Interview: Kevan Lee, Buffer Content Crafter

Our InterviewFX series continues! These interviews offer business owners and marketers important insight, advice, and ideas that will help grow their online presence and become more successful at what they do. To see past interviews, visit this page or click the “InterviewFX” button in our sidebar.

Today, we’re asking Kevan Lee of social sharing service Buffer five questions about his job as a Content Crafter, common misconceptions about content marketing, and how he gets inspired. Keep reading to see the full interview!

1. What is the company culture like at Buffer?

Culture is huge for us – especially as a distributed team and a fast-paced startup. It’s been such an amazing shift in perspective for me, coming from work where culture is an afterthought. At Buffer, culture is a tentpole.

We have 10 pieces and parts to our culture; just a couple of my favorites: Positivity, no ego, self-improvement, and transparency.

2. How do you get inspired to write? Do you keep a running list of ideas to refer to or do you write your posts mostly “on the fly”?

I’m an idea hoarder. I have swipe files set up in a several different spots around the web; some people stash candy around their house, I stash blogpost ideas around the Internet.

At Buffer, we collect ideas in Trello, a task-management tool. At any given time, our pool of ideas is 40- or 50-deep. The week before, we pull the stories that seem like they’d be the best fit for the following week’s content, then I get to work!

3. How do you motivate yourself to write about “boring” topics?

I’m really grateful for the story angles we take at Buffer. With our culture of self-improvement, we’re always experimenting and trying new ideas. For me, this approach makes writing about any topic really fun.

Writing is learning, discovering, trying. I think if I ever felt bored by a topic, it would reflect in my writing. Others would be bored with it, too!

So it feels really good to tackle topics from our perspective of well-researched, actionable, useful articles.

4. What do you think is a common misconception about blogging or content marketing?

I believe there’s much more to blogging and content marketing than simply sitting down at a computer and typing out an article; I wonder if people realize all that goes into it. In our case at Buffer, we research our posts, we create visuals, we share on social media, we engage with readers, and we repurpose content for other uses. I’ve probably left out several steps, too!

5. What’s one piece of advice would you give to anyone getting started with content marketing or blogging for their business?

Have fun with it. Blogging/content is easier when it’s fun. Take away the fun, and you start to lose the consistency, the quality, and the time investment that you need to succeed.

Kevan Lee is a content crafter at Buffer. You can find him online, tweeting about his writing process, or at home, second-guessing football coaches. Live simply, give generously, beat cancer.