Ashley Walton

I attended a great panel this morning at Denver Startup Week called "How Hiring Fractional Talent Can Drive Quick Wins for Small and Medium Size Businesses." I'm about to hit my one year anniversary of becoming a fractional SEO Director, and a lot of what the panel discussed really resonated with what I see as the value I bring to my clients every day. Some of the key advantages of working with fractional talent include: - You are able to hire higher caliber talent than you may be able to afford if you were to hire a full-time employee. - You get a brutally honest voice in the room. We aren't politicking or angling for a promotion. Your success is our success too. - You get quicker execution from fractional talent. Onboarding is shorter, meetings are fewer, and there is more intentionality around our goals and work because our time is more limited. - Your organization benefits from us working with other clients. We will get you out of the "we've always done it this way" mindset and provider fresh perspectives on how others have approached your challenges. If you're looking for fractional SEO or content strategy help, or you are interested in getting into the fractional world, my DMs are open! #denverstartupweek #fractionalleader #fractionalhiring #fractionaladvantage

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Back to one of my favorite strands to write about: Adding more value to your B2B SaaS content (and making it different from the rest). A typical SaaS blog post contains: Typical headings, a mix of long and short paragraphs, some advice, some idealism, and a lot of similarity to what you'll find when you hit back and click link number 2. What about a strategy where we go for a really helpful book-style content approach? Create articles so rich and varied around something really complicated, say, setting up a content marketing for scratch for a new website. Order that content in a series like a YouTube playlist. Ask the gentle reader to read it in a sequential way. Number them. Have quizzes and follow-ups to assure your readers are actually finding value in what they're reading. Collect feedback. Reach out, perhaps in person, and ask if they found what they read helpful. Help as much for free. Trust and revenue will come in automatically. But remember, super-helpful, super-rich content has to play a fundamental role here. And such content needs budget, resources, and time.

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<rant> For most of my life, I made my living as a writer. I've never particularly been a "grammar N*zi," and I've always welcomed linguistic evolutions that rankle other, more prescriptive, writers. But. I've noticed a recent trend that drives me bonkers. This one. Y'know, where every sentence in a LinkedIn post or Substack note is a standalone paragraph? I get why people do it. It encourages people to click through to see the whole post. And it's a cheap way to make each sentence seem important. And maybe, for some, it makes it easier to read. (I can't even fully commit to the bit, so I'm going to stop this nonsense.) I'm all for brevity, conciseness, and directness. After all, I'm a journalist. But while the occasional one-sentence paragraph does lend more weight to the idea it conveys, writing an entire post that way has the opposite effect: In order for emphasis to be effective, it has to stand in contrast to everything around it. The Pixies made a whole career out of that approach to music. But whatever your reason for separating all your posts into single-sentence paragraphs ... Just stop. </rant>

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🎶 The weather outside was frightful And my content plan not so delightful With nowhere to spend my (last quarters) dough Let it snow let it snow let it snow (Record stops abruptly) Anyway … If you are looking for a little bit of help with your content calendar planning for 2025, or extra writing support send me a DM. I offer one-one content strategy consults that help create content clarity for mid to enterprise scale businesses and content departments. (Yule) not regret it when you get in touch. (Puns included)

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I’ve never really told you all what I actually do for a living, so here you go Pisgah Peaks Ventures builds & manages fractional marketing team for SMBs that are doing under 10-15 M ARR. The teams could be anywhere from 2 to 20+ individuals. Hiring for PT marketing roles can be a big drain on small businesses. They're unsure of who to hire, how to train, and they def don't want to manage them. This keeps costs in check (no office space here!) + avoids costly benefits / W2 wages. Perfect clients for us? B2B companies with 1-2 internal marketing team members Dispensaries with 2-5 locations. Soloprenuers who are scaling from 6 > 7 figures. A few years ago we started investing into other small businesses & at this point have equity in a handful of other SMBs. The goal? By 45; be able to live off the proceeds of our portfolio and golf 4X a week. To my network.... Tell us What do you do? Why do you do it? Post in the comments!

