One cockroach will ruin the whole bowl of cherries

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In reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” I came across a quote from Paul Rozin, who was introduced as “an expert on disgust” (what a title!).

Paul pointed out that “a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.“

The same is true with your marketing. If all you put out is garbage and self-centered content, a “cherry” here or there isn’t going to help things.

Perhaps of bigger concern is that if you put out a lot of wonderful cherries and then mistaken drop a cockroach into the mix (such a a racial slur or indecent photo), the whole bowl of cherries can become worthless in an instant.

As a famous Japanese proverb says “The reputation of a thousand years may be undermined by the conduct of one hour” and we see that these days more than any other time.

Why I’m Writing Every Day

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You may have noticed that I’ve once again picked up the daily blogging habit on here. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m writing every day, but I’m making sure to publish at least one post per day. Some days I’ll write 3-4 posts and save them up, and then some days I’ll write none and be thankful for the backlog.

I’ve done this before, but that was more with an eye toward search engines and growth. This time around it’s more for me and helping to sharpen my thought.

With our monthly Meetup, I often intentionally present topics that I myself am unfamiliar with but curious about — which forces me to think through them, learn more, and put together a presentation. This is similar, but on a smaller and more frequent basis.

Inspriation

The inspiration for this has come from two people. Both of these are people that you can ask a question to and almost always immediately get back a well-thought, deep, articulate answer. They’re amazing.

Seth Godin has written daily posts at seths.blog for many years and attributes it to much of his business success. Here’s a super short video where he explains more:

Chris Lema isn’t blogging every day right now, but has for long stretches of time and still posts quite regularly at chrislema.com. While I’ve heard Seth answer questions in videos and podcasts, I’ve seen Chris answer them live and it really is stunning; he’ll take the most basic question and give an incredibly detailed and helpful response. Here is more of why he does it and how it impacts his thinking.

Going Forward

My plan for now is to try to write and think more about ideas and concepts and less on widgets and products, though I’m sure I’ll do some of both. Learning about the latest features in the new iPhone is fun, and I hope to continue to dig into that kind of stuff for the rest of my life, but the idea here is to think through slightly bigger topics in a succinct manner.

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I’ve believed for years that daily blogging is a good thing, similar to keeping your inbox at zero or eating healthy. Like those other good things, I’m not always as consistent as I need to be, but I know the direction I want to go.

When you’re reading this post, it might be that I’m no longer writing daily, but I certainly hope that am. If not, I’ll be back.

If you want to start your own daily blogging habit but aren’t sure where to start, this free course I created will hold your hand every step of the way to get things set up and rolling.

Embrace the brevity

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For quite a while, in various circumstances, I’ve felt that I need to speak for a longer period of time. I tend to say what I’m going to say, and then move on without a lot of repetition.

Some other people can use a lot more words to answer a question, and that may be a good thing. If I were to ask my pastor what 1+1 is, I suspect I’d get a 10 minute response but I’d also get a great story about the history of Arabic numerals!

For me this has been troublesome at times, such as when I was leading a middle school Bible study years ago, when I’d complete the lesson in 10 minutes instead of using the full hour. In that case, perhaps a bit more depth and repetition could have been a good thing, but in most cases I’m realizing that brevity can be a good thing.

Seth Godin, who I’ve mentioned on this blog a few times, is a great example of this. He’s mentioned before that the more time he is able to devote to polishing up a blog post, the shorter it gets. He doesn’t add more anecdotes and different ways of saying things, instead he works to refine his thoughts to express things as clearly and easily as possible.

Blaise Pascal, had similar thoughts, when he said “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.“

A final quote is attributed to President Woodrow Wilson, though the authenticity of it is in question.

A member of the Cabinet congratulated Wilson on introducing the vogue of short speeches and asked him about the time it took him to prepare his speeches. He said:

“It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

Conciseness can be a good thing, and it comes naturally to me (for better or worse). I’m generally going to stop worrying about my inability to stretch out talks to fit a certain length, and just say what needs to be said while embracing the brevity.

noreply means “don’t bother us”

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I’m in between cars right now, and slowly looking. I’m not traveling much lately thanks to COVID, so I’m in no rush.

Last week, I sent an inquiry to Subaru about a car on their lot. Here is a screenshot of the form I filled out:

You can see the blue “Submit” button at the bottom, and there is literally no text below it.

Pretty simple so far — I’m asking about a car. There was no email opt-in list or anything, just a request for info.

Sure enough, the next day, they got in touch and we emailed back and forth a bit. They don’t have what I need right now, but it was a good conversation.

