Excellence doesn’t need to be perfect

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It’s been said that “perfection is the enemy of done”, in that people will work so hard to make a product or idea absolutely perfect that it never gets finished. However, something doesn’t need to be perfect for it to still be excellent.

In his book “Unreasonable Hospitality“, author Will Guidara puts it like this:

“It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly. That’s the very definition of excellence: getting as many details right as you can.”

Of course, the opposite can happen where using “perfection is the enemy of done” can be taken too far, where you don’t worry about quality in order to push out the new product, and that’s not the point either. It’s a fine line between making something excellent and pushing too hard for perfection, but I think Guidara’s quote helps to firm up that line — get as many details right as you can, and then get it out there.

Boast or fact?

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When marketing your company, there’s a fine line between boasting and sharing facts. Boasting can be fine is certain cases, but facts should always win.

A recent post from Jonathan Stark laid this out perfectly, and he compared it to the movie “Elf” where Buddy tries the “World’s Best Cup Of Coffee”. If you’ve not seen it, here is that scene:

Jonathan makes some great comparisons between boasts and facts, like taking this:

“Sought-After Speaker”

to this:

“Most-watched TED speaker of all time”

You can’t verify a boast, which is why they tend to be used so much. They’re easy to come up with, but they’re of little value. The more often you can supplement your boast with a fact, the far more credibility you’ll show. Check out Jonathan’s full post for more great examples.

Give or take?

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After my recent post “experts don’t cold call“, I had an interesting comment from a friend. He defended cold calling to a degree, and ended with “you have to start somewhere when you’re new“. I agree with that, but you have a choice when you’re new: you can choose to give of yourself, or you can choose to steal the attention of others.

As I look back over the 13 years of GreenMellen, we’ve never resorted to cold call, spam emails, or any of that foolishness. When things were slow, our reaction was to give more away and it’s worked amazingly well.

  • We’ve hosted a free monthly Meetup for more than a decade now. In the early days, we even did it twice a month. We met lots of folks, shared lots of advice, and they’ve been fantastic.
  • I’ve also attended hundreds of other Meetups. Spending time being led by folks like Kathy Drewien, and her incredible ability to match those in need with those that can help, created dozens of wonderful relationships for me.
  • I’ve volunteered with dozens of organizations. I’ve spent a good bit of time with groups like KBA, NCBA and ANA, and tons of time with WordCamp Atlanta.
  • I’ve published over 1400 posts on my blog, and as a team there are nearly 800 posts on the GreenMellen blog, all with free tips, ideas and advice for others to use.
  • I had a few paid courses for a while, but later made them free on my YouTube channel. Along with those, I’ve published tons of other great content across 100+ videos that have been viewed over 700,000 times, including those courses on blogging, Notion, and Roam Research.
  • We have a podcast that Robert Carnes and I put out every two weeks, and we’re more than a year into that, covering marketing topics that would likely be of value to those of you reading this post.

I look at this through a similar lens to how we eventually connected with (and hired) Blumer CPAs to help with our books. They never cold called, never spammed, but put themselves in a position to be seen by us (speaking at WordCamps) and then produced consistently valuable content to help show their value.

If you’re new, or if business is slow, you have three options in front of you:

  1. Continue as-is, and hope for things to improve.
  2. Cold call and spam as many people as you can, and hope that you get enough people to hire you to overcome those that you annoy.
  3. Get out there and give of your time and talent, and make yourself known as a knowledgeable, generous person.

If option 3 sounds appealing, go do it. Like, right now. There’s nothing stopping you from publishing a short blog post or video today. If you need more encouragement to head that direction, Bob Burg’s book “The Go-Giver” is a great story on how that can work in your favor.

Personas are specific, but not precise

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When working on defining your target audience, building a persona can be a great exercise. It’s something I do with some of my writing, where I occasionally write for a specific vision of a person. Having a person in mind when writing content can be a huge benefit, and it can ensure that you’re using the right kind of language (not too technical versus very technical, for example).

When building a persona, it’s helpful to be very specific, but just know that you won’t be precise.

By specific, I mean you should include all of the details you possibly can about this made-up person. Think about their age, gender, family, job, lifestyle, home, community, school system, and more.

