A no-nonsense email outreach manual

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

Productivity Hacks

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

Content Marketing Analytics: 11 Ways Data Can Inform Your Content Strategy

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.

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2018 Goals

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

What I learned about content marketing at CXL

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).

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3 Things I’ve Done in R in 2017 So Far

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).

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Three Instant Ways (<2 min) to Make Facebook a Productive Place

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.

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