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

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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.

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

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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.

15% of all searches on Google are still brand new

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Over the years, Google has frequently shared that a large percentage of the searches on their site are for phrases they’ve never seen before. This is heavily related to search queries getting longer, which I first talked about 13 years ago and continues to progress to this day. As of right now, 15% of all searches on Google are phrases they’ve never seen before.

The 15% stat is amazing to me on two levels.

  • First, it’s fascinating that Google can usually give fantastic results for something they’ve never seen before. They can take a brand new query, compare it to billions of possible results, sort them in the perfect order for that session, and do it all in a fraction of a second.
  • Secondly, though, is just how crazy it is that 15% of searches today are new. Google sees around 8.5B total searches every day, meaning there around 1.3B new searches every single day. This is after we know that Google has already seen somewhere around 30 trillion searches since 1998.

Google has seen 30 trillion search queries, and yet we still give it 1.3 billion new unique searches every single day.

This is also why we encourage our clients not to get too hung up on particular rankings. Sure, ranking well for an established keyword can do great things, and we don’t shy away from that.

However, our main goal with every client is to avoid confusing Google. When Google gets those 1.3B new queries each day, they immediately provide results to the searcher. The better Google can fully understand your site, the more times you’ll show up in those results.

(via Search Engine Roundtable)

We remember what we create

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Over the years, I’ve discovered that one of the best ways to learn something is to try to teach it to others. In preparing to share a concept, I’m forced to learn more about it and break it down in a way that can be understood by others. The process of doing that has incredible benefits for me as a learner.

A common way I’ve done that in the past is with our Meetup. Many topics are things I’m already comfortable sharing, but I’ve frequently used it as a way to force myself to learn new things. This includes things like learning about GDPR regulations back in 2018, working to take my Notion skills to a higher level, or digging deeper into website accessibility.

That’s also a big reason why I publish this blog. I love to share things that I discover, but many of these ideas are new to me and the process of distilling them down into a blog post helps my understanding of that topic tremendously.

It’s not unlike what Jim Kwik says in his book “Limitless“:

“Remember that we tend to remember that which we create.”

More creating leads to more learning, which leads to more remembering. I’ll still continue to work on ways to better remember the things that I write, but the simple act of developing a thought and publishing it takes me a long way down that road.

The right way to forward URLs

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When it comes to forwarding addresses on your website, there are a few different scenarios to consider.

First you have the “always forwarded” pieces like I shared a few years ago, to catch special URLs or typo domains.

The other scenario is when you build a new website to replace your old one, and want to make sure that everything still flows smoothly for the end user (and for Google). The technical side of it is relatively easy, but the planning behind it is where many sites drop the ball.

As an example, a local Chamber of Commerce near us recently launched a new website but failed to take this into account. Google still has 11,600 pages from their old site in their index, and virtually all of them are now “404 not found” errors because no redirects are in place. If they don’t fix this very quickly, the repercussions on their search presence will be massive and it will take many months for Google to understand all of the changes.

The basic plan

As I mentioned above, taking the time to simply plan out the move is really all you need to go. Google’s John Mueller recently shared a short video that talks through how Google sees this and what you should do to prepare:

Redirection

If you use the WordPress platform, the popular Redirection plugin will do most of the dirty work for you. Not only will it let you set up the redirects that you need, it will also monitor for 404 errors and let you quickly add redirects for those as well.

If you have trouble with this or need additional clarification, just reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help.

Own your content and join the POSSE

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I’ve talked many times on here about how I believe we should all work to own our content. Having content in a system that you control is absolutely the way to go, and then you can use other channels (like social media) as a means to share it.

Along those very lines is a great concept being pushed by IndieWeb called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

The idea is not unlike what I’ve been promoting, but they’ve taken it a level further to refine the idea. The main idea is to publish your ideas on a platform that you own (which could be WordPress like me, but certainly doesn’t need to be), and then sharing the content across the web so your readers can see it wherever they prefer to consume content.

They offer a few main reasons why this is a solid model, but ownership is a big piece. This matters in two big ways:

  1. You’re not relying on a third-party to do the right thing with your content.
  2. You’re creating an “ownership chain” of your content. Wherever you’re reading this post, there’s likely a link back to the original that I published on mickmel.com.

Keep it easy for others

Continuing to share on social media, email, and other places helps keep things easier on your readers. While I’d love to see a world where everyone uses RSS to handle their media consumption, I realize that isn’t going to happen. I’ll still encourage that angle, for sure, but I’ll also be sharing my content across every medium possible in order to give people simple ways to find it.