By precise, I mean that clearly this isn’t the only person you’re targeting. If you manage to find this precise person, that’s great, but it’s wildly unlikely. Having that specific target to chase is a great thing, just know the reality won’t be as precise.

Here’s a partial persona example from a client we did this for recently.

Homeowner Hannah lives in a three-bedroom home off of Church Street in Marietta, Ga. The home was originally built in 1982 and her family has lived there for five years. They bought the home for $287,000 when they moved in and pay $1,800 per month in mortgage.

Thirty-eight-year-old Hannah works as a teacher at Marietta Middle School and her husband is a medical technician in the WellStar Health System. Between their two jobs, their household income is $110,000. They have two elementary-aged children who attend West Side Elementary School.

Sorting out that detail takes conversions and a good bit of work, but is worth it in the long run. For anything this client produces going forward, they can think about “Homeowner Hannah” and how she might receive that type of message.

To make it even more effective, we spend some time cycling through images on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com to find one that we feel looks like our persona. It’s a fake photo for a fake lifestyle, but the target is a fantastic way to aim our marketing.

You should make your persona as specific as possible, but still be very happy when less precise real customers actually show up.

Google Reader hurt the internet the most

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Over the years, Google has killed off a lot of products, with the “Killed by Google” site listing 280 of them as of now. Most were pretty small ones you’ve never heard of, but some were rather substantial.

I was a big fan of Google+, and I’m still upset that they canceled Stadia. While those two had a bigger impact on me personally, I think Google’s biggest loss was Google Reader, because their treatment of that product has helped create some of the problems that the internet is facing today.

Google Reader?

You may not be familiar with what Google Reader was, which is part of the problem. In short, it was a popular RSS reader that helped people consume content on the internet. I’m still a big fan of RSS, but it’s unlikely to ever really make a comeback.

Before Google Reader came along, there were a lot of RSS-focused tools available. Many people I knew used them, and things were great. Google Reader was launched in 2005 and essentially swept up that market. Most people, myself included, moved our subscriptions to Google Reader because it was a great tool and it was free. Some of the other tools charged for their usage, so when users like me left, most of them went out of business.

Then, in 2013, Google killed off Google Reader. Most of the other products were long dead, and now users had to figure out what to do next. In most cases, the answer was “nothing” and they moved on to just using social media and allowing algorithms to dictate their content, which was by far the easiest path.

This is similar to when Walmart comes into a small town, wipes out the existing businesses, then closes up shop and leaves a big mess behind. That’s what Google did here.

A better internet

I believe that the internet would be a better place today if Google Reader had never existed. I’m not foolish enough to believe that RSS would be dominating today, but it would certainly be seeing much wider usage.

RSS is a fantastic way to avoid filters and algorithms and to really control your inputs, and I encourage you to give it a shot with something like Feedly (a solid replacement for Google Reader). It’ll be interesting to see how things like this shift in the coming years, but this is a move you can make right now to help improve your internet experience.

Experts don’t cold call

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Some of the funniest emails I get are from “SEO experts”, and I’m sure you get many of the same. My initial thought is “if they’re so good at SEO, why do they need to resort to spam?”.

Of course, they’re not any good at it, which is why spam becomes their tactic.

In a classic post from Seth Godin nearly a decade ago, he defines spam this way, and explains the wider repercussions if we agree to allow it as an acceptable way to do business:

Spam is commercial, unsolicited, unanticipated, irrelevant messaging, sent in bulk. It’s the email you didn’t ask to get, the junk in the comments that’s selfish and trying to sell something, the robocall on your cell phone from a company pretending to be Google Maps.

Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can’t possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?) People are smart enough to see that once spam becomes professionally and socially acceptable, all open systems fall apart.

Related is a post I shared this summer, where “marketers” on LinkedIn were upset that people were treating them poorly after they spammed them.

A recent episode of the excellent 2Bobs podcast brought this around again with a slightly different angle. From co-host David C. Baker:

“I’ve also just struck by something else you said about how other experts in your life show up. I’m just laughing as like, so who is the expert in your life? Maybe it’s a divorce attorney, or maybe it’s a medical practitioner, an expert, or maybe it’s somebody that’s trying to get you out of a tax issue or something, did any of these people call you ahead of time and ask for your business?”

