Gear Bong. Signals In The Noise – Issue 63

Hey there,

I hope your Friday is going well, or, if you’re in a part of the world where the weekend is already underway, I hope you’re having a good weekend. (If you’re in Australia and your Saturday is almost over, can you tell me if my son’s soccer team will win their Saturday game tomorrow?)

Enjoy your classified Intelligence Briefing!
 

In The News

The Aspens are yellow and falling to the ground over here in the mountains of Boulder, CO. It’s a lovely time to step away from the computer and get out in nature.

The coronavirus is showing no signs of giving up around the world, with scientists reporting that it’s now starting to mutate into more aggressive versions. We could be looking at another year of living in this new normal of masks, social distancing, and people uncomfortably avoiding eye contact in public, as if that will reduce the risk of getting Covid.

In other news, due to life with Covid, 87% of people are commuting half as much, which means we should have twice as much time to work on growing our online businesses. (You like my math skillz there?)

Speaking of growing your business, here are this week’s hand-picked, curated-just-for-you articles that can help you get your business engine running better.

Can I buy you a link?

“The blog posts that typically get the most backlinks are backed by original research and data. If these blog post angles speak to wide audiences, they can even increase the chance of press mentions.” That’s Irina Nica, Senior Marketing Manager at Hubspot, in an article about the types of content that are currently getting the most backlinks. Why do backlinks matter? Because Google still uses them as one of the signals to help their algorithms decide how to rank your content. More high-quality backlinks = better search engine results positions for your content, which means more organic traffic. Don’t believe that this method works? In a recent study, it was shown that 84.7% of baby goats will get on your back if you get down low enough.

A picture is worth a thousand herds

Are you using images in your emails to your audience? If not, why not? Are you possibly using too many images in your emails, causing your emails to get a one-way ticket to people’s spam folder? What kinds of images work best in emails to increase click-through rates? Does placing a gratuitous photo of you with a goat increase your bottom line? Here’s Neil Patel with answers to all of those questions except the last one (because the answer is plainly obvious. Goats, bruh.)

Gear Bong

So, you’ve heard that webinars can work really well for getting prospects to sign up for either a free offer on your website (for list building) or for a paid product or course (for money-making.) You’ve decided, after your morning coffee, that, “What the hell. I’m going to do a few webinars and see how it goes.” After drinking a bit too much coffee you’re raring to go. But…where do you start? How about with a list of some of the best gear you can use to make the webinar happen? Here’s Jay Baer with just such a list. The best lights, microphones, screensharing apps, and digital carnival wheels to run live contests and give away prizes during your webinars. (I was today years old when I learned that people use digital spinning carnival wheels to give away prizes to randomly chosen webinar attendees.)

Nickle and Time

Running a small online business, especially in the beginning before you can hire people to help you get everything done, can be a challenging game of “how the hell am I going to get all of this done?” This path is hard. There’s no way to drizzle chocolate on that. The rewards can be worth the effort though, and you can make some of the bigger challenges, like where to focus your energy with the time you have, a bit easier. Here’s Darren Rowse, founder of Problogger (and who is also so friendly that both times I’ve met him I thought he was Canadian, despite his Australian accent), on how to make better decisions on where to spend your time when working on your business.

System of a Frown

“In a crisis, there’s maximum attention. And in a crisis, we often discard any pretense of caring about systems and resilience and focus only on how to get back to normal. This is precisely why normal is what normal is, because we fight to get back to it.” That’s Seth Godin on why it’s vital to look at the underlying systemic forces in play whenever we face any kind of crisis. It could be a pandemic, or remote public school not working for your child, or a launch for your online course not going as well as you hoped it would. What system is at work underneath the top layers of the crisis? Did you have any part in creating or continuing that system? Can you pause and question the system to prevent the crisis from reoccurring? Last week we questioned the education system and pulled our son out of remote public school. He’s in Papa’s Homeschool now and loves it. Papa is excited to design a new educational system and teach things that his son is passionate about, but Papa’s productivity is taking a big hit and it’s causing him to speak about himself in third-person.

Hope you have an amazing weekend and a super productive week next week!

You’re amazing! Keep going over there 🙂

All the best,
~Forest Linden