When it comes to the big disagreements we see lately, on topics such as abortion or border control, people generally take “sides”. To pick a side often means that you don’t want to debate the nuances, which is where the truth often lies.
An antidote to this proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the range of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re making progress by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism.
It’s easier to just pick a side, but taking the time to really digest and debate a topic is what can lead to real change. Topics like border control aren’t just a pro/con argument, but get into deeper topics with laws, infrastructure, legal immigration processes and more. Thoughts on what is right will vary a lot, which is good for all of us, but simply picking a side isn’t the answer.
About a year ago, I shared the story of an insurance salesman I met that offered every kind of possible insurance there was, which made me realize that he probably wasn’t an expert in any of them. Too many options can be a problem.
The same can be true of your website, though with different consequences. Rather than a user not trusting all of the options, they simply don’t know where to go next. Every page of your site should have a goal, and that should be where you encourage your users to go. If you have dozens of navigation items and many varied calls-to-action on the page, it’s not likely to work out very well for you.
The folks at FeverBee did some testing and found that removing options from their site created huge increases in engagement. In their case, they noticed that of their seven navigation items, only five were regularly clicked — so they removed the other two, and had zero complaints about it.
In a bigger example, they used a variety of criteria to remove a ton of pages and conversations on their site (such as “any discussion which hadn’t been visited by 50+ people within the past year was archived“) and it increased engagement by 22% and increased their search traffic by 17%.
This is why we spend a lot of time with our clients digging into their Analytics and viewing heat map data from their sites. Insights like this image are hugely valuable to help us understand what visitors are clicking on and, more importantly, what they’re not.
It’s very possible that you already have a good idea of which pages on your site are the most frequently used, but if you can verify that with data it can help make you more sure of that decision (or help sell the idea to your boss).
There are times when most everyone has needed to pull an all-nighter at one point or another. However, if you have to do it regularly it’s a sign of poor planning.
Sleep is one of the most important parts of my work routine, period. All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan, who put things off to the last minute.
Getting a solid amount of sleep, every night, is one of the best things you can do for your productivity. Getting the right amount of sleep requires a wildly different approach for different people, but it’s something you can work into your schedule.
His post goes a bit deeper, and the main focus is that “the perfect day begins with a good evening”. If you can create a solid evening routine, including a consistent bedtime, your mornings will almost always be better.
On the other hand, if you find yourself having to pull an all-nighter, it’s either a very rare circumstance or a lack of planning to blame for it.
As I’m reading through Adam Grant’s excellent book Think Again, I keep being struck by one big thought — if Donald Trump had read this book, he might have been able to get reelected.
There are two big problems with that, of course: the book only recently came out, and “reading” versus “fully executing” content in a book are two different things. Still, let’s play along.
I used this same example in a similar post last month, but I think one of Trump’s biggest problems is that he wasn’t open to other experts, as he felt he knew “more than anybody” on a huge range of topics. Items that he claimed he knew more about included:
Campaign finance
TV ratings
ISIS
Social media
Courts
Lawsuits
Politicians
The visa system
Trade
The U.S. government system
Renewable energy
Taxes
Debt
Money
Infrastructure
Sen. Cory Booker
Borders
Democrats
Construction
The economy
Technology
Drones
It’s a huge list (details on those can be found here on Axios), but it showcased his biggest weakness. He’s clearly a pretty smart man, as you need to be in order to be elected president (and I say the same about Biden, Obama, Bush, etc), but if he had been willing to think again and trust others, it would have benefitted everyone greatly.
Of the 22 items on that list, the person that “knows more than anybody” for each one is almost certainly someone different for every single item. To think that you know the most about social media, taxes, construction and drones than anybody is just foolish.
Thinking deeper and reshaping your views can help a lot, and learning from others (and trusting those that know more) can take you even further.
It’s long been said that “if you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product” when it comes to things like Facebook or Twitter. While that’s essentially true, it’s not really you that is the product — it’s your attention.
