Hotjar is a suite of website traffic data visualization tools. It's cheap and my go-to recommendation for sites trying to dip their toes into better understanding how users interact with their …
The “right way” to organize your articles
Let's pretend there is a right answer to the question of, "what is the next best piece of content I can serve someone to best help them after they just read an article?" And let's assume it's within …
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Generate a sample CSV file with x rows from larger CSV
A lot of the data preprocessing is trial and error. It's creating some regular expression, or relying on some method from a library I don't fully understand and then making sure it does more good than …
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Preprocessing data with Python for NLP Prep
Doing some research, it looks like the best practice is developing a preprocessing workflow around 1) whatever your goals for wrangling the data are and 2) what the raw data actually looks …
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Buffet style content organization
inCourage, mentioned in yesterday's email, just launched this past summer. We didn't start with a lot of content but what they do have is pretty varied in terms of content format. In wanting to …
Three birds approach to content organization
We're finishing up two projects with interesting content organization challenges. One is AIME, a trade association that supports mortgage brokers with content, events, training, access to …
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There is no more “fat head”
Just a few years ago, simply by being the something expert online, focusing on your craft, providing value, you could build visibility, an audience, and business with some ease. Now there are 10 …
“Start Here” or “Best Articles”?
The pages on your site that you are most likely to link to and the pages others' are likely to link to are completely different. If you have a page on your website that is starting to get links, …
“It’s fate”
One of the things I'm most excited about with the graph journey is prediction algorithms. What makes them fun and accessible is that a lot of them are actually quite simple. Like looking for the …
Bias and stuff
I've been thinking about biases a lot lately. People make money exploiting or compensating for biases. People lose money being unaware of their bias. When I'm feeling good, I enjoy the …
Prepping website content data for graphing
I'm going to take a step back and walk through this graph-based content audit process step by step using a Philip Morgan's site (with permission). Philip writes daily emails to his email list and …
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Pre-learning how to graph content to determine what’s important
I'm going back to converting dinner party conversations into speeches analogy from yesterday. Let's imagine you recorded all the conversations you've ever had, when and who they were with, the …
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Bias in content organization
What digital marketing activities are most effective for entrepreneur-author-speaker types? I've had a lot of trouble with this question with one exception: content organization, or simply the idea …
Happy new year
I took an Adulthood and Aging class in college. We spent a lot of time on life development stage models and specifically the literature around what makes people happy. The general takeaway was that …
Privilege and ethics in SEO
I follow a lot of people I look up to on Twitter. With few exceptions, it's a delicately curated list of people I respect the most in (mostly) marketing/design related fields. But, and I'm not sure …
Quick tips to improve internal linking for WordPress sites
Half the internet runs on Wordpress. So the common issues that arise with having a Wordpress site are pretty widespread. Wordpress was originally designed to be a blogging platform so content …
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How I deal with overwhelm
I think of overwhelm in two ways: internal and external. There's a type of person who doesn't procrastinate, they'd rather get the items on their to do lists crossed off, the order doesn't really …
SEO is snake oil.
In the mid 1800s Southeastern Chinese migrant workers came over in droves to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. They brought a variety of Eastern medicines over, including snake oil. After a …
Building a moat for bigger competitors in search
About a week ago I wrote an email on accumulating advantages with your content. The idea being that the things you do to improve your search presence either distance you from your competition or …
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When you have less traffic than you should
We've been talking about lost traffic and low traffic is function of competition and that no matter what the landscape holds, that the only solution is taking ownership. The one hard thing about …
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How low traffic is your fault
I've been feeling bad for experts with low traffic on their content. The solopreneurs beaten down by tech monopolies and overfunded startups with quarterly inbound marketing budgets bigger than …
You have no traffic because you’re losing
You are one of two types of people: a) people who used to get a lot of traffic never had to think about it, b) people with a lot of content getting far less traffic than they should be. For the …
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tis the season for info products
Trying a shorter-form daily email format and then shooting to do a longer form, more thought out, article weekly that I'll link to in emails but not publish to the list. Yesterday's email was a …
Scarcity burndown
The problem with opening and closing course launches with email campaigns is how the scarcity works. You have your "doors close" scarcity and keep it simple. It's high brow, and understandable …
More on search vs social for experts building audiences
We've looked at search versus social for experts from a few angles: paid ads based on your product's goals and for info products sales funnels, purchasing mindset of users on search and on social, …
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Accumulating advantages
I read a fun post about building moats in business, moats being a term Warren Buffet uses to describe business advantages that create distance between you and competitors. The trap businesses fall …
Your SEO regimen
In a previous email I shared the two basic phases to SEO: initial and ongoing work and in that email focused on initial phase. I've been working through why SEO doesn't work for experts and what we …
Current thinking on Twitter
This is a follow-up post comparing search versus social for traffic to a site. Repasting for context: In a recent email Bob Lalasz of Science+Story shared common objection to doing SEO he often …
Social versus search for content visibility
In response to a recent email around objections to doing SEO like the high amount of uncertainty or not having the resources, Bob Lalasz of Science+Story shared another common objection he hears from …
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The two phases of SEO
SEO, as it's currently approached, doesn't work for experts. There are two phases to approaching SEO: initial and ongoing. Today we'll go over the initial phase. This is a one-off that typically …
“I don’t have the resources to do SEO”
There's a host of reasons most experts do not do SEO. We covered a first reason of uncertainty, but it's more than that. The know-how, the time, the team, the budget to hire an agency, whatever it …
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How you segment and how you personalize
Some more thoughts on email segmentation for tags vs custom fields debate: Email marketing software is opinionated (or not) Most email marketing software is "opinionated" in the sense that …
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Email segmentation: tags or custom fields?
How you go about segmentation will dictate and constrain how you are able to approach personalization. If you take some time to think about how you might want to personalize in the future, or what …
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Dealing with uncertainty in search.
Things that work for one site are tanking traffic on another. There are no more "best practices." There is no list of things anyone can tell you to do for guaranteed or even predictable …
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Part 3: The new SEO best practices
Many "best practices" have come under threat as more and more "wins" do not hold across sites. They are situational, not reproducible. That lack of portability means there is no free lunch. Most …
Part 2: How influence is measured on the web
How did Google blow all other search engines out of the water almost overnight? PageRank. You've heard of it. It appears to be one of the most influential innovations in information retrieval and …
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Part 1: Why understanding “search” matters
This is part one of a series on demystifying Google for audience-first content experts Why understanding "search" mattersWhat PageRank actually isGoogle search engine (a brief history of …
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Content channel (and format) gut check
Whether and how much you focus energy on search or social or referral or email or affiliate should be a function of what you want to accomplish and whether or not you can win there. What is winning …
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Helpful upsells
I'm currently reading The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. A few times I've been enjoying a chapter or section and then get blindsided by something he says. Like this part where he talks …
Restarting vs being consistent
In psych research, low self esteem was originally considered a bad thing. There were all sorts of concerted efforts in American society to raise the self-esteem of children. I Googled around for a fun …