I’m back! I took the summer off from blogging to focus on my family and my own business. But now I am back to posting regularly about content marketing. I always hated those essays that we had to write in the fall about what we did over our summer vacation, but I’m going to bring back good and bad memories by sharing with you what I learned over the summer. Over the next few weeks, I am going to elaborate on each one to share how you can use what I learned (the hard way) to grow your own business.

1. Taking time off actually helps me increase my income. This spring I found myself burned out and basically going through the motions with several projects. I decided that I needed a break to regroup so I didn’t work a lot this summer. But honestly, I thought about work a lot over the summer and it helped me refocus my business and realize what I wanted to focus on in the coming months. And once I started back to work, I was able to jump right back in and land some high paying gigs. Without the time off, I think I would have been too burned out to have the needed epiphany.
2. I do my best work when I am working on a project that I care about. I really like to do a good job on every project that I take. And it is time consuming and stressful to make extensive revisions and also know that you haven’t met your editors expectations. Although this doesn’t happen much, when it does happen, it is with a project that I took for reasons other than I cared about the company or was interested in the company. I realized that my best work comes when I am working on a project that I receive some personal satisfaction from. Yes, I realize it’s not possible to only do projects that fall in this category, but I have made a resolution to work to ensure that most of my projects are ones that I find meaningful.
3. It is possible to find content marketing writing gigs that are both meaningful and high paying. I originally thought that I couldn’t find both, but they are out there. You just have to look, and you have to expand your definition of meaningful. I wrote a series of articles this summer for a telecommunications company this summer, which is not where I would have thought I would find meaningful work. But the focus of the case studies and articles was about how the company has helped transform multiple communities through deploying broadband service. The stories of the impact were very eye-opening and I was proud to be able to help share their good work.

What did you learn this summer? Any topics you want me to cover this fall?