Keep it easy for you

The full POSSE concept is fairly complicated and might seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. You don’t need to build your own server or anything, just set up camp in a place that you have a degree of ownership in, and then share your thoughts from there. Just reach out if you’re stuck and I’ll be happy to help point you in the right direction.

Making content that lasts

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The odds are high that you’ll create some kind of content today, with the majority of it likely being on social media. Will it last?

Seth Godin recently shared about the “cultural half-life” of ideas, and how our world is moving increasingly toward vaporous ideas that come and go as the social media algorithms move on to the next click of the day.

There’s really two aspects to what Seth is trying to say: systems and content.

Systems

For systems, I’m talking about sharing your ideas on a platform that you control so that they don’t fade away. With my site, I can easily reference back to posts from years ago (like discovering WordPress in 2004), which is much more difficult with social media. Using Facebook as an example, they weren’t even open to the public until 2006, and it’s likely that people will move on to other platforms over the next 17 years.

Content

The other side is content. I linked back to my old WordPress post, but it’s really not of much value today. It’s neat to point to it, but that’s really about it. The key on the content side is to write content that matters and will be valuable in the future, which is another issue altogether and is something I continue to work on for myself.

An Example

This came up for me recently when a friend published a great post about the future of WordPress. Myself and a few others left comments on his blog post to start some discussion, but most of the discussion happened on Twitter. The ease of discussion there is great, but it’s already essentially gone. Finding old threads on Twitter can be tricky, but finding that post on his blog will be easy to do into the future.

If someone looks back on how this particular WordPress issue was resolved, they’ll find his post (and our few comments there), but almost certainly miss the deeper discussion on Twitter. It’s a tough balance, but it serves all of us well to focus our efforts in areas that will last.

Quick looks at great books

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Just over a year ago I told you about how I used Blinkist to “read” popular books in about 20 minutes. It’s certainly no replacement for a proper reading of the book, but it’s a great way to get an idea of what it’s about and then perhaps dig into the full book later.

If 20 minutes is somehow still too much, then the new BookStash might be your answer. They distill books down even further, with average book taking three minutes to unpack. Each book is broken into roughly 12 cards, each of which explains a “key idea” from the book. It looks like this:

The BookStash service is tied into the popular DeepStash, which is a great place share and read articles and their summaries and insights. I’m still just dipping my toes into DeepStash, but it seems like a fantastic community, with a well-designed product, and may be a place that I end up spending a good deal of time.

When it comes to reading books, most of my reading is still on full books (on my new Kindle Paperwhite), and then a few on Blinkist. BookStash is a neat concept, and I might use it for some quick looks at books that I’m interested in, but we’ll see if it sticks.

Marketing automation isn’t always the answer

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Marketing automation can be a great thing. If a user is interested in your service or product, creating a series of messages to go out to them can be a very beneficial for both parties. Too often, though, companies think that marketing automation is something magical that can solve all of their problems, and that’s generally not true.

I’ve talked before about the hilariously bad series of automated emails that I received from a car dealer, and how my current insurance agent and banker are both based on personal relationships, and things seem to be continuing to trend in the direction of more automation. Automation combined with humanity can work, but relying on automation to solve your woes is unlikely to help much.

Really, any kind of magical solution should be treated with some suspicion. Any promotion to help you “jump to the top of Google” or “get 1,000 YouTube subscribers overnight” are more likely to get you banned than to find success.

As I’ve shared before, though, the answer isn’t all that tricky — it just takes work.

Marketing automation might be part of the answer for you, but I’m sure that proper messaging, blogging, social media and other items are just as important for you. No single thing is going to make things explode upward, but lots of steady work will get you there.

Website themes are not content

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When building websites, people are often concerned about not duplicating content across pages or sites. While there is no specific penalty for that, if Google thinks your website has the same content as another site, one of you won’t have a chance in the rankings.

So what does that mean for website themes and templates? If you use a popular one, are you at risk of facing duplicate content issues? In a word, no.

When Google looks at your content, whether it’s comparing it to others or just viewing the quality of it by itself, they’re looking almost exclusively at the actual text that you put on pages. The theme wrapped around it is just for show, and Google is well aware that many sites use the same theme as one another.

In a recent question posed to Google’s John Mueller (via SE Roundtable), a user asked “I create a WordPress theme and can I use it on multiple websites?”. John’s answer was clear, saying that “lots of sites use the same themes”.

Creating clear, concise, and valuable content is wildly important for your status online. Choosing the wrong WordPress theme could potentially cause speed or security issues, but Google won’t care a bit when it comes to content.