Post-COVID

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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.

Today, it begins again.

To be honest, I’m rather frustrated that it ended. We had been on vacation the week before in NYC (which is where I picked up COVID), but I had worked very hard ahead of that trip to have enough content to make it through while traveling and keep thing humming along, which I did. Unfortunately, I was running low on content by the time I got home, and couldn’t catch up while sick. Once the streak was broken, I simply took the rest of the week to recover and to get this week off to a solid start.

I still believe in the same reasons for daily writing that I shared two years ago, so off we go!

Your readers aren’t stupid

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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 the “here is what Obsidian actually is”. This is where having content that is more focused can be helpful, as you’ll have a better feel for the education level of your audience on any given topic. Since I tend to bounce around across many different topics, I’m often not sure where that level is.

In her book “Everybody Writes“, Ann Hadley puts it this way:

“Assume the reader knows nothing. But don’t assume the reader is stupid.”

I’m confident that everyone reading this is intelligent. You, the one reading this sentence, could certainly teach me many things that I’m uneducated about. That’s not even a question. The question is more about your depth of knowledge on the particular topic that I’m writing about on any given day.

The challenge becomes the balance, and I don’t think there’s a good answer. I’ll continue to assume everyone reading this is smart, but I’ll also assume that I’m digging up some random concepts and tools that might be unfamiliar, and I’ll work to strike a nice balance.

If I ever miss the mark badly, please let me know.

Enjoy your obscurity

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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 at famous actors or athletes, there is certainly a lot to like about the life they have, but there are downsides as well (they can’t go out in public as easily, etc).

The same is true for online work. I look at someone like Chris Lema that gets a ton of traffic to his site, so as a consequence he turned off the comments feature a few years ago. It was a fantastic little community in the comments, but it was simply too much work for him to maintain. Turning off the comments was unfortunate, but absolutely the right move for him.

In his book “Steal Like An Artist“, author Austin Kleon simply says this:

Share your work with others to become well-known, but enjoy the benefits of obscurity first.

Becoming well-known will provide a ton of benefits to you, but if you’re still rather obscure, take some time to enjoy the benefits that come from that as well.

Flow follows process

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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, it can feel pretty good. The challenge is that there is no way to get that feeling of flow until you get in and start doing the work.

Writing is the same. If I sat around and waited for brilliant inspiration to strike, I might never write a word. There’s a chance something would hit me from time to time, but waiting for the muse to strike is a fool’s game. Start writing and the flow will often follow.

As long as you have small nuggets of ideas ready to go (and regular reading habits will solve that), then it’s just a matter of taking the time to get it going.

Some days I don’t feel like writing or don’t feel like exercising, but forcing myself to just take one tiny step forward is usually all it takes.

Google extracts “near me” from search phrases

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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. That’s not a surprise. However, if Google sees the phrase “near me” in a search, they essentially strip it out and do a local search for whatever your other keywords are.

For example, if you search for “sushi near me”, Google will run a local search for “sushi”. Whether or not any of those companies have the words “near me” associated with them is of zero value. Instead, it comes back to a traditional search result based on location, rankings, other keywords, etc.

Chris Silver Smith summed it up nicely in a recent post on the Search Engine Land website:

Google has made it now so that a “near me” query will return the closest matching local businesses for one’s search terms within the Maps/Local listings. To do this, Google clearly extracts the “near me” portion of the user’s query and matches the remainder of the query with businesses and websites it believes are closest in location proximity to the user. This handling negates the efficacy of performing keyword optimizations with “near me” phrases for Google Maps/Local search.

Putting the words “near me” on your website won’t necessarily hurt you, but it’s of no value and you’d likely do well to make better use of that space.

Writing with empathy

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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; you need to work for it.

“Empathy—like writing—isn’t a gift. It’s a discipline. It takes some intentional effort and diligence to develop enormous empathy so that you can apply it to your writing.”

Taking it a step further, she shared some thoughts from Facebook content strategist Jonathon Colman about what comes next:

“Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love.”

If you can start from a place of empathy and refine from there, you’ll end up producing far better content than if you just dive in without a plan.

Algorithms versus value

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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 example, LinkedIn tends to show posts to more people if there aren’t any links in it. This makes sense, because it’s less likely to be spam, but it leads to weird outcomes. Either people omit links that might have brought more value to the post, or they do the cute “link in the comments” thing to get around it.

That’s not a horrible idea, but it’s silly to have to play those games.

For example, in this post about mistakes I discussed a study from the American Psychological Association, so the post was more valuable if I included that link.

Or in this post about anchoring your new product to an existing idea, I linked to a podcast from Seth Godin and a link to an article on Compio that provided more context.

I’ve also recently talked about the growing trend of sharing screenshots instead of links. That’s often for dubious content that would be unraveled with a link, but it’s along the same lines. Algorithms that discourage links are also discouraging context for posts, which can be very problematic.

If all of these links start burying my posts on LinkedIn, perhaps I’ll change my mind. I hope not, though, as I’d rather focus on bringing valuable content than worry about what LinkedIn’s algorithm thinks about it.

I was fantastic with Google+

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I thought Google+ was a great product. I dug in deep, and developed a solid following on there. Today, that’s worth absolutely nothing.

It’s good to develop strong skills in a particular area, but it’s even better to develop skills that don’t rely on a particular piece of technology or a single service.

My Google+ experience makes me feel like the fish that Stephen Jay Gould referred to when he said:

“Even if fishes hone their adaptations to peaks of aquatic perfection, they will all die if the pond dries up.”

It’s a tricky balance. On one hand, you don’t want to go too wide. Most people that try to be super active on a dozen different social media platforms tend to end up with mediocre outcomes in all them. On the other hand, relying on a single platform for your reach isn’t ideal either — that’s Donald Trump’s biggest problem with having been kicked off of Twitter.

In my case, I should have done a better job of building the public to private bridge that David Perell has talked about. My email list is growing nicely now (come join it!), but I should have been working harder on it years ago. The more you can attract people to places that you truly own (like email lists and blogs), the more sustainable your efforts will be in the long run.

Anchor and twist

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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.

Mise en place for better writing

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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.