However, a few days later I got this in my inbox:

The email opt-in arguments are pretty simple. Do you require single opt-in? Someone just needs to request be on your list and you start sending them newsletters. Or do you require double-opt in, where they need to request to be on your list, then you send a verification email, and once verified you start sending them newsletters? Pick one.

There’s good arguments on both sides of that, but Subaru goes with “no opt-in” — if you get a potential customer’s email address, add it to the list! It’s a great way to build a list. If people don’t need to request to be on it, you can add anyone you want. 🙂

Thank you!

It gets more fun, though, because the email replies go to “[email protected]”. It’s a polite-ish way of saying “no-reply”, I guess, because an email to their thank-you address bounces back with:

Yeah, they don’t have time to talk, so leave them alone.

no-reply is such a bad idea

I talked about this a few years ago, but the problem only seems to be growing. A big reason that I moved from SunTrust Bank (now Truist) to State Bank (now Cadence) is because Cadence sends me emails from Ed instead of from no-reply.

In other words, Cadence says “Hey, here’s some information, let me know if you have questions” whereas SunTrust says “Hey, here’s some information but don’t bother us. If you have questions, call our 800 number and wait there for a while.” It’s baffling.

Subaru took it up a notch

SunTrust’s “noreply” emails were awful, but at least it was from a company that I asked to send me email.

Subaru had to be shady enough to add my email to their list without permission, and then be cocky enough to say “Hey, here’s some crap for your inbox, but we’re far too busy to listen to anything that you might put back in our inbox. Byeeee.“

I’ve said it for years. Just be human. If you can’t be at least a little human when I’m looking to buy a $40,000 car, then that’s a very big problem.

Marketing Automation gone bad

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I’m a big fan of marketing automation, when used correctly. We use it at GreenMellen from time to time, and it can be an effective way to send out information.

However, automation doesn’t get you off the hook. People still ask questions and may want responses directly from you — and that’s a good thing! If your marketing automation has people interested in learning more, that’s a win. Make sure you’re listening and you’ve a great thing going.

Car Dealers

Over the years, I’ve seen how car dealerships suffer with technology. In started back in 2010 when Jim Tidwell Ford sent me a bunch of emails from a variety of different people, none of whom were talking to each other. A year later, I showed how car dealers tended to love to show off Twitter badges, but literally didn’t look at the platform. In 2016, I showed how Autonation had implemented some marketing automation, but really didn’t know what they were doing. In 2017, I showed how only one dealership was willing to chat via email (and the others seemingly weren’t) and that won the sale.

Mountain View Ford

So that leads me to now, and the most amazing sequence of automated auto dealer emails I’ve ever seen. It took me a while to figure out the order of everything, since they sent so many different emails. Here you go:

Long story short — email automation can be a good thing, but please don’t take the human part of the interaction out of it.

What Google’s Latest Changes Mean for Your Site

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Below are the slides from my talk at WordCamp Atlanta this afternoon. If you want to keep up with this stuff from Google going forward, you can use the email subscription box on the right or subscribe to the podcast here:

You can download the slides in this PDF or browse them here:

Thanks to all who attended and we’ll see you again there next year!

Fight to avoid the filter bubble

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Reading Time: 2 minutesThe “filter bubble” is a phrase coined by Eli Parser after he noticed that a search for “BP” came up with very different results for different people. You’ve likely seem similar things on Facebook and Google.

Last year Bill Gates said: “(Technologies such as social media) lets you go off with like-minded people, so you’re not mixing and sharing and understanding other points of view … It’s super important. It’s turned out to be more of a problem than I, or many others, would have expected.”

The challenge is trying to break out of the filter bubble to see different points of view. Social media algorithms are increasingly focused on keeping your bubble intact, and you need to focus on breaking out of it. Jeff Bezos said it best back in 2012 when he said that “people who are right a lot often change their minds

“. That’s not to suggest that you should be wishy-washy, but that you should be open to new points of view and consider why people hold those views.

Closed bubble

I noticed this a few weeks ago on Facebook with a comment that I left. Someone had posted a politically-charged post that was demonstrably false. They already had others inside of their bubble cheering on the false statement. I pointed out that while the sentiment they shared was valid, the quote was wildly inaccurate — no one seemed to care. I see this quite often, from both sides of the political spectrum.

Open bubbles

On the flip side, I think of two friends of mine — Joe and Karen.

Joe is a conservative, and I suspect he voted for Trump. Karen is liberal, and I suspect she voted for Hillary. Both often post political statements on Facebook, but it’s their handling of them that impresses me. While I tend to lean more toward one of them politically, I enjoy talking politics with both of them. Both have comments on every post from both sides of the aisle and both do a good job of engaging with them. Unlike the millions of Facebook users that scream “you’re wrong!” if you disagree with them, Joe and Karen both explain their points of view and listen to what others have to say. I’ve learned from both of them, and they’ve both helped to shape my viewpoint on many issues.

