Holly Grace Callis

At this point, surviving as a content writer requires the emotional resilience of a Victorian child working in a factory knowing that steam-powered looms are coming. (Too niche? Sorry, that's the history teacher in me coming out.) But seriously, we're knee deep in the AI revolution, my pension is tied up in its unprecedented success, and AI is rewriting the rules of content as I type. The landscape used to change every three months. Now it changes from one day to another. You take your eye off the ball for a second and something new has happened. You build a strategy, get it approved, start executing, and by the time you have traction, the goalposts have moved entirely. Don't get me wrong, it's kind of exhilarating. (Maybe that's just the bootlicker in me -- hey we all need to work to live though, right?) But it requires a level of adaptability that is genuinely hard to maintain. If you are feeling completely overwhelmed by the pace of change right now, that is the correct response IMO. It IS overwhelming. The only way through it is to focus on the fundamentals: understand your customer, write clearly, and don't panic every time a new tool launches. Oh and also, have a back-up plan. Keep looking for jobs (my free newsletter Get That Money (GTM) 🤑 is a great place to start), build up your emergency fund if you can, and keep your skills up in AI. You're gonna need 'em. How are you handling the pace of change right now?

PSA: Can we stop writing content job posts looking for a ninja / magician / rockstar / wizard? 🥷🧙🎸🧙‍♂️ First of all, I PROMISE you that we're rolling our eyes reading it. It's not as innovative as you think. But second of all, this isn't attracting who you think it will. For my jobs newsletter Get That Money (GTM) 🤑 I look at a lot of hiring posts, and the language used to describe entry-level marketing roles is wild. They want a "marketing ninja" who can handle strategy, execution, design, SEO, and event management, all for a junior salary. When you use that kind of language, you are not attracting top talent. You are signalling that your company has no idea what the role actually entails, and that you expect one person to do the job of three. If you want to hire good people, write clear, honest job descriptions, looking for humans, not mythological creatures. Tell them exactly what the day-to-day looks like. Be transparent about the salary. And be REALISTIC about what one person can do in a day, please! Leave the unicorn hunting to Tinder (IYKYK) 🦄

Running a content agency means you are permanently living inside other people's chaos… Right now I am working across a couple of client accounts simultaneously, helping them build and streamline their content workflows. Every single one of them has the same underlying problem. The work itself is fine. Brilliant, even. The coordination around the work is a disaster. We have great ideas that get lost in a Google Doc that’s never opened again. We’ve got client feedback that lives in a call recording from last week that only one person has access to. Someone is chasing an approval that should have happened three days ago, and now that approver is OOO due to return in September 😅 It’s easy (and I’ve fallen into this trap before) to think the answer is fixed with more calls, a Slack channel, and a WhatsApp thread. But ask my PM Flo and she’ll tell you that midnight client WhatsApps is actually not the cure for all this stress… who knew?! So, on my hunt for a solution, I have been testing Axamy internally at Empowered English. And I love it. The thing that makes it different IMO is that it doesn't just organise the work (we’ve got Google Sheets coming out of our ears that do that). It actively works BTS to coordinate it all. It’s AI that follows up, does the chasing for you, and (this is the best) flags when something is about to become a problem before I have to jump into firefighter mode and my cortisol spikes. The best way I can describe it is that it does the job that usually falls to the person on your team who is brilliant at keeping everything moving. Except 24/7. Because, unfortunately for us agency owners, humans have to sleep 🫠🫠🫠 If you are running an agency or managing a team across multiple projects and the coordination overhead is keeping you up at night, first of all, I feel you. Second of all, you might want to try this. I’m such a fan that I’ve partnered with them to offer FREE VIP onboarding to my network when you book a setup call. Comment CHAOS for the link and I’ll pop it across. #ad

Before you come for me.... "LinkedIn isn't the PlaCe for mEMeS" "This isn't FAcEBooK" " That's not PRoFessIoNaL' Calm down. I'm just telling you my summer plans ☀️☀️☀️

Your homepage probably makes perfect sense to you... But that is exactly the problem! As you can probably imagine, I spend a lot of time auditing websites for clients. But what's surprising is that almost all of them suffer from the same blind spot. The founders and the marketing team know the product so intimately that they forget what it is like to be someone who has never heard of it. They use internal acronyms / jargon that an industry insider might understand, but that your average procurement person just doesn't (sorry). They reference features without explaining the benefit (or even who would use them at all). They write copy that assumes the reader already understands the problem the software solves, before they introduce it. It's the truth universally acknowledged, that when you are that close to the work, you stop writing for your customers... You end up writing for yourself. The most valuable thing an external content partner brings isn't just the better writing (although that certainly helps 🥰 ) It is the ability to look at your homepage with the eyes of someone who has no idea what you do, and point out what you need to change.