When it comes to answering the question, “what causes a site to earn more answer engine traffic,” I have two disparate things going for me that create a unique opportunity: A bit of academic training in, and a long professional history of, data-driven analysis of complex systems. Access to a LOT of instances of Google…
Bear with me here, folks, because I have a somewhat wonky analysis of the economics of content spend for you. But I’ll make up for that in two ways: I’ll use graphs and visuals and a remarkable amount of self-restraint to make the topic approachable, and I’ll show you how to spend your content budget…
I promise you that I’m going to make some grammar mistakes and maybe even factual errors in this post. Well, promise might be strong. But it’s quite likely at least. The reason, dear reader, is that I simply don’t care enough to remedy that ostensibly bad situation. That, and the fact that I read at…
Imagine this for a moment. You hire on with an enterprise, or perhaps you’re acquired into one, and you want to work with a favorite freelancer that you’ve worked with in the past. Maybe that freelancer writes blog posts or does some impeccable graphic design. What’s your next move, or even your next thought? I’m…
I know, it’s been a while. For anyone wondering if I’d given up the blogging habit, I haven’t. I just forgot how to read for a bit. Luckily, however, I have a 4-year old that loves Dr Seuss, so that’s gotten me back on track and no worse for the wear, except for my new…
I’m gearing up, like some kind of power washer, to spray new productized services into our operations group so they can SOP those services at scale. And because I’m doing that, this seemed like a good moment to draw on my experience, both in leadership roles and as a management consultant, and lay out a…
I’ve made two posts this year about content refreshes. One was about traffic recovery, and the other was about refresh identification. Both of them were, admittedly, fairly wonky. I got lost in my SQL statements and graphs and invited you to come along for that ride with me, if you dared. Not today, though. Today…
In the last few months, I’ve been burning the midnight oil. By day, I run Hit Subscribe. But by night and weekend, I’ve buried myself in a sea of client analytics data, building out our content performance monitoring alpha offering. I say this not to complain. After years of pretending to know what I’m doing…
I was recently scrolling through LinkedIn, admiring the art of the single-line hook followed by emoji bullets, when I stumbled on a really interesting question from Fio Dossetto. The question is as follows: As someone who self-identifies as neither a marketer nor “smarter than” anyone, I figured I’d leave the comments to the thought leaders…
Be decisive. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision. I don’t know who originally said this, so I can’t properly attribute it. I guess that makes it some kind of piece of folk wisdom, now best suited for cheugy merchandise. But whoever dreamed it up has a gift…
Do you offer a trial? I’ve run Hit Subscribe’s sales for five of our seven years of existence. And this is by far the most common question I field at some point during discovery. The simple answer to the question is “sure, we can do that.” We don’t bother to set any minimums on the…
Yesterday I was wasting a little time on LinkedIn between calls. I ran across this post by April Dunford which resonated heavily with me and introduced me to a term I’d not previously heard: main character energy (or syndrome, I guess). I rolled up my sleeves and waded into the comments as a thought-follower, offering…
If you were to take a stroll through Hit Subscribe’s offering page, you’d see that we now have a first-class “traffic recovery” offering. We added this because of the frequency with which we field the question, “Why is my [usually organic] traffic declining?!” In fact, we field that question so frequently that I’m writing this…
Recently, I wrote a post about changing Hit Subscribe’s positioning, which I intend to distribute to clients and prospects in appropriate situations. I shared it to DaedTech as well, assuming that an audience of (I think, still) largely engineers might find the positioning insight interesting. What I didn’t expect was the traction among developer marketing…
Minimum viable product (MVP), as defined by Eric Ries in the Lean Startup, is a fascinating term. It has a specific meaning in the context that he defined it, but it also has a highly-inferable, slightly-wrong meaning if you simply happen to know what each of those three words mean. I imagine a whole lot…