Experts don’t spam you. They don’t send cold emails, or call your cell phone to try to win your business. When you need an expert, you know how to find them. If they’ve done a good job, they’re already in your sphere to some degree (like how we eventually landed with Blumer CPAs), making it an easy decision for you to reach out when you need them.

Related to David’s comment, I’ve never needed a divorce attorney, a medical expert, or help getting out of a tax issue, but I already know the first person that I’d call for each of those scenarios. None of them have ever spammed me, but they’ve positioned themselves as experts in their field so that when the time comes, I know who to call.

If an “expert” reaches out cold, you should quickly question whether they’re an expert at all.

The truth versus paywalls

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It feels like most information today is free, and it largely is. Movies and music are locked up in services like Netflix and Spotify, but most news and information is free, right?

It largely is, but the growing list of news outlets that are putting up paywalls is becoming troublesome. I don’t object to them doing that, as they deserve to get paid for what they do, but those paywalls are increasing causing division online.

Current Affairs listed this out, and you can easily see the split:

Paywalls:

  • The New York Times
  • The New Yorker
  • The Washington Post
  • The New Republic
  • New York
  • Harper’s
  • The New York Review of Books
  • The Financial Times
  • The London Times

No Paywalls:

  • Breitbart
  • Fox News
  • The Daily Wire
  • The Federalist
  • The Washington Examiner
  • InfoWars

It’s easy to see why content from the second list spreads far faster and wider than content from the top list. I personally pay for some of the sources in the top list, and read pieces from some on the bottom, but my paying doesn’t help the problem. Heck, it might be making it worse by encouraging them to keep using the paywall model.

It’s not unlike when a new scientific study comes out. YouTube videos that summarize the study (right or wrong) are completely free, but actually seeing the study itself generally costs money. As a result, the “research” that most people end up doing is simply watching the videos rather than digging into the study itself.

The solution?

I don’t have a good answer here. Our world would be well-served by having open access to the sites on the top to help balance things out. Those sites aren’t always right, for sure, but getting more conflicting viewpoints into the world is generally a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see how news-focused business models change in the coming years and if this is able to resolve itself or not.

Keep it simple: Sonder to Empathy, or Experience to Work

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I’ve written a few times on here about the goal of keeping things simple, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t fall prey to overly-exotic words sometimes. Two examples showcase that.

Sonder

First is the idea of sonder, which I wrote about a few years ago. While many people may not know the word, reading that post helps to explain it. After I wrote that, I created a category on the blog focused on “sonder”. The idea was solid, but most people hadn’t read that most and therefore it wasn’t a clear name. I changed that category name to “empathy”, which is largely the same idea but is something that more people understand.

Experience

As part of the redesign of the GreenMellen website a few years ago, we included a tab at the top called “experience”. People could click on it to see work we’ve done in a variety of ways, and it was a great way to get to know us better. However, people didn’t know what to expect from “experience”, so it rarely got clicked. Instead of being the most popular tab in our navigation, as it likely should have been for someone that wanted to see our work, it was the least clicked. Here’s a heatmap of it, showing the relative lack of clicks:

We made a small change, rewording it from “experience” to simply “work”, with the clarity of “if you want to see our work, there it is”. The results have been fantastic, and that section now gets the appropriate amount of traffic.

As I shared recently, distinction can be good, but clarity is better.

Distinction is good. Clarity is better.

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When marketing your product, you always want to stand out and be memorable. In an effort to be memorable, though, you can run dangerously close to simply being unclear.

I talked about this a few months ago with the death of Google Stadia. Their main commercial for the service was bonkers, and simply being clear about their offering would have worked far better.

In his book “Radically Relevant“, author Blake Howard puts it this way:

“It’s a mistake to sacrifice clarity on the altar of distinction.”

Or, as Donald Miller has said repeatedly over the years:

“The answer to confusion is always no.”

Of course, this is much easier said than done. Crafting a message that is both clear and compelling takes some work. This is something we do quite a bit of at GreenMellen, and we can certainly help you if you need it.

To DIY it, though, start with the books from the two gentlemen quoted above, with Blake’s “Radically Relevant” and Miller’s timeless “Building a StoryBrand“. Simply taking the time to explore that kind of content will quickly get your clarity into the top 10% of businesses in your market, and it can only get better from there.

Did I write this?

