A Very Good Day: Guest Speaking at Wesleyan University about Branded Content
Well, this is great news. Based on feedback on last year’s presentation, Dr. Rachel Besharat Mann asked me back to Wesleyan University to educate students about branded content. Last week, I led a 90-minute interactive session for Dr. Mann’s Contemporary Literacy class. The students were fantastic — prepared, engaged, and eager to ask questions and […]
Branded Content August Roundup
School is back in session here in Ridgefield, CT. Where did the time go? August was a great month! We kicked it off with our annual trip to Cape May, NJ with dear family and friends. We closed it with a family trip to Lake Winnipesaukee (pictured!). When I wasn’t enjoying some needed downtime, I […]
The Time I Got to be a Branded Content Professor for a Day
When branded content is done right, everybody “wins”: the audience, the sponsor, and the publisher. But we need to educate audiences about this fast-growing space: what it is, and isn’t, how it differs from traditional journalism, and how to tell if you are are engaging with content that has been paid for by a sponsor. […]
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at What Is Basically the World’s Best Project
For the second year running, I had the pleasure of attending and covering the Inc. 5000 conference for the Inc. Media Content Strategies team. This three-day event is the perfect mixture of education and celebration. The founders behind some of the fastest-growing private companies in America get together to share successes and failures, applaud one […]
A Ghostwriter’s Musings on Ghostwriting
When people ask what I do for a living, I tell them I am a writer and marketing strategist. If they ask me to drill down, I rattle off the types of projects I work on. When I get to “ghostwriting,” people tend to stop me. “Who do you ghostwrite for?” “Do you like it?” […]
We Earned Our Editor Credit on Amazon
Last spring, JR Lisk helped Brian Jones, founder of Nuts & Bolts of PR, create a PR workbook that teaches people how to take PR into their own hands. Brian had so many tips, tricks, and success stories to share—he needed help organizing his insights and presenting them in the most useful way possible. Brian […]
A Layperson’s Guide to GDPR
If you are a marketer, publisher or digital business, GDPR probably makes you shutter. For the rest of you, it probably makes you shrug. Let’s quickly break it down, in plain English. What is GDPR? The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new regulation governing data protection and privacy in the European Union […]
The Surprisingly Tricky Task Of Writing Company Summaries
Helping a new company boil down what it does into a few sentences is a surprisingly challenging task. The last four years, I have been helping businesses, big and small, do just that. Writing a company description is especially hard for a nascent organization that is still working out exactly how its products or services […]
Naming a Tech Business? Read This First.
The ad tech space is notoriously crowded, which makes finding a good name particularly challenging, as well as important. JR Lisk, Inc. partnered with the naming experts at River + Wolf, a NY-based brand naming and writing agency, to write this piece for Medium on ad tech naming trends and tips. The article discusses three […]
What You Don’t Know about Ad Blocking
I can see all sides of the ad blocking conundrum. On one hand, we are fed up with obtrusive, irrelevant ads that interrupt our online experience. But then again, advertising subsidizes publishing. We need ads to monetize digital journalism. Plus, when used correctly, ads are a powerful marketing tool for raising brand awareness and driving […]
