Cassie Boorn, Ask a PR Girl and the Blogging Lessons That Still Matter

In July 2012, Building Better Blogs published an enthusiastic recommendation for a brand-new free challenge called 5 Days of PR for Bloggers. It came from a young writer, social-media specialist and PR professional named Cassie Boorn, through her project Ask a PR Girl.

The original Building Better Blogs writer had completed only two lessons when she posted about it. She was already impressed enough to tell everyone about the resource - and 17 readers joined the conversation below, talking about signing up, bookmarking the lessons and using them to improve their blogs.

More than a decade later, this little article gives us something we rarely get to see so clearly: an early snapshot of someone's work before anyone knows where her career will lead.

Cassie Boorn died on August 16, 2024, at age 37. Looking back at what she was teaching bloggers in 2012 - and at the career she went on to build - makes this old Building Better Blogs post worth preserving for much more than nostalgia.

What Cassie Was Teaching Bloggers in 2012

The original five-day challenge promised to help bloggers assess their sites, establish goals, improve their About pages, develop editorial calendars, create better content, drive traffic, build press kits, identify media contacts and learn to pitch.

Some of the platforms, tools and PR tactics surrounding blogging have changed enormously since 2012. Those foundational questions have not.

Assess the Blog You Actually Have

It is difficult to improve a site if you never stop publishing long enough to look at it as a whole. A blog assessment remains one of the most useful things a blogger can do.

Look at the homepage, navigation, About page, categories, best-performing articles, email signup, products or services, broken links and the path a new visitor is expected to follow. Ask what still represents you and what belongs to an earlier version of the site.

That is particularly important for a longtime blog. Years of publishing can create tremendous value, but they can also create clutter. Improvement does not always mean making something new. Sometimes it means making existing work easier to find and use.

Know What You Are Trying to Accomplish

Cassie's challenge included goals and a plan to meet them. That sounds basic until you look at how easily bloggers can spend an entire week working without moving toward anything measurable.

"Grow my blog" is not a very useful instruction. "Improve the five articles already bringing search traffic," "build an email welcome sequence," "pitch three relevant brands," or "finish the product readers keep asking for" gives you something you can actually do.

Good goals also protect your time. If a task does not support a current priority, it may not deserve to become today's emergency.

Your About Page Still Matters

One of the original commenters immediately recognized this. She wrote that she needed an About page and had never really known what to include.

That question still comes up.

A useful About page should help the visitor understand who you are, what the site helps them do, why your experience is relevant and where they should go next. It can include personality without becoming an autobiography, and credentials without reading like a résumé.

For bloggers who want partnerships, speaking opportunities, media coverage or clients, the About page can also be one of the first places someone checks before deciding whether to contact you.

An Editorial Calendar Is a Tool, Not a Boss

Editorial calendars remain useful, but they should support your life rather than make you feel behind before the month even starts.

Plan around priorities, seasons, launches and proven content. Leave room for opportunities and real life. A sustainable calendar tells you what matters next; it does not exist to punish you for missing an arbitrary posting quota.

Build a Press Kit Before You Desperately Need One

Cassie was also teaching bloggers to create press kits and media pitches. That was forward-thinking advice for bloggers in 2012, and it remains useful for creators who want to work with brands, media, event organizers or other partners.

Keep current information about who you are, what you cover, your audience, relevant accomplishments, services or partnership options, strong examples of your work and a reliable way to contact you. Then a good opportunity does not require rebuilding your professional story from scratch overnight.

Learn to Pitch Without Making Every Relationship Transactional

A pitch should make it easy for the recipient to understand why you are contacting them, why the idea fits their audience or business, what you are proposing and why you are a credible person to do it.

But pitching is not the same as sending generic requests to everyone whose email address you can find. Research and relevance matter. So does treating the person on the other end like a person rather than an opportunity.

Where Cassie Boorn's Career Went From There

The 2012 Building Better Blogs post described Cassie simply as a writer, social-media specialist and "PR girl." Her career grew well beyond that early description.

