I started work at ReferralCandy in February 2013. It’s easily been the most interesting, exciting and challenging year of my life so far.

Part of my job is to write blogposts that are useful and relevant to our target market. I’ve written 80 blogposts over the past year (and helped with perhaps a dozen or so more).

That averages out to 1 blogpost every 4.5 days, or every 3.25 working days. I wasn’t so consistent, though. In the first few months I was writing a post every two weeks or so. Towards the end of last year, I was writing a post nearly every weekday.

Here are the posts that I’m particularly proud of:

Marketing Stuff:

• SodaStream, Scarlett Johansson and the Streisand Effect I’ve always wanted to do a blogpost about the Streisand Effect, which is when getting something censored, hidden. This was a great opportunity.
• Analysing the marketing behind Coke’s Super Bowl 2014 ad. Multicultural marketing is here to stay, and it’s symptomatic of a multicultural USA and a multicultural world.
• Analyzing the marketing behind Guiness’s “phones down” ad. How the ad polarizes people in a way that is consistent with the brand’s image and ideals.
• Analyzing the marketing behind Axe’s Make Love, Not War ad. Ruminating on how even the young white male demographic is becoming more sophisticated (or at least wanting to feel that way). Marketing becoming aspirational and less crude.
• How To Sell Saxaphone Lessons In which I crowdsourced advice from veteran internet marketers on WarriorForum and assembled it into a coherent, actionable blogpost re: sales, marketing and copy.
• 5 classic sales and copy lessons from Charles Atlas. I normally try to avoid lists, but I think this one is a good one because it describes such a powerful example. Anytime your marketing seems to be suffering, think about what Charles Atlas would’ve done. (Well- technically, it was Charles Roman who did the marketing…)
• Marketing vs. Sales: What’s the difference? There’s a lot of overlap between the two, and for small businesses it might not be meaningful to make a distinction. It’s useful to think about, though. The more precise you are about your objectives, the better placed you are to acheive them.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was invented by a content marketer. It’s true! The comics were given away for free by Montgomery Ward, a retailer in the US. They got their in-house advertising copywriter Robert May to do it. Robert put his heart and soul into it, and it was so successful that it was distributed 6 times more than John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the bestselling book that year.
• The Evolution of Sinterklaas Ever wondered what a jolly old white man dressed in red had to do with the birth of Jesus? Turns out that Christmas is far less straightforward than you might think, and the festival as we know it borrows heavily from other elements from other cultures and festivals.
• Marketing Lessons from Ron Popeil and How would Ron Popeil have marketed the VCR? I happened to re-read Malcolm Gladwell’s What The Dog Saw, and the essay The Pitchman spoke to the marketer in me. I thought the ideas in the essay ought to be made accessible.
• Ecommerce marketing with limited resources. I started writing this as a response to an annoyingly simplistic blogpost about how content marketing ought to be.
• 12 simple marketing tips for your online store. Just the basics, laid out simply.
• How did Cookie Clicker get so popular? The study of a phenomenon. Game mechanics, social mechanics, baked-in marketing. (Hah.)
• 2014 Marketing Trends This was a collaboration between me and Desmond (my Statement co-founder!). I’m especially proud of this one, because I saw the original blogpost and immediately saw that it could’ve been improved upon- and so we did just that, and it paid off.

Referral Stuff

• Referral Marketing 101: What is a referral, exactly? I’ve learnt that taking the trouble to deliberately explain what seems obvious to you often reveals that it wasn’t nearly as obvious as you thought it was.
• The curious case of PayPal’s referral program. In which I consolidated everything I could possibly find about PayPal’s referral program in the early 2000s. I don’t think there’s any other single centralized blogpost that covers it in such detail.
• How referrals built the Dropbox empire. As with PayPal, I consolidated everything I could possibly find about Dropbox’s referrals and weaved it all together into a single post.

Ecommerce Stuff

• What’s the best way to develop an understanding of ecommerce? In which I analyze dozens of blogposts about ecommerce mistakes to make sense of meta-trends and patterns in what people talk about. I’m quite excited about this, and we’re going to use it to make a series of infographics.

Blogging/Thinking/Copy stuff:

• How and why blogging helps ecommerce retailers. Blogging is best thought of as a tool of inquiry. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Blogging is a great way to communicate why- and to find out, too.
• Ask Better Questions – A Response To Five Paragraph Essays by 42 Floors. If you’re not exploring something interesting, then you’re wasting everybody’s time- especially your own.
• How to communicate passion effectively. Headfake- talking about your passion is insufficient, because it’s easily replicable. You have to demonstrate passion by showing commitment and competence, in a way that others can’t replicate.
• The importance of good definitions. The reasoning behind some of the definition posts we’ve been doing. Clearer definitions lead to clearer thinking. (Also: Why is it so hard to define social media, and why should we care?)

Social Media Stuff:

• Social Networking Sites vs. Social Media: What’s the difference? The latter is emergent from the former. Networking sites are infrastructure, social media is a phenomenon.
• Social media is NOT Media gone “Social”. How social networking sites disrupted traditional media, forcing the latter to adapt.
• What IS social media? Disproportionately proud of this one, because me and my colleagues spent an inordinate amount of time arguing and debating about it. We were very insistent on getting precise, useful definitions.
• Why are people so annoying on social media? People haven’t changed, but we behave differently in different circumstances. And self-publishing is a relatively new phenomena- one which we aren’t quite equipped to navigate artfully. Not yet.

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I think I’ve grown a lot as a writer over the past year. I’ve gotten better at thinking, at grokking, at pretty much everything I do.

That aside, I do feel like my understanding of my ideal clients’ needs could be more precise. I’d like to better connect with specific individuals running ecommerce buinesses, to learn about their marketing journeys and struggles. I genuinely want to learn and help people do that stuff better, regardless of whether they use my team’s product. On top of my day-to-day work, I’m currently trying to figure out the best way to do that.

It’s pretty exciting.