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 …
A draft of my content organized and some thoughts there
In organizing my own content, I'm working from the start and the end chronologically and making my way toward the middle. In starting with early posts and working forward, I can move quickly and …
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Consolidating your (our) websites
I've often given the advice that you shouldn't have multiple websites. The exception: when you should have separate websites When does this advice that you should always have one site, and …
Lessons from research, picking a bad? fit target market
I got business and life coaches to fill out about 100 surveys and interviewed some of the higher income ones. At the time, I was interested in possibly working with coaches and also using talking to …
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Time scent: a content organization weapon
No matter how little or poorly you've organized your content, your database stores those posts in chronological order - often with a last updated field. In info architecture theory, they often talk …
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Features at your disposal for analyzing your content
Last week I wrote about a content feature first approach to organizing content. Below is a list of things you might not have thought about that can help isolate key features for easier analysis. I …
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Everything is tagged, now what?
We discussed some tips for how to tag your content. But once that is done, or if you've tagged as you've gone along, what's next? Once you've gone through your tags you should have a good sense of …
Using tags to organize your content
I'm understanding the position experts with lots of yet-to-be organized content are in. I have about 200 posts and here's what I'm learning doing this for Content Audience. Originally, I thought, …
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WordPress hosting options for our clients
Disclaimer: This article is designed for our clients to understand the two hosting solutions we provide, it is not a product comparison guide. TL;DR (Short version) WPEngine vs Digital Ocean …
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Get a list of published posts by word count in WordPress database
How to generate a list of your published Wordpress posts by word count in SQL (PHPMyAdmin) So to get started, you will just need to drag-n-drop the How-to Schema block in the Gutenberg editor. The …
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Content feature first approach to analyzing content
Say you want to organize a body of content. You don't know where to start, it's a tall order, you have a fair amount of it, and other things like traffic/user data, Google updates, and campaigns, …
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Get a list of posts with word counts into a spreadsheet
You have a few options here: Table Of ContentsOption 1: Use a word count Wordpress plugin and copy/paste the posts list into a spreadsheetOption 2: Crawl a list of your posts with Screaming Frog …
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How to share creative assets online
How to share a Pinterest Board 1. Go to the pinboard page and click the "+" symbol under the name of the board. 2. a If the board is public, and you just want to share the link, you can just …
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Crawl and scrape sites that require your login
This guide is for logging into a platform and scraping the data you want from it. The use case we are following is logging into my email software (ConvertKit) and scraping the engagement data from …
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Why you can’t get your expert content to perform
Most experts seem to think getting meaningful traffic on their website content is out of reach. The returns of claps and views on Medium, or dopamine hits of likes and retweets on social are …
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Twitter Topics – The Mega List
▼ Skip Down to the Mega List of Twitter Topics Twitter launched "Topics" in November 2019 in response to a user issue they uncovered: that people used Twitter to explore discussions and news …
How to share website related credentials
This is the rough template I share with clients. Feel free to use in your own workflow, but please note these instructions ask for higher levels of permissions than you might need to provide to your …
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Your own knowledge graph
Fictitious Joe's birthday is July 3, 1980. He also really likes Jimi Hendrix. This information alone is worthless. But if Joe is your brother (if you're a Person entity related to him), that …
Surfacing opportunities in your network for content amplification
We've been talking about characteristics of network influence for content amplification (popularity vs betweenness). In a perfect world, your content strategy would be inextricably linked to your …
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Validate a new business direction with warm email outreach
The key advantage a smaller player in a market has is in choosing how you spend your energy to develop a solution for a market. Larger organizations will do lots of market research, then ignore it. …
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Invisible bridge trolls can change your life
-or- Two types of network influence – Part 2 "Who can change my life today?" When I was 19, my dad took me to a Howard Brinton StarPower real estate conference in San Francisco. It was 2004 and …
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Two types of network influence – part 1
You can clearly see the different modes of influence by looking at network topology. In network science, it's called centrality. The idea is that central nodes in a network are the most …
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How to make success inevitable
Story 1: A leadership coach sits next to an executive at a seminar where they exchange business cards. Three years later, it turns out the exec, who now works at a $100b+ annual revenue corp, has …
Twitch: having fun as content
Our family got a cordless phone when I was in 5th or 6th grade. I went to an all-boys school so it was one of the only ways to communicate with the girls from our sister school. A few of them would …
How racist is your personal brand?
The value in being a personal brand is the personal part. The part where you get to be authentic, draw others to you with that, connect meaningfully with your audience, strengthen affinity, lead by …
thoughts on race, what’s happening, what can i do
My latest thinking on personal brands is that the world is being split between large corporations and individuals, that the strengths we have being real people are the only meaningful advantages we …
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Wrong questions lead to wrong answers
I woke up a little panicked Thursday last week. I had turned 35 on Wednesday (hb 2 me) and my first thought was that I hadn't written a post in a week. For me, this is the only daily work …
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Twitter outreach planning
Install the Scraper Chrome Extension Create a spreadsheet with two tabs First tab has two parts: 1/ a list of keywords to brainstorm: Combinations to checkhealthcare …
On credibility (and pseudo update)
I bit the bullet and posted a long case study around a low traffic site we worked on where traffic (for a very low traffic site) had increased about 4x. There are a lot of tips and takeaways for …
2x search traffic with content organization
The case is for an interior design ecommerce site with three phases of work, with each seeing a significant corresponding lift. And it's almost all relevant to experts serving audiences with …
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[COVID pun here]
COVID related brain dump here. You've been warned. With the market I picked, experts serving audiences, I like to think it's not (all) about the money. But the money matters. Stability matters, a …
On personal infrastructure
Personal infrastructure is just what it sounds like: "...the fundamental tools, services and systems serving an individual... necessary for that individual's function (Wikipedia). There are easy …
Competing with bigger brands
The difference in search visibility between personal brand and corporate brand websites boggles my mind. As individuals we have so many advantages. It is much easier to build a twitter …
From user journey to content organization
Have you ever walked through an Ikea? Maybe a bad analogy because while we all love Ikea, we all hate the intentionally shitty wayfinding maze that Ikea experience is. I'm creating a content …
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The audience-problem expert-solution divide
I was on a group call organized by Philip Morgan run by Brad Farriss around how he developed a self-diagnostic tool profiling the types of firms he works with based on business maturity. Brad's …
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The SEO fix
-or- how not to get massive traffic and what to do instead The idea that SEO is something you can "fix" is a bit of a myth. I describe the three types of SEO work and a brief exercise you can do …
What ongoing insights could look like
I've been working through the content audit and related recommendations service I'm launching. While it's intended to be completely custom and unstructured, here's what I am thinking as an optional …
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There is no top or bottom of funnel content
I’m designing a service based on ongoing SEO content strategy recommendations. For beta sites, it will be grandfathered in at $500/month. If interested, hit reply and let’s chat. We use models as …
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Website audit with ScreamingFrog crawl data and Neo4j
This is a nice peek into how powerful graphs are for site audits and how these capabilities are coming along for those interested in content audit + ongoing recommendations service. I'm chipping …
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Prioritizing internal redirects to fix
I spent about 20 hours trying to figure out how to properly load some crawl data into a graph database over the past two weeks. Once I hit bottom and gave up, I got the answer within 5 minutes of …
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