So, what a week (and a bit).
- Trump (sort of) leaving the White House after a crazy election (not that I really understand the whole ‘American system’ but it’s certainly an entertaining watch)
- Covid-19 vaccine in the works – which means, just like the war, it’ll ‘all be over by Christmas’!
What a time to be alive!
In personal news, you’ll all be happy to know that I did make it down to the pub once (or twice) before we got locked back up for November. Which is good, because I’ve got to be honest, a week in and I’m already going stir crazy. Like I said though, it’s allowed me to knuckle down to work and I’ve been putting in a few more hours in the past week and a bit.
I’ve also been working on some other writing projects that I’ve got going and finished up a series about female authors so it’s nice to have that off the plate!
As for work itself in the week, I started with heaps on my plate – it seems there was a bit of a lull at the end of the month where I managed to catch up and all of a sudden things have gotten back to moving at 100mph! This includes updating old PL content which I’d like to have a go at to see how I can blend with the existing content and style (but haven’t got round to yet), uploading and commenting on our own placement blogs, PL properties content (which I’m seriously lacking on – probably need to enthuse other team members to help out), and regular guest posts and plant sumo content.
We all also got tasked with writing some software review listicles to PL/PLL (mine was for guest posting tools) which was actually a nice change of pace:
- To do some writing again after being PR-focused recently
- To do a bit of longer-form content (especially as most of the tools I’d never heard of before, other than e.g. Word Pigeon and Grammarly for obvious reasons)
Plant Sumo is having another push for content and has set up a sheet with some really useful hyperlinking strategies. This is where they’ve crawled the web for the contact info for restaurants in boroughs of London by the filter of vegan/vegetarian. I got round to writing a piece for them yesterday (which I really enjoy) and managed to go from scratch to a 1.5k listicle, fully formatted and proofed with images and alt text and everything done in around 2.5 hours. So I think this is a good mark to set for myself, and I’m going to try and replicate it today before the team meeting.
Other than that, I’ve been asked to put a pin for pitching for Astteria (about mid-week) until they have their ‘about us’ page done – one of the things we brought up in our client call last week. Pitching for Dr Watson has continued with something resembling split testing (i.e. pitching Sam as the founder of Dr Watson CBD and then sometimes as co-founder of me|today – a beauty and wellness/sustainable product beauty and skincare range). Hopefully, the results will start flooding it. 😁
HARO premium has definitely been helping out with the pitching and is a lot more streamlined than sorting through the lists and having to wait for releases each day. It’s a shame that you can’t spice the messages up with formatting like in a standard email, but oh well.
Before the team meeting today I’ll be writing and posting (my), and commenting on (other) placement blogs. Then it’ll be the usual: a quick admin and email filter to check I’m up-to-date with everything, then onto a guest post etc.
I also had my one month review with Deepak which was helpful. He picked up on some areas for improvement that I agree with such as more synergy and back-and-forth between myself and Heather to support one another. I think we’ve been doing this better this week with more transparency on what we’re both working on and even setting up a weekly call.
Plus, I was tasked with setting up a bi-weekly content writers meeting which I think will have the same positive effect. I’m still working on our joint PR guide (mainly focusing on pitching and content and how the two come together) with a deadline of 20th November. Hopefully, after doing some non-PL work this weekend I might have another look at it this Sunday and get it in ahead of schedule.
I’ll keep you posted! Until then.