Exciting news! Having seen the success of the Weird Marketing blog posts, we are going to be rebranding our entire website within a month.
New title. New URL. Complete commitment to the article style that the vast majority of readers are coming to the website for.
Why change?
When we initially started Marketing is the Product in 2019, the goal was simple: write the kind of articles that new business owners would find really useful. Basically, compile a bunch of 101-level articles so that anyone, regardless of professional experience, can learn the ropes of marketing. Hence the Start to Finish: Market Your Small Business for the First Time series.
We’re proud of that work, yes! But over the last three years, the purpose of this blog has shifted a few times. We were always trying to find our unique angle in the world. Our own market position in the crowded blogosphere, if you will.
We dabbled in answering short questions with short posts. We dabbled in coronavirus-era speculation about how the virus would change business forever. For a while there, we even had a podcast.
But none of these exactly took off the way we had hoped. Start to Finish was an attempt to do work done already by websites like HubSpot and our podcast came to an end when my cohost Pierson moved onward and upward with his career. Quick Questions never quite answered questions with a level of detail I found satisfying. And, Coronavirus Case Studies, well…it aged like milk, as most speculation does.
Our Weird Marketing articles are resonating
But our series Weird Marketing Lessons really started to work. Basically, we talk about how you can find business lessons in the strangest places, from pop stars to gas stations, old video games to wrestling. Even without a serious social media plan or any advertising, our posts have been working their way up the Google rankings. Traffic is up, time on site is up, and referral traffic is up.
Stats like that don’t lie. It’s clear that many of our readers have grown weary of how-to guides and listicles. That’s why we’re leaning into the weird, wild, and wonderful. We’re writing about what we love and tying it back to business whenever and wherever we can. It is more educational than I could have thought possible.
In order to do that properly, we think it’s necessary to rename our website and refresh its design. “Marketing is the Product” is fine for communicating the message we wanted to in 2019, but “Weird Marketing Tales” is a lot closer to who we want to be in 2022 and beyond.
We’re not removing anything, but we’re adding a lot
For all the changes we’re going to be making, we’re not removing any posts. We’re proud of our body of work and we’re going to leave every word of it intact. In fact, we’re going to make it easy to go through our entire catalog if you want to.
But we’re adding a lot! First, we’re releasing a free 16,000 word eBook called Experimental Marketing: Turn Your Curiosity into Success. It’s basically a distillation of everything that I have learned in over a decade of marketing.
It’s not a book of one-size-fits-all advice. It’s instead a guide on how to use your curiosity to form good questions which you can test with well-designed experiments. In other words, it’s a field guide on how to form your own marketing strategies. It is literally a list of the processes I use to provide marketing consulting to our clients. And like I said totally free.
If that weren’t enough, we’re also going to be rolling out a companion email series that breaks the book into smaller, more digestible chunks. Plus, we’re going to just keep on cranking out Weird Marketing posts because we know that’s what you’re probably here for!
A few more words
Just because we’re marketers doesn’t mean we always know what people want to read from the get-go. Just like you, we have to try different things out and see what people respond to. We’ve finally found a niche that we enjoy and that others enjoy reading. Now it’s time to commit 100% to that path!
