Greatest Hits

After several years and 500+ posts and counting, it has gotten a little unwieldy to just point people at the first article and ask them to read to the end.  (If you’d like to try anyhow, I recommend Rizal al Mashoor‘s MicroISV on a Shoestring Reader. For some reason related to my blog migration to WPEngine, you’ll need to click Next twice to read the first post after you open that. The 404 isn’t real.)  For folks who would rather just get to the good stuff, I try to periodically curate a list of the posts which are most valuable.

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Most Popular:

Videos:

  • Andrew Warner interviewed me on Mixergy.  (About one hour, comes with transcript half-written by me.)  Andrew is, by the way, the best interviewer in technology today.  You cannot do better than some of the insights he teases out of guests, and he has a wonderful way of making people so comfortable they forget to not answer the tough questions he slides in there.
  • Gabriel Weinberg interviewed me with specific regards to SEO, mini-sites, and conversion optimization.  (About one hour, comes with transcript written by me.)
  • I did a 7.5 minute lightning talk on selling software to underserved markets at Business of Software 2010.
  • I did an hour-long talk with Andrew Warner about Scalable Content Generation.  AppSumo sells it.  It is worth the money.
  • I spoke on Productizing Twilio Applications at TwilioConf 2011.
  • Google brought me in to do a tech talk about What Engineers Don’t Know We Know About Marketing.

SEO:

Content Creation:

  • Before launch (July 1, 2006) I had a rough cut of my content creation strategy and figured out there would be seasonal elements to it.
  • Right after launch, I stumbled on what turned into my first major SEO opportunity: Dolch Sight Words.  This started working rather quickly (was my main source of sales for almost a year), both for traffic and for backlinks.
  • Optimizing your website for snowflake queries: the ones Google only sees once.  This eventually formed the core of my content creation strategy: as many pages as possible, each targeted at one specific, narrow interest.
  • Most recommended series: After seeing the results of doing content creation by hand in notepad, I started trying to scale it up using Rails and get the content written by freelancers.  This ended up getting early positive results and eventually virtually taking over the business (now accounting for some 50% of sales and 75% of profits, give or take).  I eventually distilled this strategy into a presentation on SEO for software companies, which is my conference shtick of choice.
  • Using evergreen content (that which is perpetually useful to consistent, unchanging needs of your customers) to make sales.  (Note: anti-pattern of a 10 year old blog post outranking product site happens frequently in consulting!)  My little brother busy trying to break into comic book writing advice also has thoughts on this here.

Mini-sites:

  • I have a variety of mini-sites focused on my best performing single pieces of content, beginning with an experimental one for Christmas back in 2008.  They tend to work exceptionally well in their second and third years.
  • While originally I wrote these by hand, after expanding from the Halloween/Christmas/Valentine’s triumvirate to second-tier activities like Thanksgiving bingo cards, it became more rational to get freelancers to do it for me.
  • Relatedly, I wrote up some tips on how to do holiday promotions.

Link Building:

  • See everything I write about content creation, as they’re deeply entwined for me.
  • Tactics and strategy for more effective link building.

On Page SEO:

Miscellaneous:

Marketing:

Free Trials:

Conversion Optimization:

AdWords:

Measurement:

Miscellaneous:

Career Advice

Tough To Categorize But Still Useful:

Statistics and Commentary: