Full-time coaches are full-time learners

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Sometime in the next decade or so, I’d think I’d like to get into business coaching. I’ve learned a ton in growing GreenMellen over the past 12 years, and continue to learn more every day from our amazing business coach and from other resources that I dig into.

I know I’m still some years from being of adequate value to many companies, so we’ll see where the coming years take me. Whether I end up as a coach or not, the principles and lessons I’m learning are of incredible value to our team right now.

While listening to a recent episode of Rory Vaden’s podcast, guest Mary Sobon shared a simple but powerful statement:

If you’re a full-time coach, you’re also a full-time learner.

That statement both excites and scares me.

  • On one hand, I know that learning about this stuff will never end, and I’m excited to continue to dig into it.
  • On the other hand, I’m sort of becoming a “full-time learner” already, so it’ll be hard for me to close the gap on those that are already ahead of me and still continuing to learn. If they’re ahead of me and we’re moving at the same pace, how do I ever catch up?

Fortunately, I don’t think that “catching up” is really what needs to happen. If I continue to focus and grow my skills, I’ll be of benefit to people out there. Whether that remains solely at GreenMellen, or coaching others, or something entirely different, the benefits of constant learning will only help me in any of those directions.

Criticize or change?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

When you see a problem in the world that you want to address, you have two choices:

  • You can complain about it.
  • You can do something about it.

I find that many people fit squarely into one of those options every time a problem comes up. Some people always sit back and complain, and some people always roll up their sleeves and get to work.

I know a lot of people on Facebook that just choose to sit back and complain. All day long, they post about how awful things are, how bad the government is, but they never do anything about it. Best case, you might get some “thoughts and prayers” if something tragic happens.

What I love to see are people that are trying to really make a difference. If Blake Canterbury sees people struggling, he’s going to fight to fix it. If Tim Villegas sees an inequity in education, he’s going to do all he can to right it.

As Dale Carnegie famously said, “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain—and most fools do.“

As I’ve spent more time on LinkedIn recently, I seem to find myself surrounded by more of the people that want to make a difference and fewer than just want to complain. I don’t know if it’s the platform, the algorithm, or just pure luck, but it’s a refreshing change of pace.

If you see a problem in the world, there’s nothing wrong with criticizing it. If you stop there, though, I think you’re doing a disservice to those around you.

Collective sharing versus collective building

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

The internet is at an interesting place right now, where sharing is becoming easier than ever, but building is becoming more elusive. As people continue to run to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other platforms, they’re finding it increasingly easy to share content.

That’s a not a bad thing, for sure. While I work to obtain a lot of content directly from the source that created it (using tools such as Feedly), most great content still comes my way because someone shared it with me, either via social media or by contacting me directly.

However, while sharing can be a great thing, the slow fade of true content creation on the internet is troubling. Thomas Friedman said it well in his book “Thank You For Being Late“:

“Social media is great for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building. Good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction.”

Collective building can be amazing, but it’s rare. Wikipedia is likely the best example of that, but so are most news organizations. Anything where people can come together and create is a great place to be, and I hope we find a way to develop more of those in the coming years.

Understanding is not accepting

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The people I meet have a lot of different ideas about a lot of different things. I agree with some of them and disagree with others, but I do my best to at least try to understand their point of view.

I don’t necessarily always go as far as to create a steel man argument on their behalf, but showing a bit of empathy can help me much better understand their viewpoint. Even as I try to understand their perspective, it doesn’t mean that I need to accept it.

This came up while I was reading “The Art of Possibility“, where they said:

“Being present to the way things are is not the same as accepting things as they are”

You really could take that two different ways, both of which can be good things.

  • You can do what I suggested above and simply try to understand the other point of view.
  • You can be more aggressive and fight for making a change where you see it might be necessary.

