Dear ,

Last week, New York City experienced an extreme heat wave as the summer sun pierced through the cloudless sky. I hope that you stayed cool wherever you were.

Unfortunately, both weather extremes hinder my creativity and ability to work

As a result, I made the cardinal marketing sin: I didn’t publish or update an existing article on Actionable Marketing Guide (although I did publish my newsletter with original content!)

Regardless of weather conditions, marketing especially content and social media marketing requires consistency. Show up regularly to earn a place in your audience’s weekly information consumption.

Traditionally, media created appointment content consumption for newspapers, magazines and radio and television shows. In turn, this created an audience consumption habit.

Now we time-shift content consumption based on our availability rather than a media entity’s schedule. We squeeze information gathering and consumption into our routines as time allows.

Also we binge consume content in marathon sessions. Services like Netflix facilitate this by seamlessly feeding us the next episode.

While information snacking and binging improve audience time utilization, they make delivering marketing content and messages more challenging.

To become part of your audience’s regular content consumption, you must build an on-going reader desire for your information and communications.

Deliver your content on a regular schedule to create reader expectation. At a minimum, publish a weekly newsletter and/or a blog post.

While marketers often play follow the leader when it comes to ideal content delivery times, recently Sunday delivery has gained prominence.

​​​​​​​Like the hefty Sunday New York Times that allows readers to sit back and read information of interest to them, marketers have replaced weekend blog posts with personalized Sunday newsletters. Among my favorites are:

• Ann Handley provides her ever-witty and appealing prose.

• Chris Penn and Scott Monty curate the best of the Internet. Penn automates his process and includes shares to-date with tracking links. By contrast, Monty personally curates his content using Flipboard.

• Jay Baer pens a weekly note in his own voice.

• Allen Gannett, a relative Sunday newsletter latecomer who has his finger on the millennial pulse.

What does this mean for your marketing?

• Consistently showing up matters. Your audience needs you to be there regularly even if they aren’t.

• Earn your audience’s attention. Contrary to what marketers and media entities think, attention fuels the Internet.

• Content longevity counts. As Jay Baer recently noted, he was among first people to create a regular YouTube video. But he got bored and stopped. In the interim, Gary Vee gained traction. While Baer returned to regular video creation, he lost his position to Gary Vee.

From a delivery perspective, provide these 3 content options:

• Thought leadership content. Offer deep foundational or crowd pleaser content on an annual, quarterly or monthly basis. This attracts new visitors and search engines.

• Consistent content. Provide content on a regular basis, daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly to maintain share of reader attention.

• Individual content. Guide new readers into your content offering using tailored communications before adding them to your regular content distribution.

This and previous AMG newsletters are available on the Web.