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You know what's *never* a fun topic? Crisis communications. But you know what's so, so much worse than talking about it? Getting blindsided by a crisis, and having to put together a strategy, team, and messaging alllllllll on the fly and under significant stress. Trust me: putting together a plan isn't as difficult of an exercise as you may think, and you'll come out the other side feeling SO much more confident about the future. Here are the major keys: 📕 PREPARATION: Every company should have a solid crisis communication plan. It’s not about if a crisis will happen; it’s about when. A clear, pre-approved communication strategy can make all the difference. 🔎 TRANSPARENCY: In a crisis, honesty builds trust. Employees, customers, and stakeholders need to know what’s happening, what you’re doing about it, and how they will be impacted. (Even if you don't have anything new to share, saying something is better than saying nothing at all.) In my experience, those who communicate effectively in a crisis not only manage the situation but also come out so much stronger on the other side. It's about guiding your team and your organization through the storm with clarity, empathy, and resilience. (Don't want to write a crisis communications plan from scratch? I'll send you our template & a completely filled-out example! ✅ ) #crisiscommunication #internalcommunication

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Calling all DTC marketers, copywriters, and you fine folk who love work distractions… Issue 35 of the Weekly Round Up is LIVE! Here’s what I’m covering this week: 1️⃣ Copy Tip: Contrast creates interest 2️⃣ User Journey Maps 3️⃣ The Psychology of Influencers 4️⃣ Encourage Comparisons in Your Reviews (and Why) 5️⃣ Podcast Pick of the Week 6️⃣ Pretty Cool Copy Examples 7️⃣ Job Opportunities Wanna take a peek? Read it here: https://lnkd.in/e7877HFr #copywriter #copywriting #emailmarketing #DTC — 👋 My name is Matt, Director of Copy at Homestead Studio. Follow me for copy strategies, tips and tricks, and industry insights to help you write better words.

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📥 From Editor-Are you always so effiecient? Me-Yes it's my best practice to respond with in an hour if not minutes. 👩🏼‍💻 Editor-Wow, I am amazed. You should work for Google and Apple and a few others —because my emails are log jammed overthere. 🎤 Me-I’m here for you to be successful. Tip: Don’t forget that every email is a priority in PR and business. #publicrelations #mediarelations #PR #clientengagement

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I’m gonna mix a little bit of info with a lil sharing. If you know me this is pretty standard behavior. I was chatting with someone about programmatic direct mail and incrementality. When I think of incrementality I think of stickiness vs reach. Showing your ad to a new person is dope, but the data shows that channel diversification is more about breaking through the noise then unlocking a new audience. If you’re spending in the millions there’s a pretty good chance you’re hitting a lot of your target demo on digital channels. Tell me the last 10 meta ads you saw? 5? Tell me one meta ad you saw today? (This brings up another convo of frequency in this evolved digital age but Idk best practices) it takes a lot for something to stick so if you’re going to a new channel for incrementaltiy choose channels that are going to stick. Hence programmatic DM. When you start testing I’d think of it as a lift channel. Part of your lifecycle nurture flow. Test with unconverted audiences and see if it lifts. Then use the lifted to lal for prospecting. Ok the other thing. I was chatting with a brilliant marketer who complemented my posts and it gave me the biggest imposter syndrome ever. I thought about it a bit and I think it’s because all of these posts are the results of failures, experiments, and learning from other great marketers. Plan A has worked so rarely I could count it on my hands. The speedy pivot to plan B, C, & D is the real gold. I’m learning new stuff constantly because I care about marketing (I’m learning about social media right now). I’ll probably suck at it for a bit and then I’ll get good and write something about it if I think it can be helpful. Idk just thought I’d share.

