Alex Birkett 
New Year’s Resolutions™ are overrated, but time-based goals are nice. I find it’s valuable to put them in writing and in public, mostly for reference and reflection down the line. 2017 Was a Good Year In 2017, I hit lots of personal and professional goals. I started training Krav Maga and taking Spanish lessons (studied … Read more
Content marketing works. It works better if you’re good at content promotion.
I always wish that more people would document their learnings as they go through a process. We often get post-hoc analyses that are cleaner in retrospect and spoken about from a 10,000 foot view.
A big part of my job at CXL was to do content marketing – create great shit, promote it, grow traffic, leads, etc.
Luckily, I did document a lot of what I learned while going through it.
This post covers a lot of what I’ve learned about content marketing and doing it well (in the context of CXL’s business, at least. May or may not apply to yours).
As I mentioned in my little post on New Year goals, I’m learning R. It’s part of a broader goal to become more technical, and I’ve certainly gravitated towards the data arts in that regard.
I’ve explored front-end languages like JQuery, and while that added a lot of value in very predictable ways, R has made more sense to me so far.
I feel more comfortable learning it.
Even better, I continue to come up with awesome ways to use it (the limiting factor in most of my ideas is, of course, my skill level).
I’m not usually a big New Year’s resolution guy. I never follow them. Usually, I forget about the resolutions a few months in. It’s hard to sustain that level of focus on what is usually quite a vague overreaching goal.
Facebook is ridiculously engaging. That’s why they run all those tests – to hook you.
But you have work to do. Or at least I do. So I don’t want to spend all my time on Facebook. And if I am spending time on Facebook, I want it to be valuable.
So I did three things that made sure every second I spent on Facebook would be a net positive effect on my life.
There’s no shortage of books about CRO.
Not all of them are good, of course. Some are, some aren’t.
Personally, I think you should read one, maybe two books, specifically about conversion optimization. Other than that, you should go directly to the seat of knowledge.
Updated March 2018. I’ve never been much of a New Year’s Resolution type of guy. I hate the swarms of new people in my gym January through Mid-February. But, I did come up with a resolution of sorts a few years ago that totally revolutionized my life. Now I set this goal each January 1st: … Read more
Note: I wrote this post a long time ago, but when I was migrating content from my old site, I wanted to revisit it. I added some weight, changed some words, and restructured the format, but the message is the same. What’s your favorite beer? I ask because you might even be naive enough to … Read more
