← Blog Sep 22, 2021 · Ian Greenleigh · Originally published on Medium
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
If you could get away with breaking one marketing rule, what would you choose? What deeply ingrained, widely accepted “best practice” holds you back? Makes you love your job less?
Today I’m sharing a simple process for liberating yourself from the most restrictive, time-consuming, and utterly useless “rules” in marketing.
Step 1: Find an expensive rule
You feel the costs of following a rule like this — time, frustration, money, etc. — but you’re not sure about the benefit.
You’ve heard that blog posts should be 700 words, right? This little nugget wormed its way into my brain early in my career, mocking my preference for brevity. Let’s interrogate it.
Step 2: Quantify the costs
What does it cost you to follow the rule?
If I’m writing three 700-word blog posts a week (I am not, this is hypothetical), and each takes me 4 hours, this rule costs me 12 hours a week. That’s a big time-suck!
And let’s not forget #selfcare. Following this rule adds 20% stress to my job. Who needs that?
Write down as many costs as you can think of.
Step 3: Confront the downside
What bad things could happen if you ignore the rule? In our hypothetical, writing shorter pieces might…
As soon as you list the risks, rank them from most harmful to least harmful, then take out the risks that don’t actually scare you. If you care about audience growth, but time-on-page isn’t an important metric to you, you’d end up here: