As mentioned, I'm doing some research on what digital marketing efforts are working for audience-first businesses (built on expert content), what's not, and how is that changing? You can read the …
Super power or curse. You choose.
Habits aren't everything. The ability to cultivate, refine and revise them is, though. The fifth lever is a good content amplification habit. I think about this in my own work and it feels like …
The Five Content Challenges
This is my current analysis of the most significant changes in the landscape affecting audience-first businesses. The list is a work in progress and as I learn more through research and …
The 4th content lever
The fourth lever is extendability. I'm cheating on this one a bit. It's the ability for content to be repurposed or re-used for benefit or it can be how far that content goes on it's own merits …
The third lever
The third lever is rapid feedback. Have you ever been pulled into a Facebook Ad funnel because it did such a nice job of describing a problem you had? I have. Of course there is a ton of …
Watch content organization double organic traffic, twice
Today I was doing some research for the third content lever and got sidetracked by something pretty neat I wanted to share. 5min Screenshare video [Youtube] Still working on the third content …
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The affinity loop
The second content lever is affinity. I'm still working on this one and it could more aptly be called loyalty, but to me that's a bit of a dirty word. I think of all the loyalty programs intended …
De-mazing your content
What's the path of least resistance for getting your existing body of content to work for you? I've been working on this question for a few months now. It's a tough one but I think I have it. It's …
20 insights for your audience-first business (part 2)
This is part 2 of a quick exercise I did. As I mentioned on the first part, I'm publishing it for posterity because I wasn’t particularly happy with the results and hope to come back, do the exercise …
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20 insights for your audience-first business (part 1)
I just finished David Baker's book, The Business of Expertise... I wish I had read it 5 years ago. In it he discusses an exercise to do a gut check on whether or not you're an expert in some thing …
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What makes users deeply loyal?
One of the things I love the most about the idea of working with personal brands is that they're... people. We follow, get inspired by, and learn from people, not companies. People have …
Ethics in info product marketing
This one's a bit long - so if you only have 90 seconds, skip to the heading, "the web makes dehumanizing people easy!" I've been obsessed with internet marketing info products for almost a decade …
Are you a content hoarder?
The more I write about the blog problem, how organizing a blog is hard, the effects of not organizing it, related common issues that can arise, the more I'm reminded of hoarding behavior. When you …
Are you doing content just one way?
Doing content one way for a long time works really well, until it doesn't. It's like investing in lots of different things and then picking the one that did the best and staying bearish on it …
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Comparing opportunities during keyword research
In keyword research with the synonymous intent method, we learned how to better measure the traffic potential for a given content opportunity. We looked at how posts can account for multiple keyword …
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One neat trick for better keyword research
Originally I was going to call this, "better keyword research with the synonymous intent method," but alas, I opted for the mystery headline. The two most common mistakes in keyword research I see …
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More thoughts on health and wellness subject matter
The problem with the new SEO when it comes to anything remotely bordering on medical subject matter is that efficacy is situational. It's a what-treatment-for-what-ailment with a comparison to …
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Your subject matter should determine whether and how you handle SEO
This is a continuation of the Understanding the New SEO series. SEO was always a no-brainer. It's where a majority of new user traffic comes from. But now you must consider what, if any, effort …
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Understanding the new Google results (and new SEO)
If you run an online business, an understanding of organic traffic, how it works and the context it lives is integral to your ability to survive and thrive online. To get SEO tips, the vast …
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How discounts affect your relationships
At some point we'll have to define discounting. Does "early bird" pricing count? Does bundling products together for a lower total price count? If you're coming from a place of gratitude, does that …
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What JC Penny learned the hard way about discounts
I've always thought of discounting as something personal brands shouldn't do. Discounting is for life. Personal brands are for life. Changes to either are irreversible. It's a chemical …
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Personal brands are delicate when you’re incongruent
I recently watched Aziz Ansari's new special, "Right Now." It was... unsettling. This super eloquent and clear Rollingstone review by Maria Fontoura did a much better job than I ever could of …
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Don’t over-optimize your site
A few days ago I wrote about a Google search patent. Short version of that post: the patent describes a method to "shuffle" your rankings between the time you make changes to a site and Google …
The common but often waste of time things a first phase of SEO includes
As a completely self-taught SEO, I have always had a deep feeling of imposter syndrome and inferiority to big SEO agency types. And imposter syndrome just comes with the territory of being an …
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Why your Google traffic has been going down for years
In most cases, your traffic is down across the board even as you have more content than ever. Even if your overall Google traffic is up, when you look at your "per-post traffic," you will find …
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What people forget about this tricky Google patent
A little click-baity of a headline, I know. But I felt like I had to offset the unclick-ability of the word patent. In 2010, Google published a patent called the "ranking document (uspto.gov …
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Resurrecting old products and evolutionary products
Discounting as resurrecting old (dead) products I do like the idea of rebundling products with a discounted rate from the original price. But this is still more of a price change strategy than a …
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Competition, consideration, comparability as reasons to discount
Why do we discount? Competition We're competing for limited attention so we evoke scarcity to stir those who would otherwise not pay attention into consideration. We're competing for limited …
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Short-fuse bundle sales
In info product land, bundle sales are very short-term (usually 24 hour) windows where bundles of old products sold together at vast discounts. This is bulk pricing meets epic one-time-only or …
Taking shortcuts and risk
Ann and I were walking some trails in the Pine Barrens a few years ago. We decided to take a shortcut. Okay, I decided to take a shortcut. Ann wasn't completely on board but we were newly-ish in a …
A hidden cost of running a discount promotion
Is this possible? Nothing I'm learning is convincing me that discounting for info products is more effective than other approaches. Sure, I can run a sale and guarantee X in revenue with one …
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Emails vs blog posts for E-A-T
Expertise, Authority, Trust. E-A-T is a commonly used term in the SEO world because it is a large part of their push to battle disinformation on the web. But those three words are also central to …
Base value neglect: implications for info product sales
Yesterday we reviewed a landmark study, When More Is Less: The Impact of Base Value Neglect on Consumer Preferences for Bonus Packs over Price Discounts (Chen, Marmorstein, Tsiros, & Rao, 2012). …
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The research on discounting vs bonuses
Yesterday we talked a little about using the exposure-response model to help think about when and how much discounting is bad: Maybe you can you sneak a discount or two in annually without an …
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Is discounting always a bad thing for info products?
There are a lot of opinions out there about discounting. You have the camp that believes you should never discount. A lot of these people have even "tested" discounting and found it doesn't work. And …
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It’s pretty much all about trust
When selling online, info products share similarities with other types of products, but they're also deeply different. By nature they're personal, hand-crafted, have low barriers to entry, and …
Why selling info products is getting harder
A few years ago, you could have something important to say, serve your audience, and your info products would sell themselves. That's just not the case anymore: Now everyone has a list, funnels, …
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Cost reduction as validation
Starting another mini series without having finished the last one. This is the first in a few emails on when you don't need to validate an info product. Anything that successfully reduces costs is …
Inability to validate as a marketing messaging problem
A lot of the time poor validation (or inability to validate) is just a matter of focusing the messaging around the value or outcome instead of the process. When you're really product-centric, its …
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Validating for a list vs a market
Let's say you have an info product idea. When do you really have to validate it? What aspects do you have to validate? Validating for a list vs a market If you have a list and your idea is …