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…
Since its founding, Hit Subscribe has had terrible positioning. And this has been entirely my fault. Now, before this self-flagellation descends into “awkward to watch,” I will offer two important mitigating considerations: Hit Subscribe’s new business has always been at least 95% pure inbound, so bad positioning has never been an acute pain. Almost all…
Lately, I’ve found myself fielding client questions related to Google’s creatively named “Search Generative Experience (SGE)”. This is hardly surprising, given that it uses generative AI, and generative AI has forced Gartner to redraw its hype cycle curve with a peak of inflated expectations that now extends about 50 miles into space. (I cringe to…
For my first blog entry on 2024’s ledger (BTW, happy new year!) I’m going to do a little double-duty. As you can see from a little slice of my Asana task list, I owe our account managers an updated SOP for identifying client refresh candidates. However, since it’s that time of year when everyone’s “best…
Something we’re asked all the time is how to match a keyword to an interesting title for a blog post that someone has brainstormed. A client has an idea for an article title, such as “Why ChatGPT Will Actually Increase the Demand for Human Writers,” and then asks what keyword they should target, or, more…
Today I rolled up my sleeves and made a spreadsheet. I know, I know, try to contain your jealousy. But in all seriousness, it was an interesting exercise. A client of ours was interested in assessing the relative cost of a few scenarios. Specifically, they wanted to know the cost of the following: Sustaining the…
I just spent part of my morning writing up internal documentation to operationalize so-called SEO competitor analysis. If you don’t believe me and think this is just a rhetorical flourish, here’s a really boring screenshot. As I was doing this, my last step was to record a high-level explanation of the document, which included…