In an increasingly chaotic world, your attention is likely your post important resource. If you give too much in one place, you have less to give to others. As I’ve said before, unwelcome attention-grabbing is why we all hate robocalls.
Facebook continues to cost $0 to use, which means your attention is what you’re selling every time you log on. That’s not necessarily an unfair trade, but just remember that you’re making the trade next time you visit.
Your website likely includes a wide variety of content types. You have some normal pages, some blog posts, maybe a custom feed for podcast, some category pages for your blog, things like that. Which does Google prefer? They don’t really care.
It’s not that every page will rank as well as the others, but that Google doesn’t give special boosts based on what type of page it is. If you have a page that is loaded with great content, and it’s technically a “blog category” page, that’s fine — Google will love it!
There are two main things that will impact rankings for content on your site:
The quality of the content, how well it’s written, how close to the keyword it is, etc.
How easy it is to find. Prominent pages on your site are likely to have more internal links pointing to them, which is an important signal to Google.
The info above isn’t a best guess about how Google treats those items, as it comes directly from Google.
In a recent “SEO Office Hours”, Google’s John Mueller addressed all of the above info. Regarding the main topic of this post, here is what John said regarding content types:
We don’t try to recognize the difference between different category pages or filter pages or search pages. Essentially we see all of these pages as being equivalent and it’s more a matter of the kind of content that you’re providing there.
As for item 2 in my list above and making pages easy to find, John gave a slightly longer response:
Look at your internal linking structure and see what you can do to make it so that we can find those pages a little bit easier. And that could be something like on your home page you list a section of popular categories or popular kinds of products and then you link to those pages directly. Or maybe do occasional blog posts with information about a specific kind of product and then from there you link to that kind of product page on your side. Which could be like a filter page it could be a category page whatever you want to do.
It’s what I said a few weeks ago: don’t overthink SEO. If you produce great content and make your site easy to browse, Google will respect and reward you for it.
While I have my share of bad things to say about social media on here, I’m still fairly active on most networks and plan to be for the foreseeable future. I suspect some of you found this post via social media, and that’s great!
In the long run, though, email is where your followers need to be. Not that email is great, per se, but you can truly own your list and that is hugely valuable. David Perell calls this taking your users over the Public to Private bridge.
I’d rather have 1 new email subscriber than 1,000 more followers on Facebook
It’s amazing to me that email is again becoming one of the best ways to reach people, but the numbers don’t lie. Continue to use social media to the extent you desire, but do your best to continue to grow your list.
If you list some of the greatest composers of all time, people like Mozart and Bach are likely near the top.
If you list some of the most prolific composers of all time, they’re also near the top of that list. Bach wrote over 1100 pieces, and Mozart (despite only living to age 35) wrote over 600. It’s not a coincidence that “prolific” and “greatest” are many of the same people.
I would think that both men had a solid degree of natural talent, of course, but I also think they made a lot of mistakes along the way that helped them improve. It’s like Henry Ford said, with “those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.” The mistakes made along the way helped them become amazing at their craft.
That’s kind of what I’m doing here. By writing every day, I’m sure that some of these posts aren’t great and that’s ok. Every day I get a little better, and at some point I might be decent at it. Until then, on to creating more…
It’s kind of a weird title, no? To be able to think for yourself, you need certain friends around you? It might not be as weird as it seems.
George Mack recently published a great tweet that explains it more thoroughly. In short, you can have two kinds of friend groups:
Centralized friend groups that share the same history, beliefs and values.
Decentralized friend groups that share wildly varying beliefs.
While having centralized friend groups can be important for your well-being at times, if you don’t intentionally interact with the decentralized groups you’re likely to simply follow their thoughts instead of seeing more angles and thinking for yourself. Understanding the thought process of people that you don’t agree with is a great way to begin to have rational discussions with them.
This points back to some of my previous posts, encouraging you to see both sides of the aisle and fighting to avoid the filter bubble. Really, though, the best explanation of this is a nice graphic that George put together that explains his thoughts on it.