Open the filter

With all of the complex filter-enabling algorithms on social media, breaking out of your filter bubble can be tough. I have two pieces of encouragement for you:

  1. Engage with people of varying viewpoints. You’ll quickly learn who will shut you down for being “wrong” and who will be willing to engage with you.
  2. Follow other sources of news. This is part of the reason I still subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds — I get a copy of every post from those blogs, not just the ones that some algorithm thinks I should get.

How do you try to break out of the filter?

My first real post with Gutenberg

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If you do much work in the WordPress world, you have likely heard about the new “Gutenberg” editor that is coming to WordPress in the coming months. It’s a drastic change to how you work with posts and pages, and it should be a great thing.

If you’re not familiar with it, this Meetup recap (including slides and a video) should help.

A world of blocks

The biggest change with Gutenberg is that your main WordPress editor is changing from a big window of text you can edit, into a world where you add lots of “blocks” of content as you work down the page. The header “a world of blocks” above is a block. This paragraph is a block.

This quote is a block

  • This
  • list
  • is
  • a
  • block
This "verse" is a block.

That image was a block

There are literally dozens of different kinds of blocks that you can add to a page, and you can extend that via plugins that offer more kinds of blocks. The end result is that it’s easier to add a video, insert some custom code, build a table, or anything else you want to do.

One of the best things about the block mentality is that the content of the blocks are separate. In the past, many of us have carefully crafted a WordPress post, perhaps inserted some special code from MailChimp or somewhere, and then watched in horror as WordPress “fixed” it for us. With separate blocks, that’s not a concern.

This site is now using blocks

To help test it further, I’ve installed the Gutenberg plugin and am now using it full-time on this site. You probably should not do the same. While the plugin is nearly ready for prime time, it’s still technically in beta and could do some strange things.

While you shouldn’t use Gutenberg on any production sites, you absolutely should be playing with it on a test server somewhere. If you don’t have the means to set up a test server, you can create an account on this site to try it out for yourself.

Will it break my current site?

Probably not. The specifics of how the new editor is going to be introduced is still up in the air, but some of the basics give me peace in knowing that most sites will be fine.

First, WordPress powers 30% of the entire internet — we’re talking about hundreds of millions of sites. You know they’re going to be incredibly careful about how this rolls out.

Second, the way your old posts and pages will be treated should be solid. One of the blocks you can add is a “classic” block; a block that works just like the editor you’re already used to. When you upgrade to WordPress 5.0, it’s likely that your existing posts and pages will be changed to use the Gutenberg editor by taking all of the content on that page and putting it in one big classic block. No mess, no problem. It should work well.

If you then want to spend the time to rebuild it using separate blocks, go for it. If you don’t, that’s fine too.

When is it coming?

As of now, there is no official launch date for Gutenberg. It will be part of WordPress 5.0, and will be released when it’s ready. Most suspect that will happen in the next few months, though no one knows for sure yet.

I’m excited about this big shift for WordPress and I hope you are too! I’ll certainly be sharing more (either here or on the GreenMellen blog) as it approaches.

What are you most excited (or most scared) about with Gutenberg?

Tips for consistent blogging

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Reading Time: 3 minutesThis week at our Meetup (come join us here) we’ll be talking about blogging. Since my WordCamp US wrap-up post on December 4

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, I’ve been publishing an entry pretty much every weekday since then. In the last few weeks, my wife has been blogging most every day as well. What changed?

I saw it coming

I knew I wanted to get blogging again, I had a few ideas, and I was hoping that WordCamp would help inspire me to get going again. Between the talks from Chris Lema and Sal Ferrarello and other hallway discussions, I got the motivation I needed and dug in.

Direction

While our reasons will vary later in this post, I think a big key to both my wife and myself has been the focus of our blogs. For a while I was only writing on the GreenMellen blog (and I still will from time to time), but I felt somewhat constrained on there. Posts on that blog need to have a marketing angle to them to be appropriate for that venue; posts on here can be about anything I find interesting — my hope is that you’ll find these topics interesting as well.

For Kelly, a change in her blog title made the difference. Her blog is now titled “Coffee With Kel” and she posts through the lens of talking to a friend over coffee. She talks about Amazon Prime, and snow days, and recipes for Chicken & Dumplings. Getting things framed properly makes a huge difference.

Simplicity

In a word, WordPress. Whatever you do, it needs to be easy to execute. While it can take some time to get set up properly, find the right themes, etc, blogging on WordPress is very easy and that makes it more likely you’ll be consistent.