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“Can you make an editorial calendar? It can be quick.” 🫣 I’m guessing every content marketer has been asked to create an editorial calendar in their role. Watch my video to see 4 things I’ve done wrong when making editorial calendars during my time at Salesforce. Managing an editorial calendar SHOULD be pretty straightforward. At its most basic level, an editorial calendar answers three questions: 🎤 What’s being posted? 🧐 When? ☕️ Where? But I’ve run into plenty of complexity when managing editorial calendars over the years. Questions come up like: 😛 This calendar is too detailed. Where’s the exec-facing view? 🤓 Can we include <these other company milestones> in the calendar? 🤠 How do these individual pieces of content support <these company themes or priorities>? 🤩 Who is the audience for this? How much content are we making for each audience? You can up-level the complexity of your content calendar depending on the size of your company and what you’re trying to do. Our editorial calendars at Salesforce are now pretty robust. 😂 But ultimately, I think content marketers should be focused on making a rock-solid content strategy first. THEN you use the calendar as an important planning tool in your toolkit. Making a great editorial calendar is usually not “quick.” But it’s definitely valuable. If your current calendar is not working for you, change it up! ✌️ Check out the video for more editorial calendar pitfalls from my experience. What’s your approach to editorial calendars? Simple or fancy? Updated by many folks, or managed by one content lead? I’d love to know! Shoutout to my bud Devin Reed for requesting the topic of editorial calendars! I’m open to more suggestions, y’all.

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Been getting my hands dirty with a few more Ecomm brands as of late. Fun when you get to work with brands who have built up a good reputation, but have basically neglected doing any SEO. Lots of wins to be had. July YoY stats for one of my top performers: +25% in organic traffic (wasn't a small number to begin with) +32% in revenue from organic traffic (also not a small number to begin with) +145% in organic traffic to blog +282% in sales from organic traffic to blog (this, in fairness, was a smaller number) What I've focused on with them: 1. SEO titles for product pages Like many big brands who neglect SEO, they were primarily getting traffic to their product pages for brand terms. I found some good, relevant keywords that each page could actually rank for, and changed the page titles. 2. Links We build links to two places - product pages and blog articles. But we only build links to: a) blog pages that have commercial intent (think "best [category] for [problem]" type topics) b) product pages where the competition has a lot of links too We'd typically build links to the homepage too, but this brand is well known in their space and picks up links there naturally. So we put their budget towards a and b above instead. 3. Content This brands' customers do a lot of research about products in the space. They're looking at which products are best for specific desires, comparing products, and how specific products help their pain points. These are all perfect opportunities for us to create content on and bring in more customers for the brand. If these steps sound obvious, it's because they are. What's not obvious is how you pull the strings across each. Finding the *right* keywords to use in a product page's title, knowing which pages need and will respond to links, and choosing blog content topics that drive revenue.

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Here's my first post in my new Substack What's Next Tech newsletter. It's a how-to on Perplexity Company Pages, which may be an under-the-radar SEO booster. Please subscribe. :)

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"It's beginning to look a lot like..." The incredibly busy end-of-year when your teams are trying to balance work, getting in that PTO, and family time with projects that need movement, wrapping up, new ideas, and so on. Everyone's sharing productivity hacks and tips for managing the chaos. Here's my radical suggestion: Do less. Not everything needs your energy right now. Not every email needs an immediate response. Not every meeting needs to happen this week. I once watched a brilliant leader handle pre-holiday overwhelm. Her secret? A sticky note with three words: "Impact or Cancel." That's it. Every task, meeting, or decision got measured against those words. And her productivity? Through the roof. I've never forgotten it. Sometimes the simplest solution is just permission to prioritize. #KeepItSimple #Leadership #Productivity"