It also leads a bit toward The Serenity Prayer, which we’ve all heard many times but perhaps never really thought about:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

You can’t gain that serenity until you really understand the world around you and where other viewpoints are coming from. If you just close your eyes and assume that “those people are all idiots”, you’ll never gain the necessary empathy to take the right path. “They” might indeed be idiots, but there’s always a chance that you’re wrong instead.

The idea of really understanding multiple viewpoints is something I talked about a few months ago (“Integrated Complexity“) and it’s a great first step if you want to walk an issue through the logic of the Serenity Prayer.

500 days of blogging

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

When I started on this back in October of 2020, I was pretty confident I’d make it through the end of that year, and even 100 in a row didn’t seem too bad. However, 500 is a different animal and I’m pleased I’ve been able to keep it up this long.

Because I don’t write fresh posts every day (I write in batches and simply publish every day), my queue ebbs and flows. I’ll have as many as 10-12 posts ready to go sometimes, and other times it gets down to just 1 or 2. When I get down that low, the root cause is usually that I haven’t been reading enough recently. Writing posts is relatively easy, and I enjoy what I learn as I write them, but I sometimes struggle coming up with new ideas to write about.

1000?

Now that I’ve made it this far, 1000 seems possible. I’m not sure if I’ll make it not, but things are going strong now and I plan to keep on running.

I’ve said it a few times now, but the longer I do this the more I’m convinced that most people should be doing the same. Folks like Seth Godin and Chris Lema continue to produce amazing content, I’m seeing other folks like Cory Miller blog more, and people such as Tim Villegas and Evan Chasteen posting very consistently on LinkedIn as well. It’s a big ask, but I strongly encourage you to give it shot and see what it does for your clarity of thought.

If you do, let me know so I can check it out and follow your work!

Internal linking is crucial for your website

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

When Google reveals a bit of information about how their search algorithm works, the words they use are very important.

For example, last year Google’s Gary Illyes mentioned that website speed is a “teeny tiny factor” in ranking, which came as a surprise to many people. It’s very important for user experience, but isn’t a major factor to Google.

However, in a recent post about the importance of internal linking on your website, Google’s John Mueller said that it was “super critical” and “one of the biggest things you can do” to help Google. Those are bold words!

Internal Links

I try to be very intentional about links on this site. Sometimes I’ll link out to other sources (such as the link a few paragraphs up), and many times I’ll link to old posts of mine that are relevant for the discussion at hand. For example, while John made it clear that internal links are important, I can point you to a post of mine from last year where he said that you can certainly have too many internal links and perhaps create problems.

Internal links are a huge, easy win, because they benefit both the user and Google. Really, most things that are good for users (unique content, mobile friendliness, etc) are good for Google as well. In most cases, you can think “Would this be good for my visitors?” and be pretty confident that it would also be good in Google’s eyes.

Back to John’s thoughts on internal links, though, here is an extended quote of what he said, and you can read even more over on this great post at Search Engine Journal.

It’s something where internal linking is super critical for SEO.

I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.

And what you think is important is totally up to you.

You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor or maybe you’re the weakest competitor.

With internal linking you can really kind of focus things on those directions and those parts of your site.

Fight for your own attention

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Over the past few decades, marketers of all kinds have been fighting for our attention. Like I said last year, your attention is the product that companies are purchasing. As a whole, sadly, they’re winning.

These days, your focus shouldn’t necessarily be on gaining the attention of others, but rather fighting to get your own attention back. While the statement may be a bit extreme, author Johann Hari puts it this way:

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can.

It’s something we have to focus on doing, but fortunately you have a lot of options. For example, you could:

  • Remove the televisions in your house.
  • Fast from social media.
  • Meditate daily.
  • Spend some time in silence, like in the shower or the car.
  • Take clarity breaks.
  • Read or write using paper, not a screen.

You likely have more items you can think of to add to the list.

I know people that do each of those, but I don’t think I know anyone that does all of them. Following that full list would be very difficult, and perhaps detrimental. However, doing a few of them would likely gain some benefits.

