Dave Young


Use Signaling Theory to Improve Your Business

One of the foundations of my friend Tom Wanek’s book, Currencies That Buy Credibility, is the idea of using signaling theory for the benefit of your business.

Animals in the wild use signaling theory to send signals about their strength. In Tom’s book, he gives us the example of the gazelle and the cheetah. If gazelles see a cheetah hanging out in the tall grass, some of them will start stotting; they jump straight up in the air, arch their backs, and prance all around. It’s their way of showing the cheetah that they are up…

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How to Get Your Employees to Create Blog Posts

If you have a marketing meeting with your employees and you say, “We’ve decided to start a blog. Jane and Bob, go write three blogs posts for the site,” you’ll probably be met with a lot of blank stares.

It’s hard to inspire your employees to want to create content for your website. But if you can get them come up with a few topics they would be comfortable talking about for a few minutes, we’ve got a way to help.

When it comes time for your recording session with us, all you have to do is sit your employee…

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Does Content Have to be Entertaining?

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once our basic survival needs are met, we start looking for entertainment.

If we’ve got air to breathe, food and shelter, we’ve meet our physical needs and start to move up the hierarchy. Contented people think, “Well, I’ve got all that done. What’s on TV?” We might scroll through Facebook and get involved in some sort of political debate, or search for memes, gifs, and interesting videos. Basically, we want to be entertained.

Your customers appreciate you doing a little bit to entertain them. Think of the most iconic advertising campaigns…

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Who Should Create My Content?

Like the Content Creator’s Creed says, the person that should be creating content is the owner of the company.

The person who founded the company has the stories to tell. Since Shortcut Content is my company, let me tell you a little story of my own. It’s more of a dirty joke, but I think you’re ready for it.

I was raised in ranch country and there was this little girl named Mary who went to school in a one-room schoolhouse. One day she was late to school and her teacher said, “Mary, why are you…

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What is Tribal Content?

People talk about marketing to millennials a lot these days, but I think that may be going about it the wrong way. You can’t take broad strokes and market to a group of people just because they were born between this year and that.

Many of us in our fifties identify with some of the issues, angst and preferences of millennials. We’ve been around them long enough that they’ve become our own issues and preferences. It’s much more powerful to identify a specific tribe of people and then market to engage with that tribe.

I’ll give you an example.…

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