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We're making outbound work like it used to. This is a tall task, but we're always up for the challenge. Here's how we're doing it: 1. The foundation is deliverability. I've talked in depth about this, but for the sake of this post I'll keep it relatively simple. We set each of our clients up with diversified infrastructure across both Gmail and Outlook, and actually split campaigns by utilizing mx records. What this means is that we bucket campaigns into 3 buckets. Google accounts, Microsoft accounts, and others like proofpoint, mimecast, etc. We test everything and are seeing a clear shift towards higher deliverability when sending to Google inboxes. I'm sure this will be temporary, but as of today, Google wins. By a lot. 2. We still build cold lists. This is less effective than it used to be, but it still works. We build lists with Apollo.io, Salesnav, custom scrapes, ZoomInfo, etc. We filter everything through Clay to optimize deliverability, normalize data, and reduce contact count per company. These are the basics. Don't send to 50 people at one company. Quickest way to get blocked. 3. We use a TON of triggers. We use website deanonymization tools like RB2B, Koala, Vector, etc. to identify RELEVANT website traffic from specific pages and key search terms to find people that are currently in market. We also use Trigify.io heavily to monitor social engagement on LinkedIn. This is a bit of a hack. We're able to utilize top creators on LinkedIn to build the highest quality lists. From here, we actually create VERY specific campaign copy for each individual contact at scale. More on this to come next week. This section deserves more detail. I'll expand on this next week. 4. We write exceptional copy and have an unfair advantage in knowing what resonates in the market. We have nearly 30 active clients, so we have a ton of 1st party data to utilize when it comes to copy angles. We trust the statistics. 5. We NEVER send to email addresses that aren't validated. This goes hand in hand with #1, but if you aren't scrubbing your lists with tools like BounceBan (Verify risky emails without sending messages) or LeadMagic, you will stop landing in the primary inbox within a matter of days, sometimes even hours. Bounce rates matter. Campaign variations matter. Copywriting matters. More on this also next week. if you've read this far, here's a quick tip. Assign the same mailboxes to multiple campaigns, and make sure each of those campaigns has multiple variations. This is a cheat code for extending the life of your inboxes and landing in the primary inbox.

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Content Marketing has a PR problem. At least that's what "The State of (Dis)Content" survey is telling me. "[we are] viewed in an org as a service provider, not a strategic partner." "My company refuses to see the strategic role that written content can play." "[When] you also have strategic goals to meet, most of the times the goals are pushed aside for yet another "urgent" ask from sales or execs." Thing is... content is on the front lines of all inbound and bridges the gap between company and customer. So what can content marketers do to become seen as more strategic partners. I've got my own thoughts that I'll share in the final report, but I'm curious to know what you think?

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I was on a call recently with a CEO and head of marketing - boy, could I feel the tension. There was unspoken history bleeding into the call that became apparent over the course of the conversation. The marketer explicitly stated she feels undervalued half way through the call. I typically get the privilege of either auditing, supporting with hiring marketers or bolstering the existing marketing lead as an advisor. So this experience isn’t a one off. Where I come in and spot there’s a real issue around emotional security. The business is behind targets which is part of the reason the CEO wanted me in, but the marketing lead kept flaking on our scheduled appointments after that call. I get why she would, because she’s not felt valued or secure in her role for the past 2 years. I’ve noticed there are two ways your marketing lead can respond when a new authority enters your business to help. 1. Curiosity with an openness to learn. 2. They see said authority as a threat. Before I get into what you can do about this, let’s break down the 3 key principles of emotional security: • Trust & transparency: Acts with integrity and communicates openly • Psychological safety: Share ideas and concerns without fear • Recognition & appreciation: Regularly acknowledged & rewarded Based on HBR study (I was deep delving into this topic to formulate my thoughts) the upside of feeling emotionally secure: 50% more productive, 76% more engaged + more loyal. That’s pretty significant. Ok so what can you do as a leader? Well, what you can’t do is force it. If someone in your team feels insecure you’re going to struggle to get buy-in. Any new person is a threat, regardless of whether it’s right for the business. The only option is to work with that person until they feel secure enough (by following the above 3 principles) or evaluate if they are still the right fit for your business. I've seen a fair few companies lead with fear. • 'If you don't achieve targets, the business will shut down' • 'If you don't achieve targets, we'll find someone who can' • 'We're losing to competitors, go quicker, and then even quicker' I reckon the adrenaline hit from fear mongering wears thin after a few months. So use sparingly (if at all). It’s on you as a leader to build emotional security to unlock business growth. Or else you’ll always struggle when you bring in support.

