Post-processing

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

At the end of a productive span of time, such as a team meeting or reading an article, spending a few minutes processing what happened can make the time investment 10x more valuable.

For example, after I read a book or an impactful article, I spend some time to pull out the highlights so I can make use of them later. Sometimes I put pieces in to Anki to memorize, some I share with my team, and most all of them end up in Roam Research for later use (like I show with books here).

After a church service, I have a pretty solid process that I go through to convert those quick notes into something that will bring ongoing value to my system (this quick video shows more).

For meetings, it can matter even more. If it’s a proper business meeting, I hope you have a good process for that already. Generally someone is assigned to take notes, and every meeting should end with clear takeaways for every attendee.

Casual Meetings

But what about more casual meetings? I was on a recent call with some of my altMBA friends, and I noticed that a lot of great resources were being shared. I scribbled some quick notes about them as we went, and then shared them with the group after the call. It wasn’t a big deal, but taking the time to process them made the value of those suggestions much higher.

Poems
Someone shared The Enkindled Spring and one from Lao Tzu, both of which I saved in Roam and tagged with their names. Thanks to how Roam magically ties things together, I was able to connect the Lao Tzu poem to some previous things I’d written such as this post. I love those kinds of connections.

Books
Someone mentioned the book “The Pursuit of Endurance“, which I added to my “to-read” list, and I shared “Seeking Wisdom“, which I’m found great value from as I worked through it.

Podcasts
Someone mentioned “The Long and The Short Of It” podcast, which I’ve now subscribed to, and it’s fantastic.

Websites
One of the men on the call is going to literally be hiking around the world, so I made sure to grab his website so I can follow his journey.

Kick back or lean in?

I could have just kicked back and enjoyed the call. The people I’ve met through the altMBA are fascinating, and that would have been a fine use of my time. However, by jotting down a few quick notes while we talked, and then spending 20 minutes after the call to sort through everything, I’ve generated a ton more value that will be with me for quite some time.

Buy, Beg, Bug, or Earn

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Interruption marketing is fading, and most people are very happy about that. While we’ll likely have traditional interruption-based ads for the foreseeable future (TV, radio, etc), true interruptions like cold calls are finally starting to go away.

According to David Meerman Scott, there are really four ways to reach a potential buyer:

  1. You can BUY attention (this is traditional advertising)
  2. You can BEG for attention (this is traditional media relations)
  3. You can BUG people one at a time to get attention (this is traditional sales)
  4. Or you can EARN attention online by creating great information that your buyers want to consume such as YouTube videos, blogs, Twitter feeds, photographs, infographics, charts, graphs, and ebooks—and it is all free.

It’s a fantastic place to be. Rather than calling 100 folks and irritating almost all of them, you can create information online that will attract the very people you wish to serve.

You can continue to buy, beg, and bug if you want, but earning attention is so much more fruitful for everyone involved.

Intentional mistakes can help

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I talk a lot on here about making mistakes, generally from the angle of “try hard to learn from your mistakes”. That certainly holds true, but there is some evidence that intentionally making mistakes can be helpful too.

The Derring Effect

A paper from the American Psychological Association showed that when students were instructed to intentionally make mistakes in their studies, and then correct them, they remembered the content better than others. This is known as the derring effect.

From the paper:

deliberately committing and correcting errors even when we know the correct answers enhances learning

Mistakes can be a great thing. If you’re generating a lot of ideas and make mistakes along the way, that’s something you shouldn’t hide from.

Going further, if you’re trying to learn specific information, making some mistakes on purpose (and correcting them properly) will help cement those new ideas in your head.

You can read more about these findings in this article from Psychology Today.

Anchor and twist

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This term has been around for a long time, but I hadn’t noticed it until very recently. It has to do with sharing new ideas, and “anchoring” them to something people are familiar with and then “twisting” into how the new product is different.

It’s similar to Seth Godin’s concept of putting your new product in the right genre so that people can understand where it fits, and then later explaining how yours is different and better.

Compio wrote a post a while back that gave some good examples:

  • TiVo works like a VCR (anchor) with TV shows (twist).
  • Spyder is like Speedo (anchor) for skiers (twist).
  • Sermo is a FaceBook (anchor) for doctors (twist)

This came up in a recent conversation with a company that wanted to rank well in Google for a phrase that no one would be looking for. Ranking #1 for something that no one searches for is useless. Instead, you should work to rank well for other attributes about your product, and then introduce them to your new phrase.

BeamPrint

For example, suppose I developed a product to make wireless printing easier and I called “BeamPrint”. Ranking #1 for that would be pretty easy, but no one would find me.

Instead, I’d want to try to rank well for terms like “wireless printing” or “mobile printing”. The page could then say:

“If you have trouble getting your wireless printer to work properly, come try out BeamPrint and never be frustrated by that again.”

In the world of digital marketing, anchors are the key. Make it easy for people to get a general idea of what you do, and then you can take them down the path of why your new solution is the one they need.

What do you notice?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

A few weeks ago, Seth Godin wrote about “The things you can’t see“, talking about small everyday items that only some people are able to notice. One example he gave is the alignment of moldings in a house, which is something I almost certainly wouldn’t notice (but a good builder would).

That made me think — what small things would I notice that others might not?

Three things came to mind.

