Reading Time: 2 min In an episode of the Cortex podcast (#122: State of the Apps 2022), one of the hosts expressed his desire (and near achievement) to “filter the entirety of my internetting through RSS“. As that’s something I’m chasing as well, I thought it was an interesting statement and something worth unpacking a bit. First, some of […]
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Expand all acronyms the first time you use them
Reading Time: < 1 min This is something I’m generally pretty good about, but I need to make sure I stay focused on it. Particularly in the world of marketing, there are acronyms everywhere that you look. While I use them frequently and know what most of them mean, those that I interact with may or may not. Whatever your […]
Constraints can be useful
Reading Time: 2 min Last year I binged through the show “The 100” and had the same experience that many others had — it was fantastic at the beginning, but faded as the seasons wore on. There are different theories as to what happened, but I think the lack of constraints hurt them. Having constraints can be a wonderful […]
Post-COVID
Reading Time: < 1 min I made it most than two years without contracting COVID, thanks to a good degree of caution, mask-wearing, and vaccines, but it finally caught me last week and knocked me down. All in all it wasn’t too bad, but it was rough enough that I had to end my daily blogging streak at 620 days. […]
Your readers aren’t stupid
Reading Time: < 1 min When writing (or recording a video, or a podcast), there’s a fine balance between being informative and treating your readers like they’re dumb. This is something I struggle with a lot. If I’m talking about something like my move to Obsidian, I try to balance the “here is what I’m doing with Obsidian” along with […]
Enjoy your obscurity
Reading Time: < 1 min We all tend to want to reach more people, whether that’s through our creative work, sports, acting, etc. Even on this blog, which I’m doing almost entirely for my own growth, it would be kind of fun to have more traffic. That said, a bit of obscurity can be a good thing. If you look […]
Flow follows process
Reading Time: < 1 min Getting into a state of flow can be amazing. It could happen while you’re writing, painting, running, or many other things. Time slows down and things feel effortless. We all know well enough that for things like exercising, the decision to do it is often more work than the actual exercise. Once we get going, […]
Google extracts “near me” from search phrases
Reading Time: < 1 min I mentioned a few months ago that using the words “near me” on your website (or even in the name of your business) was unlikely to help improve your search rankings, and now there is some more data to support that. To be clear, people search for things “near me” all the time, myself included. […]
Writing with empathy
Reading Time: < 1 min Empathy is the key to great writing. If you can really understand the worldview of those that are reading what you write, you’ll tend to be much more effective. In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Hadley shared two great quotes that go into this. First, she shares how empathy isn’t just something you have; […]
Algorithms versus value
Reading Time: < 1 min As I’ve been working to improve my content on my LinkedIn profile over the past few months, I’ve learned a lot about how their algorithm works. For a while I was trying to tailor my posts to better suit their algorithm, but I’ve learned to (mostly) ignore it and focus on providing great value. For […]