Always be looking for ideas

For both of us, we’re becoming more aware of always looking for things to write about. I save my ideas in Google Keep and Kel uses the notepad in her iPhone. Always jotting down ideas throughout the week will help when you sit down to write.

I get a lot of my ideas from Feedly

and from other news I read, but many of my posts simply come from tools I use and ideas that I have.

Batched

I tend to write my posts in batch, and typically keep 4-8 of them already written and ready to go. They get shuffled around a lot, but each morning it only takes me about 10 minutes to publish a post:

  1. Look at the list to see what I had previously scheduled for today, and decide if that’s still the best one.
  2. Preview it and proofread it again.
  3. Publish it.
  4. Share it on social media.

That’s it. It makes the morning routine pretty simple. I write the majority of the posts on the weekends or when I find a few spare minutes, to save myself time during the week when I tend to be more busy.

Kel does it a bit different, since her schedule allows. Once the house has cleared out, she writes about what’s on her mind or she references her phone for a few ideas.

Google Earth Blog

From 2009 to 2014, I wrote daily for the (unofficial) Google Earth Blog. I published a post every weekday, writing a total of 1431 posts on there, and I’m using some of those same techniques now. I stepped away from there in 2014 to focus more of my time on GreenMellen, but the routines I developed there (batching, notes, etc) are serving me well now.

Markdown

A little thing that helps me write a bit more quickly is the use of Markdown, explained in this post from a few years ago. It’s a way to add bold, italic, links, headlines, etc, with shortcodes to keep you focused on writing and not worried about having to highlight text to modify it. It’s not for everyone, but I find it to be quite useful.

Get started

Ultimately, it’s not hard to get started with a blog. If you’re not sure how all of this stuff works, go sign up on WordPress.com for a free site and get started. You can literally be from zero to working on your first blog post in a matter of minutes.

Have you posted a blog entry lately? If so, leave a comment and share it with us! If not, what’s stopping you?

The blogs I follow

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Reading Time: 3 minutesI mentioned a few years ago wrote about how I follow over 500 blogs every day. That post has the details of how I do it, but it really comes down to two things:

  1. Devote time to keep up with them.
  2. Have a system to help you out.

That older post will show you the system, and the time factor is up to you. I try to allow spots of time throughout the day to keep up with them, then some longer time each week to dig deeper into some of the more compelling posts.

Finding blogs

Once you have things set up you need to find some blogs to follow. Here are some ways to find items to add to your Feedly.

Icons
Look for the orange RSS icon, seen on the right. Clicking on that icon will typically lead you to the RSS feed of the site you’re currently on. While the feed itself will look ugly in your browser, you can copy the link to their feed and add it to Feedly.

Just Guess
The second best way is to simply guess. If you’re on a blog or news page of any kind, there is a 90% change of having an RSS feed behind it. Just copy the link to that page into Feedly and it will typically be able to find the feed for it.

Dig for one
There are many other custom feeds you can generate yourself. For example, WordPress sites automatically create separate feeds for each category of posts. Suppose you’re on the GreenMellen site and just want a feed of our SEO-related posts. Head over to this URL:
http://www.greenmellenmedia.com/category/seo-blog/

Then just put “/feed” at the end of it, like this:
http://www.greenmellenmedia.com/category/seo-blog/feed/

In WordPress this also works for tag pages and author pages, though fewer blogs use those.

Another good example is with craigslist. If you’re on there, perhaps you want to keep an eye on any new antiques that are added. Start by browsing to that section, then look for the orange RSS button at the very bottom on the right.

Better yet, you can do a search on craigslist and get a feed for the search results. For example do a search for the hot NES Classic, and you’ll see that same orange RSS link at the very bottom.

I tend to only pull craigslist feeds occasionally, as you will typically have a lot of items pouring into your Feedly.

Start with mine

While I have around 550 sites in my Feedly, many of those are blogs that you wouldn’t be interested in (my local weather, blogs from our kid’s schools, some of our clients, etc), but there around 400 that might be worth considering. I’ve saved those into this OPML file for you download and add to your own Feedly. It’s full of hundreds of tech blogs that I’ve added over the years, with a few things to look out for:

Dead: Some of the blogs are certainly dead. I’m not sure which ones are, but it doesn’t matter — this is the beauty of RSS. You’ll simply never see any posts from them, so it’s not like they’ll really be in the way.

Crazy: Some of them in there are very busy; Lifehacker produces roughly a dozen posts per day, and sites like TechCrunch average almost 40/day. You may want to remove some of the busy ones like that so you can get a handle on things.

It takes effort to keep up with a large number of feeds, but it’s a great way to keep yourself informed without having to visit dozens of different sites every day.

What are some of your favorite blogs to follow?