** announcement! contentaudience.com is going away, the emails you get from me will start coming from jim@inboundfound.com after today** I took my dad to the ER on Christmas Eve for COVID. He was …
Black Friday hangover
We have been in the market for a dog bed for a while. This is old one: Roger is getting older so we had preliminarily settled on the fancy Casper orthopedic one designed for older dogs. It's like …
“Warm yourself by the dumpster fire of my insights”
The underlying network processes between how you currently approach content and how I think you should, are radically different. The content you create is typically for your existing email list, …
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What does bottom of funnel content look like for experts?
I define BOFU content for experts this way: Content that serves a real and imminent purchasing decision for a paid solution. The user is in pursuit of a jump in progress on a more meaningful …
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Learn from B2B SaaS
Maybe counterintuitive, but experts can learn a lot from B2B SaaS traffic getting content strategy. The following sites have done a great job of zooming out of their specific product to get a …
My content analysis workflow – part 1
Table Of Contents1. Review site manually, get a lay of the site and typical page template structures 2. Crawl and extract text, meta data, metrics with ScreamingFrogScreamingFrog's API …
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Get Website PageRank and CheiRank natively in Neo4j
We all know what PageRank is in the context of Google / SEO, but it's also an incredibly useful tool for internal purposes around website analysis and surfacing insights. CheiRank is like PageRank …
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giving directions vs drawing a map
We often think of people as buyers in pipeline stages or funnels. As if their journey is somehow linear, they understand their problem, and can cut a straight line to the solution. But it's much …
Part 2 Solving for audience self-misdiagnosis
People pursue purposes and outcomes. You've heard those can be treated as moving away from pain and/or toward possibility. But what I think really happens is you zoom out, and we're moving toward …
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Solving for audience self-(mis)diagnosis
I've talked a lot about how you, having turned over lots of complex problems, have domain knowledge while your audience is forced to operate from too little experience. Mapping user journeys in …
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“outsized returns” indicates past mistakes
Bear with me on this idea. As I obsess over "low hanging fruit" this and "high leverage" that or content organization as the solution to all your web-based marketing problems, I can't help but …
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Email list vs website: part 2
Yesterday, I wrote you some reasons I thought "email list as king" of your marketing efforts should be rethought. To me, the points were self-evident: "email list value decays over time" AKA …
Email list vs website – which is more important?
You hear that the "email list is the lifeblood of your online business." When you (email) launch a product, the sales come through your list. When you write a book, hammering your email list is …
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more thinking on organizing content
When I sold some work around a site audit + per article recommendations around keep, rework, delete and categorization, I thought, "this will be easy, this is what I do now." But I just keep …
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Links are dying
It is pretty much a meme now for SEOs to share and collectively crap on bad hot takes about how "SEO is dead" by people who don't even have a baseline understanding of search. They (we) think, as …
Bridges vs hubs
Everyone loves a power curve - the idea that central nodes in a network are the most important, that the fat head is where all the influence and popularity lives. All sorts of things were built on …
“Topics” are for them, not you
-or- rooted content vs thinking content This is a weird one. As I do pattern analysis on expert content, I find something that is obvious to the user but an absolute blind spot for the …
Options for extracting keywords associated with your content
This is a key early step in organizing expert content. Keywords for our purposes just means one, two, three or so word terms that identify or are representative of an article or section of an …
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TF-IDF for organizing expert content
This article is in progress and incomplete. For my first year on this journey, TF-IDF shows up a lot in NLP 101 courses, each making it sound more complex that it is and stressing it as overly …
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Transformation is optimization over time
Experts solving for relevant problems always seem to lean toward advocating transformation for clients. But in reality, that advice rarely ends up working. Why? Lack of buy-in (e.g. you're not …
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[Workshop] Organize your expert content for better usability (and SEO)
On Sept 1 and Sept 8, I'll be doing a livestream workshop facilitated by Philip Morgan on Twitch and Youtube Live. It's practical takeaways on turning your piles of expert content into a well …
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How many clicks does it take to change someone’s life?
If every visit to your site resulted in that person finding what they were looking for, that would be meaningful right? You'd have an instant way to qualify them. You can see where they came from, …
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Why it’s hard for experts to say what they mean
Yesterday (ok, Thursday), I was describing why I think, in general, it's hard to say what you mean. Or more aptly, why I think it's hard for me (fear). When you want to say what you mean as an …
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Why is it so hard to say what you mean?
I was going to write about a top tier SEO agency botching their own site migration after being acquired by Perficient. I was very excited to point out their fancy suit with the fly down. And then …
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