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AI technologies continue to improve, as I shared a few months ago with my post about AI-generated art.

Along with art, AI-generated text has been improving rapidly as well, and the new (currently free) ChatGPT has taken things to a whole new level.

In short, it’s a chatbot that can create unbelievably solid text about any subject you want. For example, I just typed: “give me 5 blog post ideas about SEO” and it returned:

“5 common SEO mistakes to avoid”
“The top 10 SEO tools for improving your search engine rankings”
“How to conduct keyword research for your SEO strategy”
“A beginner’s guide to on-page SEO”
“The role of backlinks in SEO and how to get them”

That’s pretty good! Let’s turn one of them into a post. I next said “write a 500 word blog post about 5 common SEO mistakes to avoid” and here is the first part of what it returned:

Optimizing your website for search engines is a crucial part of any online marketing strategy. While there are many factors that can affect your search engine rankings, one of the most important is your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, many people make common mistakes when it comes to SEO, which can harm their website’s performance in the search results. Here are five common SEO mistakes to avoid:

1. Not conducting keyword research. Keyword research is an essential part of any SEO strategy, as it helps you identify the words and phrases that people are using to search for the products or services that you offer. Without conducting keyword research, you may end up targeting the wrong keywords, which can prevent your website from ranking highly in the search results.

(I’m not going to list all five, but it was really solid)

Next, I said “summarize that in a tweet“, and I got:

5 common #SEO mistakes to avoid: not conducting keyword research, ignoring on-page SEO, overusing keywords, neglecting backlinks, and not tracking results. Follow best practices to improve your website’s performance and drive relevant traffic. #onlinesuccess

It even included some relevant hashtags!

Any format you want

I’ve done a lot of other tests, and it’s remarkable. You can say “write a podcast script about x” and it will create a full conversation. You can say “write an email to steve to thank him for the sweater” and you’ll get a great email for Steve.

More troubling, you could say “write a 1000 word report on the life of Abraham Lincoln” and it will do just that. This is clearly going to be troublesome for schools, and I don’t know how you stop it. The text is all unique, so no plagiarism checker will find it. Perhaps schools will need more tests and fewer essays, if all essays are now suspect.

As another test, I just said “summarize the book “building a storybrand” in 250 words” and got this:

“Building a Storybrand” is a book by Donald Miller that offers a framework for businesses to create compelling marketing messages that connect with their customers. According to Miller, many businesses make the mistake of promoting themselves in their marketing materials, rather than focusing on the needs and desires of their customers. This can lead to confusion and inaction on the part of the customer.

Miller’s Storybrand framework offers a solution to this problem by helping businesses clarify their message and create a clear, compelling story that resonates with their audience. The framework consists of seven elements: the hero (the customer), the guide (the business), the plan (the solution offered by the business), the villain (the problem or pain point), the mentor (a trusted source of advice), the confrontation (the moment when the hero must choose between the plan and the villain), and the resolution (the outcome of the hero’s decision).

By using the Storybrand framework, businesses can create marketing materials that clearly communicate the value they offer to their customers and show how their products or services can help solve their customers’ problems. This can help increase customer engagement and drive more sales.

In addition to the Storybrand framework, the book also includes practical advice and real-world examples of companies that have successfully used the framework to improve their marketing efforts. Overall, “Building a Storybrand” is a valuable resource for businesses looking to create more effective marketing messages and connect with their customers on a deeper level.

It’s imperfect, but quite good. Scary good.

I don’t like it

As a writer, I don’t like it. I also know that my opinion doesn’t matter. It’s coming, and can’t be stopped. There will be a huge variety of these tools very soon, and there is no turning back.

Schools will hate it, Google will hate it, and that’s just the way it is.

I don’t have any solid answers, but I’m very curious to follow conversations about it in the coming months. Even though this is the best tool we’ve seen so far, it’s just the tip of the iceberg, as these tools will only get better from here.

For this site, it doesn’t matter much. I’m writing primarily for my own benefit here, so getting AI to help defeats my goals. What you see on here will all be coming out of my brain.

For most blogs, though, this could be huge. If you’re writing for the benefit of SEO, tools like this could be amazing to help you generate tons of content. Ethics will be a big part of future discussions around that, but things will be getting very interesting.

Try it out for yourself here and let me know what you think this will lead to in the coming years.