From the Host: Jeremy Rivera on Content Strategy & Marketing
Content strategy is one of those disciplines where everyone has an opinion and the quality of advice varies wildly. The guests I’ve brought on for this topic — from content directors at top agencies to solo practitioners who’ve built measurable content programs from scratch — share a common conviction: content that starts with the reader’s actual question, goes deep enough to genuinely answer it, and is written by someone who actually knows the topic will always outperform content that starts with a keyword. The briefing process, the measurement framework, the editorial standards — those are the levers. Not volume. Not AI tools. The decisions a human makes before the first word is written.
“Someone’s bullet point is someone else’s entire universe. I wrote a copy brief on divorce for a healthcare company — not the bullet point that said ‘divorce is a life change event’ but every question someone going through a divorce actually has about their insurance. That is helpful content.”
— Stephan Bajayo, Co-Founder of Vibe Logic
Why Content Strategy Is a Discipline, Not a Deliverable
Content marketing fails most often not because of poor writing — it fails because the strategy upstream of the writing is wrong. The wrong audience, the wrong format, the wrong distribution channel, the wrong success metric. Content strategy is the discipline of making those upstream decisions correctly before any writing happens.
The guests on this page have collectively built content programs that drive measurable business outcomes — from enterprise brands to affiliate sites to B2B service companies. Their frameworks for briefing, measuring, distributing, and iterating on content are the foundation of every high-performing content program I’ve encountered.
Episodes on Content Strategy & Marketing
Julia Bocchese: Pinterest Is a Search Engine and Small Businesses Are Sleeping on It
Julia Bocchese — Founder, Julia Renee Consulting | SEO professor and Pinterest strategist for creative and holistic businesses
Julia teaches SEO without textbooks because anything printed a year ago is already outdated — and her content strategy advice reflects the same standard of currency. Her most persistent observation from client work: small businesses write copy for bots, not for the humans who are actually going to pay them. Her framework for building content that serves readers first while hitting the keyword signals that drive organic discovery is one of the most practically applicable in the library — and her case for Pinterest as a content distribution channel with multi-year compounding is one most businesses completely miss.
“I keep seeing clients focusing their copy more on writing for the bots crawling their website rather than writing for the humans that are actually going to be hiring them and giving them money.” — Julia Bocchese
Content Strategy & the Art of the Brief with Nina Payne
Nina Payne — Content Director
Nina’s focus on the content brief as the most undervalued document in the content production process is exactly right. Her framework for writing briefs that consistently produce rankable, useful output — and the specific elements that writers most often ignore — is the kind of operational excellence that separates content programs that compound from ones that churn.
Melissa Popp: Why Digital Marketers Need to Stop Reverse Engineering Google
Melissa Popp — Founder, Rickety Roo
Melissa’s argument is one I keep coming back to: obsessing over algorithm changes is the wrong game entirely. The content programs that survive every update are the ones built around what users actually need, not what Google’s current ranking signals seem to reward.
Bridging SEO with Multi-Channel Marketing: My Conversation with Melissa Popp
Melissa Popp — Content Strategy Director, Rickety Roo
In a second conversation with Melissa, we go deeper on what it actually looks like to connect local SEO with a multi-channel content strategy — and why the future belongs to brands that show up consistently everywhere their audience looks.
Content Marketing Mastery with Cauvée: How to Build Your Personal Brand Empire
Cauvée — The Inspiration Engineer
Cauvée’s framework for building a personal brand empire through content — category kingship, the law of reciprocity, and what’s actually working on Substack right now — brings an energy and creative perspective to content marketing that the more technical episodes don’t.
Measuring Content Marketing Results with Brie E Anderson
Brie E Anderson — Founder, Beast Analytics
Brie’s work on connecting organic traffic to real business outcomes — rather than the vanity metrics most content reports feature — is one of the most practically important episodes in the library for anyone trying to prove content ROI to a skeptical client or executive.
How Kate Toon is Shaping the Digital Landscape: Creative Copywriting Meets SEO
Kate Toon — Award-Winning Business Mentor, Author & Founder, Recipe for SEO Success
Kate has been making the case for good SEO writing — copy that serves readers while satisfying search engines — since before most practitioners took content quality seriously.
User Satisfaction and Content Measurement with Jen Boland
Jen Boland — Founder, Satisfyly
Jen has built her entire practice around one question: is your content actually satisfying users? Her frameworks for measuring user satisfaction surface the gap between content that looks good in analytics and content that actually serves the reader.
Psychology Meets Marketing: Episode Recap with Rai Hyde Cornell
Rai Hyde Cornell — Creator of the ELITE Method
Rai brings the psychology of decision-making directly into content marketing strategy — and the result is a framework for creating content that doesn’t just attract visitors but actually moves them toward action.
Sam Partland: Living the Dream — Programmatic SEO Nomad Life
Sam Partland — Freelance SEO & Programmatic SEO Specialist
Sam’s programmatic SEO work — building scalable content architectures at the intersection of data and templates — represents one end of the content strategy spectrum.
Joe Fisher on Boosting Sales with Ecommerce SEO Grandchild Pages
Joe Fisher — eCommerce SEO Consultant, Fisher SEO
Joe’s work on eCommerce grandchild pages — the deep sub-category and product-level content architecture that drives long-tail conversion traffic — is one of the most practical eCommerce content strategy frameworks available.
Katie Wagner: SEO & Journalism Are the Answer to LLMs AND Google Too
Katie Wagner — Founder, KWSM Digital Marketing | Former CNN Journalist
Katie’s transition from CNN to content marketing agency founder gave her a unique lens: journalistic rigor is the content standard that Google and AI engines alike are trying to reward.
An Insider View of Profit-Led Money Hat SEO with Jamie I.F.
Jamie I.F. — SEO Affiliate & SaaS Marketer
Jamie’s profit-led approach to content — where every piece is evaluated against its direct revenue contribution, not just its traffic potential — is one of the starkest contrasts to the brand-awareness-first content philosophy in the library.
Jeremy’s Key Takeaways: Content Strategy & Marketing
- Write for the human who pays you, not the bot that crawls you. The bots don’t have cash. Copy optimized for algorithms at the expense of clarity, trust, and persuasion is the most common and most fixable content failure.
- The brief is the strategy. The quality of your content brief determines the quality of your output more than the quality of your writers. Invest disproportionately in the upstream decisions.
- Depth beats volume every time. One piece that fully answers a reader’s question at the level of depth they need will outperform ten pieces that each partially address related queries.
- Measure satisfaction, not just traffic. Traffic metrics tell you whether people found you. Satisfaction metrics tell you whether you helped them. The latter drives the signals that move organic performance over time.
- Human voice is a competitive moat, not just a preference. As AI content floods the web, the content that’s demonstrably written by someone with real experience and a real point of view becomes increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
- Distribution strategy is part of content strategy. Content that no one reads doesn’t help anyone. Building the distribution channel — newsletter, social, podcast, PR — is as important as building the content itself.
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