Even if you don’t, simply acknowledging that many people are fighting for your attention is a great place to start, because once you realize that you can start to do things to take it back for yourself.

What’s something you’ve intentionally done to start getting your attention back?

You won’t be discovered, and that’s ok

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Years ago, many people desired to be “discovered”, particularly in industries like music. Make some great stuff, and then hope that the right person hears it and can vault you to stardom. Those days are long gone, but it’s ok.

These days, with sharing so painfully easy, any great talent will quickly be shared and become known without the intervention of someone like a record label. As Hugh MacLeod said in his book “Ignore Everybody“:

You don’t have to waste time, sitting around waiting to be discovered. Be proactive, network and use the internet to get your message out to the world.

It’s yours to take! Keep putting out amazing content, and your audience will slowly (or perhaps rapidly) grow.

The same is true for business. I mentioned last month that if your business requires that you buy advertising to survive, you’re likely in trouble. Hugh puts it this way:

“If your business plan depends on suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.”

Ads can potentially help you get there, but you should be able to grow to some degree without them. If you’re not yet where you want to be with your business idea or your artistic talent, just keep being proactive and keep making pots.

Being overprepared can make things look easy

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

If I need to travel to a business that I’ve never been to before, I almost always scout it on Google Maps Street View first, so I have some idea what I’m looking for. Just a few weeks ago, this habit paid off when I discovered that I had the address wrong and would have been driving in circles. Instead, that two minutes of looking at Google Maps probably saved me 30 minutes of frustrating driving.

That said, it’s a tough balance — how much effort should you put into preparing? Taking my example above further, I could have pulled up Street View for every turn along the route, figured out which lane to be in after each turn, looked for landmarks, etc. That would have helped, but would have taken an absurd amount of time and not been worth it.

Backups

Another example is how we handle website maintenance with our clients. We back up every site at least twice a day, we run at least two different malware scans on them each day, and we monitor their update and stability every five minutes. That’s beyond the core work we do with content, plugin updates, etc.

For almost every client, that is far more than needs to be done. We manage roughly 200 sites, so that’s 12,000 backups that we run every month, and we maybe need to use one of them every now and then. For that one, though, that backup is worth gold.

If a site happens to crash, we can get it back up and running in minutes and it seems super easy — and it was. Because of the effort we’ve put into being prepared, we can make problems disappear quickly.

I like what Barbara Corcoran has to say about preparedness:

Time-shifting

In a way, I see being over-prepared as another way of time-shifting your effort.

  • When I was heading to that meeting, I was able to use some time from the night before to make the drive easier.
  • When a website goes down, we’re able to use the time from earlier in the day (the backup) to save time right then and get things resolved quickly.

In both cases, being able to use some earlier time to speed things up when they really matter is absolutely awesome. If you’re careful not to go crazy with it, being overprepared is a wonderful thing.

More content doesn’t mean more traffic, except when it does

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you’re striving to get your site to rank higher in Google, you often hear two big things: Google loves more content and Google loves fresh content. Neither are necessarily true, though they’re not necessarily false either.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s consider “more content” and “fresh content” to be the same thing. If you’re going to work toward either, you’re going to accomplish both. The question is, does Google care?

At a high level, the answer is a clear “no”. In a recent tweet, seen below, Google’s John Mueller was super clear about it:

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable did a good job of explaining how John is accurate, but how more content still can be beneficial. Barry said:

I can relate, creating more content, does not always translate to more traffic. Sometimes sites push out bad or spammy content and that won’t always lead to more traffic. But in general, if you write quality and useful content often, it is more likely that you can produce more traffic from more content. Not always but often.

If you strive to write great new content frequently, it’s going to help you rank better in search. Not because it’s “more” or “fresh”, but because you’re generating more individual pieces of content that may be worthy of showing in the search results for other users. If search engine rankings are important, quality beats quantity every time.

Google won’t directly reward you for the fact that you’re putting out lots of content, but if the content is high-quality then you’ll see the rewards anyhow.