Typically we cater to KPIs around reducing costs and increasing leads or sales. We set these with our clients at various points in the funnel and sometimes they care about other things we cannot …
The problem with KPIs is bias
For our tiny agency, data is our best friend and worst enemy. We’re mostly referral driven so in a sales process, I might not know a client's industry well enough to rely on instincts. The right …
Choosing the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
As you might know, KPIs are metrics that help determine how well we're doing in accomplishing business objectives. Good KPIs predict the future and tell the story of where we are versus where we want …
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point of view audit
I've been slipping a little bit on the daily writing. The problem (I think) is my instinct is to try to look good. This gets exacerbated when when I get or lose some momentum. Needed to call myself …
Characteristics of purchases people regret
Updated: May 28, 2019 I can think of a few and they fall into these categories of anything: that locks you into an ongoing agreement arbitrarilywhen you couldn't really afford itthat afterward …
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Tactical content vs thought leadership content
There's a tension between doing effective (but tactical) things with your content and playing the long game of developing you E-A-T (expertise, authority, trust). Mark Schaeffer wrote that over …
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Planning my first info product [notes]
Picking a format I know format matters in terms of perceived value so I think I will have a combination of video (with audio/transcripts) and pdf worksheets. I'm worried about losing steam (a …
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Using keyword research to plan writing a guide
Understanding search intent Let’s just look at search from a purely psychographic standpoint. In this exercise, we’re only concerned about the what and why of people’s mindsets as buyers or …
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Why bloggers are bad at SEO (anthropological edition)
Thoughts on how bloggers SEOing their posts came to be a thing and why it's so hard for them. A completely biased and incomplete history of keywords -or- "When keywords ruled" Until about …
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Learning how to fall right
In jiujitsu, as you move up the belts the things you focus on change but they also don't, or so I'm told. I'm just a month in and wear a newly bright white gi (pronounced gē with a hard "g") and …
What content format(s) should I use?
Interrupting the blog post series on optimizing your blog for users and search engines alike for a quick post on content formats. Make it about the user Let's think again about the users under …
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Category Pages vs Curated Guides: A Case Study
I have been rambling about blog organization forever now. If you've been putting up with that, thank you. This post focusing on usability and the next focusing on search, I think, will really make it …
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From automated archives to curated hubs
In the blog problem, I wrote: The default organization is posts being archived by date. This leaves more posts siloed with each passing day in your growing library of content. When this …
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Painless-as-possible content audit
A traditional content audit requires inventorying every piece of content on your site. With two minutes spent on each posts at 1000 posts, you'd be looking at a week of non-stop work, just to get to …
The Curse of Content
Are you familiar with the curse of knowledge concept? I (maybe wrongly) assume you are. [It] occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the …
Lots of content with little to no organization
To recap, "The blog problem" is inherent to active blogs. With every post, all the posts before it get pushed further down into the ether. Even with some tastefully placed categories, the newer …
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the blog problem
or why most blogs are a hot mess By the early 2000s a series of free hosted blogging platforms brought blogging mainstream. People start chronicling experiences, thoughts, learning, etc., …
Does your site use too many tags and/or categories?
If you use a fair amount of organizational taxonomies like tags or categories, you’re likely on a CMS that dynamically generates pages for those taxonomies. If not, skip to the next section. If so, …
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What content or page issues are weighing down your site?
You can’t “open the floodgates to profitable organic traffic.” That’s not a real thing. UNLESS your site is being totally bogged down with issues. If you have issues, rectifying them can give you …
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To plan or not plan your content?
Guess how many times "how to organize a blog" gets searched in Google? Yeah, none. Categories vs tags type queries do a little better but users are talking about Wordpress and Squarespace so I …
Organizing a blog is hard
“I just went to this really well organized and easy to navigate blog. You should totally check it out,” said no one ever. Once you get to about 500 posts, content organization starts to become a …
Two ways people go bankrupt
I haven’t read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. But this quote is fun: “How did you go bankrupt?"“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” An army of people came before you. Most reach a measure of …
A Simple 5 Step Email Funnel Outline for New Subscribers [part 3]
This is the third part of a tiny guide designed to help you sell a product core to your body of work to new subscribers by email. You can read the first part here and second part …
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A Simple 5 Step Email Funnel for New Subscribers [part 2]
This is the second part of a tiny guide designed to help you sell a product core to your body of work to new subscribers by email. You can read the first part here. Most of your subscribers …
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A Simple 5 Step Email Funnel for New Subscribers [part 1]
Before we get into customer journey maps, let's look at a short and simple sales email sequence. This tiny guide was designed to help you promote info products under $100 core to your body of work. …
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The most powerful ways to segment
We talked about the common types of segments but not the most consistently effective approaches you can start using today. The goal of segmentation is enabling personalization. The end goal of …
How much time do you have to convert a new subscriber into a customer?
spoiler: you have about 30 days Have you heard this? In sales the odds of converting an inbound lead drop 95% if you wait more than an hour to call them. A ton of research has been done on …
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The new subscriber
It’d be weird if you went to a cocktail party and then proceeded to have the exact same conversation with everyone, whether you had met them before or not. But that’s what you’re doing with …
Common ways to segment
The end goals of segmentation is personalization. The idea is that you can better communicate with and serve people based on treating them like, you know, people. Some common categories of …
When you should start segmenting your list
A costly mistake The number one mistake I see with clients growing their lists that can never be undone is having tens of thousands of subscribers they never segmented. In fact, with just a few …
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Connection refused opening “Edit post” (Gutenberg) in wp-admin [solved]
First step with this issue or related issues is to check your error logs via FTP or SHH. For me checking the error log showed this: Let's break down the structure of the error: Date - self …
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Fix WordPress warnings in wp-admin dashboard
The goal of this post is to index warnings and how to troubleshoot them, some example solutions so we don't have to scour threads for answers. Let's see how we do! What call_user_func_array(), …
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Cannot add dynamic_sidebar() to WordPress Nav_Menu_Walker (solved)
Let's say you want to add content to your navigation without prepending it or appending it to the end (which is much easier). In trying to build a mega menu that relies on a widget area and hooks in …
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23 Free Stock Photo Sites
Ideal for your next website design project! Last updated: October 19, 2022Updated: June 7, 2018Updated: March 4, 2018Updated: November 19, 2017Published: November 2, 2017 This is an internal …
Troublehshooting not secure badge on chrome
There are various tools for checking that your website is secure. These tools are great as a starting point but aren't fully bulletproof so the below is a good workflow if you fixed all instances …
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Pavlok Site + Retargeting User Journey
Hey Maneesh! I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to me on twitter and express interest in learning more about what we can do to help Pavlok grow. You're probably wondering who we are …
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WordPress Get_Terms OrderBy Not Working
There are a few reasons this will happen: 1. There is a taxonomies order, or drag and drop re-order plugin overriding it. 2. You're calling it "orderby" when it should be "order". See codex …
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Woocommerce Ultra Custom Front Page
Answer Summary Output Woocommerce Brands field in a custom Woocommerce loop: $args = array('post_type'=>'product','product_cat'=>'cameras'); $loop = new WP_Query( $args ); while …
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Add Typekit to Your WordPress Site
When you're given the embed code for Typekit and you're using Wordpress, you have a couple options for how to add it to your site:Devin's code snippetUse a pluginUse a head tag hookMy code snippet …
Flush rewrite registered custom post types to fix args on theme switch
A common problem wordpress developers run into when registering new custom post types (CPTs) is having incorrect arguments, that generate slugs, or public single instances of the post type, and then …
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