a LinkedIn audience.

What you need to know about leveraging LinkedIn newsletters

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Best Practices for Finding, Connecting With and Engaging “Shadow Buyers”

Are invisible prospects costing you sales?

Today’s digital commerce environment means that marketers can learn a lot about consumers who are interested in their products and services. But while that can be a boon for marketers, it’s not something that all prospects feel favorably about.

In fact, a rising number of consumers are actively taking steps to avoid being detected. They don’t want the bother. They don’t want the intrusion. And they don’t relish the feeling of violation that comes from being served up offers immediately after checking something out on your website.

How to bring them out of the shadows

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Using Generative AI (GenAI) to Create Video Marketing and Sales Content

GenAI tools are dramatically simplifying the video production process

Video used to be very expensive and time-consuming for companies and individuals to produce. Then, with the widespread adoption of smartphones that came with the ability to capture video seamlessly, and an associated drop in viewers’ expectations of high-quality output, the cost and time requirements for video production have declined precipitously.

The most recent impact on the cost and time required to produce video content is generative AI (GenAI) which has become a transformative force in video production across the entire creation process.

Ongoing Popularity of Video Prompts Adoption

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Evaluating New Entrants to the World of Gen AI

GenAI Tools You Need to Know About

ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) tool, was released by OpenAI, and that tool was soon quietly followed by other entrants to the space, including Perplexity and Claude. Then DeepSeek burst onto the scene, far from quietly, in January 2025. Almost immediately, tech companies started to worry because DeepSeek supposedly represented a low-cost option, but now experts are saying that may not be the case.

But DeepSeek isn’t the only disruptive entrant in the space. There are a continually growing number of tools and features that content creators need to know about.

Staying on top of a continually evolving GenAI landscape

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A Step-by-Step Process for Gen-AI Search Optimization

Preparing for the World of GenAI-Driven Search

As more and more consumers are turning to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity instead of Google when they’re looking for answers to questions, or doing research, brands are taking notice.

Long-term reliance on Google search, and traditional approaches to search engine optimization (SEO), aren’t necessarily relevant in this rapidly changing search environment. Google search isn’t going away, but GenAI-driven search is having a growing impact.

What do you need to know, and do, to make sure your website doesn’t fall into oblivion?

Key Recommendations a One-Year Plan

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