Alex Birkett 
New Year’s Resolutions™ are overrated, but time-based goals are nice, and so are general life reflections. I find it’s valuable to put them in writing and in public, mostly for reference and reflection down the line. I did one last year, and in 2017 as well. 2018 Was a Good Year (Recap) 2018 was an … Read more
A/B testing (aka split testing or online controlled experiments) is hard. It’s sometimes billed as a magic tool that spits out a decisive answer. It’s not. It’s a randomized controlled trial, albeit online and with website visitors or users, and it’s reliant upon proper statistical practices. At the same time, I don’t think we should … Read more
How do you model and predict growth (and growth opportunities)? There’s all this talk about “growth models” and “growth modeling” but not much talk about how to build them and get value from them. As with many things, it’s easy to see why they’re important, but hard to put them into action. This post covers … Read more
“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.” – Milton Friedman (among others throughout recent history) This will be piece inspired by a recent BuzzFeed article that outed contributors at “trustworthy” publications like Forbes, HuffPo, and Inc. To recap the piece: Forbes and others operate using a free contributor model. In addition, their editorial stringency … Read more
I’m not an OG Austinite, but I’ve been here long enough to have had dozens of visitors come through and ask, “what do I definitely need to do while I’m in Austin for the weekend?” After having answered the question similarly each time, I decided to write down what I would consider an optimal weekend … Read more
Capturing email leads is one of the primary goals of most content marketing programs. The money’s in the list, you get a million dollars back for every dollar you invest in email marketing, yada yada yada all the cherry picked statistics. Anyway, you know it’s important or you wouldn’t have found your way here. The … Read more
I think I’m pretty good at email outreach. I’ve done a bunch of it, for a variety of reasons from link building to strategic partnerships to simply wanting to meet up for caffeinated beverages, and have had pretty good success in general. One time, I even had an unexpected case study written up about my … Read more
The world is obsessed with productivity hacks. Lifehacker gets many millions of visitors every month, the supplement industry is like $50 billion a year, and we all listen to Tim Ferriss’ podcast, which in effect covers the morning routines and productivity hacks of those more successful than us. We all want to squeeze more out … Read more
They say the third lever of content marketing growth is content optimization.
Content creation, content promotion, and content optimization.
We all want to be data-driven marketers, but sometimes content marketers are left out of the loop and expected to run solely on creativity.
Content marketing is a creative endeavor – just as other types or marketing are – but data and analytics can inform content marketing just like they can paid, social, or affiliate.