Later that same year, Forbes profiled Cassie and identified her as Blog Development Manager at Babble.com, which had become part of Disney Interactive. In that interview, she talked about building digital skills and creating a career while raising her son as a young single mother.

Her professional work continued across blogging, social media, public relations, consulting and training. She wrote about PR and blogger outreach for industry audiences and created resources intended to help people understand online communication and promotion.

According to her obituary, Cassie's social-media and marketing work included strategies for recognizable brands such as Samuel Adams, Pond's Cold Cream and Bounce. She spent roughly a decade freelancing in social-media marketing and later became the first Marketing Director at Getz Fire Equipment in Peoria, Illinois.

That career path makes the little five-day blogging challenge preserved here especially interesting. The subjects she was encouraging bloggers to think about-positioning, communication, content planning, media materials and pitching - were not simply a short-lived blogging trend. They were part of a professional skill set she continued developing and applying.

What We Can Learn From Looking Back

There is another lesson here that has nothing to do with PR.

Old blogs preserve beginnings.

When this article was written, nobody commenting below knew the full career Cassie would build. They were simply excited about a free resource that might help them make their blogs better. One person needed an About page. Another was preparing for BlogHer. Others bookmarked the lessons or immediately signed up.

Those comments are a tiny record of how bloggers learned from one another in that era.

This is why Building Better Blogs is not wiping away its history as we modernize the site. Some old tutorials truly are obsolete. Some links disappear. Some platforms vanish. But sometimes an old article captures a person, idea, community or turning point that becomes more meaningful with time.

Try Cassie's Original Ideas as a Modern Blogathon Challenge

You do not need access to the original five-day email course to put its core ideas to work.

1. Assess your blog. What is working, outdated, confusing or unfinished?
2. Choose one meaningful goal. What result do you want during the next 30 to 90 days?
3. Review your About page. Does it explain who you help, what you do and why someone should trust you?
4. Look at your content plan. Does it support your actual priorities, or are you publishing because you feel you should?
5. Check your professional materials. If a brand, journalist, podcast host or event organizer contacted you tomorrow, could you quickly provide the information they need?
6. Write one thoughtful pitch. Choose a genuinely relevant opportunity and explain the value clearly.

That is enough for a productive Blogathon work session - and it is remarkably close to what Cassie was encouraging bloggers to do back in 2012.

Remembering Cassie Boorn

Cassie died in 2024 at only 37. Building Better Blogs was fortunate to document one small piece of her work near the beginning of this chapter of her career.

We are preserving the original article and its 17 - reader discussion below, both as part of the history of this site and as a reminder that the people we encounter through blogging can leave a trail of ideas, conversations and work that lasts much longer than a particular platform or promotion.

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From the Building Better Blogs Archive: The Original 2012 Post

The following is the original Building Better Blogs recommendation of Cassie Boorn's 5 Days of PR for Bloggers. The challenge, links and platform references are historical and should not be treated as a currently available offer. We are preserving the original wording because it documents how Cassie's work was received by this blogging community at the time. The 17 original reader comments remain attached below.

Disclaimer: I JUST learned about this, I JUST signed up and I'm since today is Day Two, I've only done TWO lessons and I get NOTHING for telling you guys about it but I just HAD to because it's so awesome!

Ask a PR Girl is a brand new blog by Cassie Boorn, a writer, social media specialist and PR girl. Already she is offering up her expertise for free.

She is offering 5 Days of PR for Bloggers:

At the end of this 5 day challenge you will have:

• A complete assessment of your blog
• Goals and a plan to meet them
• A newly updated and optimized "About" page
• A fully developed editorial calendar
• Techniques for driving traffic to your blog
• Techniques for creating good content
• A fully developed press kit
• A list of media to pitch
• A pitch to send to media

You can sign up and each day you will get an email outlining the day's challenge and some other information. The actual challenges are posted on the blog and you can tweet about your progress using #PRforBloggers on twitter.

So far I've already done a blog assessment of Callista's Ramblings and am working on day two which is to create the perfect bio and about me page (best info on it I've seen ANYWHERE!) She offers PDF files you can print out and write on which is awesome. I plan to use her worksheets on all my blogs eventually.

I am SO happy I found this.