  • Website speed: While we can all notice when a site is slow, I often can pinpoint the reasons a bit based on how images are loading in and what items show up first.
  • Accessibility: I’ve turned my eyes toward this a lot more in recent years, so things like #lowercasehashtags really stand out to me.
  • Tile grout: Years ago, we worked with a company that produced a huge range of colors and styles of tile grout. Now if I’m out and about I’ll notice when businesses used plain white grout when they could have styled things a bit better.

The challenge with this post is that I don’t know what I’m not noticing in the world. It’s almost like a form of survivorship bias; I know about some of the things that I used to not notice, but I have no way of noticing the things I’m not aware of.

What do you notice now in your day that other people might not pay attention to?

What do you expect in return?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

In a recent podcast episode I heard from Gary Vee, he explained that when giving something away, there is a very simple difference between kindness and manipulation.

Kindness is doing something for someone with no expectation of a return.

Manipulation is doing something for someone with an agenda behind it.

There are times when you do something for someone and expect the kindness to be repaid, but it only becomes manipulation if you’re unclear with your motives.

I’ve seen it put another way, though I can’t determine where it first came from:

Honesty without kindness is brutality, and kindness without honesty is manipulation.

Kindness and honesty need to go hand-in-hand, or else you’re not likely a very pleasant person to be around.

Mise en place for better writing

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

When I cook, which is fairly rarely, I try to follow the French concept of mise en place, where you have everything prepped and ready to go before you actually start. Given my weak cooking skills, it’s very helpful to do that.

I’m finding that writing works best for me when I follow the same idea. I’ve said before that I have a hard time when faced with a blank page, so the more prep that I do for each post, the easier it is for me. I broke down each step of my process in this post last month, and it shows how my mise en place comes together.

Processing

If you read that post, the key for me is the processing step in the middle. During that step I pull in relevant quotes, thoughts, photos, ideas, etc so that all of my ingredients are laid out in front of me.

When it’s time to write, I have all of the core pieces at my fingertips, and it’s just a matter of assembling them in the right order and putting words around them.

Some of my meals come out better than others, but they’re all easier to produce when I follow the right steps.

Should your offline activities affect your Twitter account?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve seen a lot of posts from conservative friends that suggest that Russia and other adversaries shouldn’t be allowed to have Twitter accounts. After all, if Twitter banned Donald Trump, they should ban others too, right?

Twitter’s response has generally been that accounts are only removed for actions taken by a user on Twitter, not by digging into their background. While some backgrounds would be easy to find offensive and worth banning (Russia, for example), it’s a slippery slope.

I’ve found that a lot of the people who are upset that adversaries are still on Twitter also share memes like this:

You can’t have it both ways

With the first meme, they’re asking Twitter to take down accounts based on actions made offline.

With the second meme, they’re suggesting the exact opposite: that Twitter might dig into all of our accounts and make decisions that affect our offline activities.

Personally, I tend to agree with Twitter’s current approach. If you do something on Twitter that violates their terms of service, you should be kicked off. If you do things offline that people are against, that should not affect the status of your account.

While I’d ideally love to see Russia and people like Zabihullah Mujahid removed from Twitter, I don’t like the ways that it would need to happen.

Social media moderation is already a shockingly difficult thing to control, and adding more nuance seems like a recipe for disaster.

Does accessibility help your website rank higher?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Online accessibility has become an important topic over the past few years. I’ve shared some tips on how you can improve accessibility on your site, and this short podcast offers a few more bits of advice.

The question is — does Google reward your site for being accessible? The short answer is “no”, but the longer answer is a bit more nuanced.

Google’s John Mueller put it this way (via SE Journal):

“No, not really. So I think accessibility is something that is important for a website because, if you drive your users away with a website that they can’t use, then they’re not going to recommend it to other people.

But it’s not something that we would pick up and use as a direct ranking factor when it comes to search. Maybe that will change over time. ”

He’s not wrong. At this time, Google doesn’t measure and rank sites based on their level of accessibility. However, many of things that you need to work on to help with accessibility will also tend to help with your rankings in Google.

A site that loads quickly, doesn’t bury text in images, uses proper alt text, and makes good use of headings will accomplish both areas. Sites like that will be more accessible, but they’ll also tend to rank better.

Accessibility won’t be a bonus for your rankings in and of itself, but spending the time to do it right will have secondary benefits for you, and your users will absolutely appreciate it.

Are your requests scaring customers away?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

When we’re developing a website, we work hard to make sure that every single page has a goal. The call-to-action (CTA) might be to sign up for a newsletter, reach out with more questions, or to simply continue on to another article for more information, but you have to have something there. Too often I find web pages that get to the end of the content and then… nothing.

However, if you go in too aggressively with your CTA, you might just scare people away instead. Much like the idea of not proposing on a first date, easing people toward a commitment is usually the right way to go.

An easy place to start is by asking for less information. If you have an email sign-up form on your site, asking fewer questions will generally result in a much higher conversion rate. While I’d love to know the zip code and annual income of everyone on our list, reducing the questions and only asking for their email address is a much easier commitment for a user to take.

Why is someone here?

As you’re working to figure out the goal for each page, taking the time to understand why someone might be reading a particular page can help you understand how far into the journey they are.

  • If they’re browsing your “about” page, they’re likely pretty new.
  • If they’re looking at the details in your knowledgebase find out how your system handles on obscure scenario, it’s likely that they’re much further along. Treat them accordingly.

For most people, simply taking the time to have a goal in mind for every page would be a huge step forward, but if you can craft the CTA for each page based on the type of person you expect would be there, you’ll see much better results.