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…
This isn’t a clickbait title. I genuinely stand by the position that “SEO consulting” is a service that shouldn’t exist in the economy. But before I dive into specifics and my case, I do want to offer a couple of important caveats. I wouldn’t dispute that some SEO consultants offer some economic value and provide…
I’ve been on a listening tour of late, talking to product marketers that own their business’s content production, among others. My aim has been to discover subtle pain points, identify patterns, and possibly develop productized services to help. A couple of weeks ago, I heard something interesting. “We have in-house engineers that want to contribute…
Today I’m going to dive into a topic and a situation that comes up constantly among clients and prospects. It’s the “You say you want organic traffic, but do you really?” conversation. Historically, I’ve tended to have this conversation live. But it comes up so often that I’m going to immortalize it here, in written form,…
Lately, within the account management function of Hit Subscribe, we’ve been swatting around a philosophical question. Rather than having disparate sales and account management departments, could a unified customer success group serve both functions for our business? We currently, tentatively believe that the answer is “yes,” and we’re proceeding accordingly. But to make this work,…
I’m going to dive into something today that I consider nuanced but profound. And I’m going to attempt to do this with some modicum of decorum, since most of the (non-freelancer) content I create for Hit Subscribe I intend specifically for clients and prospects. It’s a risky “call your baby ugly but do it gently”…
If the title here seems aggressive, my hope is that you’ll empathize with me by the time you’re done reading. Throughout this post, I’m going to post screenshots of link building outreach I’ve received over the years. They’re not going to be relevant to the flow of the post, per se. Instead, I’m going to…
Editorial Note: this post is part of my SEO for Non-Scumbags series, which I began here and am syndicating to this site from daedtech.com, since there’s substantial audience overlap for these posts. It might seem a bit aggressive or presumptuous to write off an entire discipline as tactical. But, I guess, here we are. I’ve…
Editorial note: I originally wrote this post on my DaedTech blog. It and the series that will follow are aimed at engineers training to be our account strategists. But there’s enough overlap that it makes sense to publish on this site as well. Today I’m going to start a blog post series that fits into…
Editorial note: I originally posted this on the DaedTech blog, but am cross-posting it here because of the audience overlap. Software engineers hang out on Twitter. I know this anecdotally and by feel because I spent most of my career as a software engineer and I’ve had a Twitter account for more than a decade. …
One of the most awkward interactions that I have on sales calls these days arises out of an apparently benign question that I ask. “How many reviewers will you have for each blog post?” Here’s what happens next, depending on the response. When the prospects answer with one or zero reviewers, the call continues without…
At the time of writing, our business publishes up to 40 blog posts per week. Managing that is no easy feat. So naturally, we throw lots of low cost labor at the problem and run around like chickens with our heads cut off. Er, wait. That’s not what we do. We do the opposite of…
My business, Hit Subscribe, provides content strategy and content. So it probably won’t shock you to learn that we frequently talk to people with the title “content manager,” and thus have a great deal of field experience when it comes to that role. Today, I’d like to leverage that experience to talk about what that…