January 28, 2015
Here is a process for managing marketing work that I’ve found to be very successful. In fact, based on my estimates, it lets us get at least 30% more work done. It incorporates some Agile concepts. Everything we have to do is in a ticket management system, as a ticket. Well, what’s a ticket? Tickets are little chunks of work, like “Design a banner”, or “Fix this bug on the website.
Read more...January 26, 2015
biology, intellectual, linnaeus, organic, sweden, theories
Last fall, I found myself very moved by visiting the residence and garden of Carl Linnaeus, in Uppsala, Sweden. As you may (or may not!) remember from your high school biology classes, Linnaeus developed the system of binomial nomenclature, i.e. the system by which we label an avocado, for example, Persea americana. Linnaeus did much of his work in Scandinavia, which is not exactly the most biodiverse or fertile part of the world; compare Africa, Asia, or even mainland Europe.
Read more...January 24, 2015
What does it mean for something to be a craft? I guess it means that it’s something that done with care and attention, and that’s done at least in part for the sake of the activity itself, rather than to achieve external results. It also suggests manual work, and small batches. Some of these things definitely apply to what I think is important about marketing. Care and attention, for sure. Thoughtful marketing doesn’t just work, it’s also respectful of your potential and actual customers.
Read more...January 23, 2015
Once you go to the effort of getting someone on your email list, of course you want them to stay there. And in most cases, you’re emailing when you have something interesting to say, and you’re producing compelling content that means that your subscribers will never, ever, want to leave. But there are a bunch of reasons why you should make it really easy for them to do that, anyway.
Read more...January 22, 2015
It’s really hard to accelerate A/B tests, for lots of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s also desirable to accelerate A/B testing, to get people excited and to show that you’re making progress. Here are some alternatives: Try not testing. Seriously. You will have to accept the possibility that the changes you make won’t work. (Which you have to accept anyway, even if it’s less likely, when you A/B test.) But can you find some best practices, or do you have historical research, that can help you?
Read more...January 20, 2015
experiments, onlineadvertising
Let’s say you’re trying to figure out how expensive it will be for you to run ads on, say, Twitter. How do you spend as little as possible while still getting a sense for whether this is a viable channel? Step 1, is, don’t. Before you spend anything, answer these questions in detail. You can actually get a lot of information about the viability of your plans, without spending any money.
Read more...January 18, 2015
digitalmarketing, googleanalytics, marketing, optimizely, webmarketing
Even though there’s more free business help on the web than ever before, starting a new product or service, and building a site for it, is not easy. Here are some things to do early on that will save a lot of time later. 1) Take a guess at who your customers are. Notice that I didn’t say “figure out who your customers are.” The goal is to put yourself out there with someting plausible so you can start learning, not to commission a multi-million-dollar research project.
Read more...November 12, 2014
conversion, forms, javascript, marketo, progressiveprofiling
If you’ve used Marketo’s progressive profiling engine, you know it has a bunch of limitations. It: Doesn’t work between different types of forms. So a user who tells you their job function on a webinar or event registration might not have that auto-filled on a Talk to Sales form. Is inflexible; all you can do is specify a list of fields you’d like filled in, and how many blank spaces to present at once.
Read more...June 8, 2014
emotionallabor, emotions, problemsolving
Here’s an essay by Paul Graham, popular today on HN, in which he talks about “good” and “bad” types of procrastination. In short, “bad” procrastination is when you work on things that are unimportant in order to avoid working on things that are important. “Running errands”, he calls it, in order to avoid, say, writing your novel. One of the major reasons people do this is that working on important things is scary, especially if they are also difficult things, which is often the case.
Read more...May 26, 2014
I keep track of lots of numbers when I go to the gym. For example, I can do x bicep curls at a time with an x-pound weight. Or I can run a mile in x minutes. Over time, I’ve seen the numbers generally go in the direction I want them to; I can run about 35% faster than I did three years ago, for example. Measuring exercise progress is nice because I have time to do a broad range of exercises (weightlifting, running, swimming) and I know that my improvements across the board generally correspond with my goals in going to the gym: having better physical health and more energy.
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