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Following a lot of entrepreneur-author-speaker types over time I've seen some patterns emerge around different inflection points in the journey to authority. At some point you reach a measure of …
Continue Reading about What does writing a book do to your blog? →
If you have a Wordpress site, what can you do? Well. Option 1 Use a no-code-required plugin with relationships functionality contextual related posts plugin One I found is called Contextual …
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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 …
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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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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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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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 …
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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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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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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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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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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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 …
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 …
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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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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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 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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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 …
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 …
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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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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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 …
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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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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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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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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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 …
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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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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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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