The short answer: Because I like it.

But that wouldn’t make for an interesting read, now, would it? You’re here because you are curious about what this post is all about and it can’t be just that.

It’s not.

This post was inspired by a chat I had with a colleague who is now a director of an agency and misses pitching content like she used to. She’s doing a bunch of new things and outreach had to be delegated.

I totally understand because when I was made a director at NeoMam, I did the exact same thing. At the time, I believed that I had to delegate the day-to-day and focus on the big picture. So I did just that.

I hired a bunch of people. I overhauled our processes. I put all my focus on what was next for the agency.

Every now and again, I would sneakily send a few outreach emails and run little tests on the side. And every time it felt like coming back home.

But it wasn’t meant to be.

I was one of the directors now. There were bigger things on my plate, so I needed to focus and let go.

We did great work during those years. We revamped the way we produced content, experimented with a bunch of new formats and landed the biggest accounts we’d ever had.

This getting out of the day-to-day thing was paying off.

I was a business grown up now, running around from directors meetings to client calls, and from weekly catch-ups to project debriefs. Forecasting the future and revising the past to inform the present.

I hated it.

The thoughts kept crippling in, “maybe I don’t care about this anymore.”

Eventually people left or hires didn’t work out and I had to go back to promoting content. It was stressful, and awesome. I was back to doing the one thing that I like to do most in the entire world. My thing. Outreach.

Soon enough capacity issues would be sorted and I would go back to my Ops Director seat.

Back to hiring and planning. Back to coaching and training. Back to another kind of day-to-day work, one where you rarely see the results of your efforts materialise in front of you straight away.

Happy new year to everyone.

Before the end of last year I reached out to a number of in-house SEO’s who I thought were doing some really interesting things with content during 2017.

At NeoMam, most of our clients are in-house SEO teams and I am always impressed with the work they do.

Unfortunately, you rarely read about them on industry sites.

It makes sense, though, as there is far less of an incentive to share this type of work when you are in-house because you don’t need to win clients like agencies do.

I hope that this post and future ones can help to highlight some of the great work being produced by in-house teams around the world and provide some inspiration for your content marketing plans this year.