Tenet Intelligence Community. Signals In The Noise – Issue 65

What The Font?

Let’s be honest. Website design is hard…especially if you’re not a designer. And unless what you need to display on your site is largely visual in nature, your site will house a lot of words. The problem is, as numerous studies have shown, humans don’t like reading words on glowing screens. Why? Eye fatigue and words on a screen are hard to read.

If you want to upgrade the design of your site by 4 or 5 levels, focus on the readability of your words: layout of columns, column width, font choice, font size, line height, line length, and breaking up large blocks of text with different design elements, among other things.

This fantastic article from Readymag gives a fantastic tour of why and how to redesign the type layout of your site to make people want to stick around longer and read the words you’ve labored over. If people read more on your site, there’s a greater chance they’ll get on your email list, become a part of your audience and later buy something from you, which allows you to make a great income while making people’s lives better which OMG means you can literally save the world by making the text on your site easier to read.

Related: The best places to find free fonts.

Simple Is As Simple Does.

Over the last year, Daniel Vassallo made $210,822 from selling one pdf ebook and one 100 minute video course. And that’s it. 2 simple products. No…seriously. This is a reminder that you don’t need a lot of complicated funnels and products and online courses to make a great living online. Want to know how Daniel pulled this off? It’s not complicated:

1. Find something you know really well.
2. Help people solve problems in that domain for free as much as you can.
3. People will pay attention and ask questions. They become your audience.
4. Answer their questions for free in social network sites, forums, or blog comments.
5. Whatever doesn’t fit in a short response is an opportunity for an information product.
6. If you choose to make an info product, you already have an audience of people who want to learn more from you that you can sell product to.
7. Offer them the info product at a price that works for them.

That’s Daniel’s formula, and it aligns really well with core principle #1 that I use to guide many business decisions for myself: Help first. Sell later. But doing this takes a lot of time and energy, which is the reason for core principle #2: when running your own business from home you’re allowed to eat breakfast food all day.

Tenet Intelligence Committee

At some point, when running an online business that sells knowledge products or services, you’ll realize that running a business like this is a constant act of creation. If you’re working on a business like this, you’re a creator. Period.

But in order to keep creating things that help people solve problems in their lives, you have to get paid. There are some fundamental tenets of how to successfully do this. I’ve written about 11 of them from my view here (because my tenets all go to 11.) And Geoff Goins writes about 10 of these tenets, with 10 Steps To Getting Paid As Creator. Interestingly, I’ve found that the same kind of tenets work great for parenting. If you have children, I’ll just let you chew on that concept for a bit. Interesting thought, eh?

Google Says Jump. You Say, “How High?”

Google has some major search algorithm updates coming in 2021. If you do SEO work on your site or if you’re getting significant amounts of organic traffic from search results, you’ll want to take note of this and prepare. They’re adding three new “web core vitals” to their ranking algorithm, and all of them have to do with Google wanting you to give your site visitors a better experience. Two of them are about making sure your site loads very fast, and the third is about making sure that the mobile version of your site doesn’t shift around in unexpected ways when compared to the desktop version. Search Engine Journal has all the details here.

Don’t Give Up Without A Write

“Your writing defines you. Whether you write blog posts, books, newsletters, proposals, emails, or just scribble notes to yourself, writing is a foundational element to your work, art, and life.” That’s Josh Spector, with 40 one-sentence writing tips for anyone who writes anything. If you have an online business that sells anything, this is for you. (I’m assuming you’re in that category, because, why else would you be reading these Intelligence Briefs?)

Even if you use a lot of videos on your site, you still have a lot of writing to do, whether it’s emails, blog posts, thank you pages, sales pages, opt-in pages, welcome emails, lesson text, blog comment responses, members-only community forum post resposnes, and on and on. If you want to make a successful run at this online knowledge business venture, you need to have writing chops, even if you hire someone to help you with some of the writing.

Trust me, if you learn to write well, your business will reach more people and you’ll make more money. It really does come down to that. Ok, well…that plus about 7 other major elements that you have to have in place. (What was that? You want to know what those other 7 things are? I’m sorry, but…I can’t tell you here. As I mentioned in the secure communication at the top of this brief, I have reason to believe this line may be tapped.)

That’s it for this week, my friends.

If you enjoyed this issue, would you consider sharing this newsletter with a friend who might get some benefit out of these Intelligence Briefs? Thanks in advance if you do that.

Good luck with getting things done on your to-do list this week.

You got this. Keep going.

Your friend,
~Forest Linden