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Remote work is great -- no commute, possibly sleeping in a little, I can run an errand if I need to -- but the trappings of home can be a thing. Especially if your work space isn't completely separate from other spaces. Ideally, I'd have a dedicated office. A place solely for work. But I don't; I can see my bed from my desk. So how do I make sure my remote day still involves, you know, work? ✨️I make myself presentable. I shave. I shampoo my hair and wash my face. I brush my teeth. I don't shower (unless I know I'll have to be in public), but basic grooming habits clue my brain in that today is not a relax day (and it helps me appear human if I have to hop on Zoom). ✨️I wear a shirt representing my employer. Easy to do, as I work for a university, but an ODU t-shirt or sweater is just another clue for my brain that we're supposed to be in work mode. Even if you just wear a polo or a button down to be "screen presentable," doing more than just sweats or PJs can shift your mindset. ✨️The personal computer stays off. During work hours, I remain on my work computer. This is both a matter of convenience and another way I separate the work from the personal. ✨️I log in *before* eating my breakfast and making my coffee. That way, when I'm done with food and I've got my mug, work is already staring at me. Ultimately, it's getting my brain to recognize that while my surroundings scream home and relaxation, I still have work to do. Working from home definitely has its benefits, but I've found it requires a level of self-discipline and responsibility being in the office doesn't. I mean, the TV and the PlayStation are RIGHT THERE...

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If you want a wildly profitable content distribution platform, it's best not to pay for your content... % of revenue spent on content by platform: YouTube: ~55% Spotify: ~70% Netflix: ~45% TikTok, Facebook & Instagram: Effectively 0% !!! % profit margin by platform: YouTube: 0-10% (maybe? revenue is public but not profit) Spotify: 1-2% Netflix: 10-20% TikTok, FB, IG: 40-50% !!! The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was convincing the world that social content wasn't worth paying for.

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What a timely reminder of how to run a great content crit from our friends at Button. I think how you run a crit says a lot about how you do a lot of things. When I started as Head of Content at Practice Better one of the first things I did was set up a weekly content crit. (We call it Content Jam, because of course we do.) Everyone across the whole company is welcome to attend, present, and give feedback. Because the point of Content Jam is to: 1. Create a community of practice that you feel a part of no matter where you sit in our org or what your title might be. Content is truly everyone's job, especially in an org of our size and at our stage of growth. 2. Make sure that all content across the whole user journey is on brand, on message, clear, consistent, and yep, delightful, in its own special way. (Delight means a lot of things in content, but we'll leave that aside for now.) Because my (incredible, wonderful, collaborative, and badass) team doesn't just own marketing content, we own content across the whole customer journey. From the first time you meet our brand to the whateverth time you open the app and run your business upon it. Why do I love this Button post so very much? Because it: 1. Offers a terrific refresher of what I call our Rules of the Road. How to run a great crit. How to make it a good, supportive, and useful experience for everyone involved. 2. Calls out how a person should feel after they present their content and get feedback on it. If crit is a product, what's the user experience? How do they FEEL after it's all said and done? Well, you should feel: - Supported - Refreshed - Confident - Motivated I'll be honest, I think this goes for a lot of interactions. I hope this is how you feel after a 1:1 with me. After a company-wide All Hands. After an async check-in on Slack. I hope you feel supported, refreshed, confident, and motivated. I try to design those interactions so that's how it goes. And isn't that how we want people to feel after they stumble across (or even find) our content? After they use our product? I think most, if not all, content teams are aiming for that. But this post is a great reminder that it all starts at home. You can't design supportive, refreshing, motivating, and confidence-building content unless you're actively building a supportive, refreshing, motivating, and confidence-building team. It all comes back to how we treat each other. Like we used to say at HubSpot, your culture is a product, too. You should spend at least as much time on thoughtfully shaping and refining it as you do the software you build.

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