This week was my dad's 70th birthday. I am now more than half his age. I wanted to do something really special for him. Something big and meaningful that would show him how much I appreciate him. …
Reverse content strategy
The ultimate needle we care about moving is impact: the amount of influence we can exert to alter others' trajectories in an intended direction. And so it is easy to poke fun at the assembly line …
Our decisions show us who we are
Before I cared about data or had much experience in marketing, I would be biased toward trying something new. I liked learning and always had the generalist's confidence that I could figure something …
How to SEO your content
This subject line/title made me wince a little so then I tried wrapping the term "SEO" in quotes to distance myself from it, like that would reduce the cognitive dissonance of writing this because …
The only link building you should be doing
The only link building you should be doing is internal. Internal link building (ILB) demonstrates an awareness of how content fits together across a site, across tasks for your users, the purchase …
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positioning gauntlet
I was going to use the subject line, "two kidney stones, one well organized website," because I'm back from my kidney stone vacation, that I shouldn't call a vacation because for I secretly worked, …
Refactoring node properties as labels and relationships in Cypher for faster querying [Neo4j]
In this use case, a node property is generated to assign a node to a community. You can learn about how we identify pages with similar link profiles by generating a similarity score based on links …
On improving website content
You have the glaring website improvements to be made, and then after that, most any we make are based on guesswork with a sprinkle of bias. Even best practices for website content are pretty …
the science of (long) big game hunting
In marketing, there are a very simple and reliable approaches to big game hunting (as long as big game exists). You see it with wild budgets being spent on bus and billboard ads for personal injury …
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Per Page Link Profile Similarity + Label Propagation for Website Analysis
I am exploring how combining graph algorithms can help with more quickly analyzing a site's structure or labeling it's content/pages. This is a proof of concept for using a similarity algorithm and …
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How to move graph databases from one Project folder to another in Neo4j Desktop
This question was answered by Elaine R. on the Neo4j community forum, but with the newer versions of Neo4j Desktop (Neo4j Desktop 1.4.3 with 4.x.x databases), there is a quick four step drag and drop …
Unlocking mental model diagrams to optimize website structure
For the past 2 years or so, I've been on this long strange trip around "organizing lots of expert website content." It is a weird specialization but the more I dig in the more depth there be. I …
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Creating a summary relationship from multiple relationships between nodes
In order to query time series data, I felt like I had to model my google search console data this way in Neo4j: each day of data with clicks, impressions In Google Search Console there are (for …
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“word” gap analysis between GSC keyword data and page content
We can do a lot of neat stuff with Google Search Console data to improve existing rankings or further optimize pages already seeing traffic or impressions from a given series of related terms. GSC …
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bye and hello
** announcement! contentaudience.com is going away, the emails you get from me will start coming from jim@inboundfound.com after today** I took my dad to the ER on Christmas Eve for COVID. He was …
Troubleshoot common plesk issues
Error 521 from Cloudflare when trying to access site using Plesk From Cloudflare error: What happened?The web server is not returning a connection. As a result, the web page is not …
Black Friday Hangover
We have been in the market for a dog bed for a while. This is old one: Roger is getting older so we had preliminarily settled on the fancy Casper orthopedic one designed for older dogs. It's like …
“Warm yourself by the dumpster fire of my insights”
The underlying network processes between how you currently approach content and how I think you should, are radically different. The content you create is typically for your existing email list, …
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Learn from B2B SaaS
Maybe counterintuitive, but experts can learn a lot from B2B SaaS traffic getting content strategy. The following sites have done a great job of zooming out of their specific product to get a …
Get Website PageRank and CheiRank natively in Neo4j
We all know what PageRank is in the context of Google / SEO, but it's also an incredibly useful tool for internal purposes around website analysis and surfacing insights. CheiRank is like PageRank …
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My content analysis workflow – part 1
Table Of Contents1. Review site manually, get a lay of the site and typical page template structures 2. Crawl and extract text, meta data, metrics with ScreamingFrogScreamingFrog's API …
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giving directions vs drawing a map
We often think of people as buyers in pipeline stages or funnels. As if their journey is somehow linear, they understand their problem, and can cut a straight line to the solution. But it's much …
Part 2 Solving for audience self-misdiagnosis
People pursue purposes and outcomes. You've heard those can be treated as moving away from pain and/or toward possibility. But what I think really happens is you zoom out, and we're moving toward …
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Solving for audience self-(mis)diagnosis
I've talked a lot about how you, having turned over lots of complex problems, have domain knowledge while your audience is forced to operate from too little experience. Mapping user journeys in …
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“outsized returns” indicates past mistakes
Bear with me on this idea. As I obsess over "low hanging fruit" this and "high leverage" that or content organization as the solution to all your web-based marketing problems, I can't help but …
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Email list vs website: part 2
Yesterday, I wrote you some reasons I thought "email list as king" of your marketing efforts should be rethought. To me, the points were self-evident: "email list value decays over time" AKA …
Email list vs website – which is more important?
You hear that the "email list is the lifeblood of your online business." When you (email) launch a product, the sales come through your list. When you write a book, hammering your email list is …
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more thinking on organizing content
When I sold some work around a site audit + per article recommendations around keep, rework, delete and categorization, I thought, "this will be easy, this is what I do now." But I just keep …
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Links are dying
It is pretty much a meme now for SEOs to share and collectively crap on bad hot takes about how "SEO is dead" by people who don't even have a baseline understanding of search. They (we) think, as …
Bridges vs hubs
Everyone loves a power curve - the idea that central nodes in a network are the most important, that the fat head is where all the influence and popularity lives. All sorts of things were built on …
“Topics” are for them, not you
-or- rooted content vs thinking content This is a weird one. As I do pattern analysis on expert content, I find something that is obvious to the user but an absolute blind spot for the …
Options for extracting keywords associated with your content
This is a key early step in organizing expert content. Keywords for our purposes just means one, two, three or so word terms that identify or are representative of an article or section of an …
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TF-IDF for organizing expert content
This article is in progress and incomplete. For my first year on this journey, TF-IDF shows up a lot in NLP 101 courses, each making it sound more complex that it is and stressing it as overly …
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Transformation is optimization over time
Experts solving for relevant problems always seem to lean toward advocating transformation for clients. But in reality, that advice rarely ends up working. Why? Lack of buy-in (e.g. you're not …
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[Workshop] Organize your expert content for better usability (and SEO)
On Sept 1 and Sept 8, I'll be doing a livestream workshop facilitated by Philip Morgan on Twitch and Youtube Live. It's practical takeaways on turning your piles of expert content into a well …
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How many clicks does it take to change someone’s life?
If every visit to your site resulted in that person finding what they were looking for, that would be meaningful right? You'd have an instant way to qualify them. You can see where they came from, …
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Why it’s hard for experts to say what they mean
Yesterday (ok, Thursday), I was describing why I think, in general, it's hard to say what you mean. Or more aptly, why I think it's hard for me (fear). When you want to say what you mean as an …
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Why is it so hard to say what you mean?
I was going to write about a top tier SEO agency botching their own site migration after being acquired by Perficient. I was very excited to point out their fancy suit with the fly down. And then …
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more patterns found organizing my content
I've come across some interesting (to me) patterns in what I write about, prompting me to note holes in my thinking I have to fill in, holes in my writing where I have done the thinking but didn't …
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Lessons from working on habits
Streaks are powerful until they are fragile You ever do something for x days in a row and feel really good that you were able to pick up the streak? Like the streak was the momentum. And then …