The Awesome Power of Self-Deprecation in ContentOps

I promise you that I’m going to make some grammar mistakes and maybe even factual errors in this post.  Well, promise might be strong.  But it’s quite likely at least.

The reason, dear reader, is that I simply don’t care enough to remedy that ostensibly bad situation.  That, and the fact that I read at a 5th-grade level on a good day, combine to deliver you a wholly and unapologetically unpolished experience, should you read on.

The Inline Self-Deprecation Example

Real quick, let’s go meta.

What I just did there is something that I do all the time when writing, and I do it reflexively, without really thinking.  I self-deprecate because it’s kind of fun, and come on, we shouldn’t really take ourselves too seriously.  But beyond that, what I did actually serves a pretty significant purpose from an operations and efficiency perspective.

I neatly eliminated the need for at least one quality assurance step (and some person-hours) in my content production.

To wit, it’s now not super important that I have an editor take a grammar pass through this, nor that I find some flavor of SME to fact check.  Why would I bother?  I’ve already inoculated against the critique of “but you did a bad grammar!” and against the critique of “that is factually incorrect, sir!”

Imagine how stupid one of those comments would look in the comments section when I not only hinted at, but practically promised, those outcomes.

I didn’t need to pay an editor, and I didn’t need to pay a QA SME.  I just needed to explain that I don’t care enough about those things to spend that time and money.

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How to Delegate Effectively as Your Responsibility Grows

Editorial note: I originally published this on the Hit Subscribe blog.

I’m gearing up, like some kind of power washer, to spray new productized services into our operations group so they can SOP those services at scale.  And because I’m doing that, this seemed like a good moment to draw on my experience, both in leadership roles and as a management consultant, and lay out a blueprint for internal delegation.

I debated musing about this over on DaedTech, especially since programmers uniquely struggle when asked to delegate (for reasons I’ll get into in a bit).  But then I figured you marketers out there reading likely also have challenges when flipping from individual contributor (IC) to team leader in a growing organization.  So whether you’d have offered a penny or not, here are my thoughts on delegation.

Delegation as a Function of Org Chart

Let me start by explaining how successful delegators at each level of the org chart delegate to their direct reports, in broad strokes.

• Executives: “You are accountable for this organizational goal.  Your deliverable to me is a plan and overseeing execution of that plan.”
• Middle Management: “You are accountable for successfully executing this plan.  Your deliverable to me is judgement-based execution of the plan in a fluid environment.”
• Supervisors: “You are accountable for these KPIs.  Your deliverable to me is executing the tasks that generate the KPIs.”

Now, let’s look at how ICs (and unsuccessful supervisors) tend to delegate.

• ICs: “You are accountable for nothing.  Your deliverable to me is an execution of tasks to my exact specification.”

At the risk of restating the obvious, let’s pause here and observe something.  Successful delegation involves both tasks and accountability.  Unsuccessful delegation cedes only tasks and retains a vice grip on all accountability.

I don’t pay you to think!

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Basking in the Traffic Gains: Our Content Refresh Early Detection System

I’ve made two posts this year about content refreshes.  One was about traffic recovery, and the other was about refresh identification. Both of them were, admittedly, fairly wonky.  I got lost in my SQL statements and graphs and invited you to come along for that ride with me, if you dared.

Not today, though.  Today is the day that I heed the demand, “In English, poindexter!”

I’m going to show off the easy button for refreshing content and realizing substantial traffic gains.  I can now do this because I’ve turned my queries and graphs into a dead simple, prioritized list of content to refresh.  You can explore it for yourself here (click “refresh candidates”), and this is what it looks like.

This is a screenshot from the alpha offering of our content performance monitoring dashboard, which I announced back in June.  (Beta coming soon!)  The dashboard here features our content lab and community site, Make Me a Programmer.

If you’re unclear on what a content refresh is or why you should do it, let me explain.  A content refresh involves making updates to an existing post or article on your site.  As for why you should do it, let me present an actual anonymized field study of the impact on traffic (refreshes executed on this group of URLs at the red dot).

If you’re sold on the concept, I’ll spend the rest of the post explaining how we help you do it, using our tooling and refresh-candidate identification methodology.

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Organic Traffic Recovery: How to Win SERPs and Influence Execs

In the last few months, I’ve been burning the midnight oil.  By day, I run Hit Subscribe.  But by night and weekend, I’ve buried myself in a sea of client analytics data, building out our content performance monitoring alpha offering.

I say this not to complain.  After years of pretending to know what I’m doing in marketing, it’s fun to return to my roots of pretending to know what I’m doing in software engineering.  I mention the midnight oil because it has served as fuel for deep, interesting insights into refreshing content and traffic recovery.

And today I want to offer up those insights to you in the form of a clear, actionable traffic recovery playbook.

Setting the Scene: What Happened to Our Traffic?

Imagine that you’re responsible for content on your site and your organic traffic graph looks like this.

Sooner or later, you’re going to have an uncomfortable conversation about how and why you’ve presided over a 40% traffic decline.  From my outsider’s perspective, this most commonly occurs following an acquisition or perhaps a change in leadership.  After obligatory pleasantries, one of your first professional encounters is explaining this graph.

There’s a pretty good chance that you have many valid reasons.  Someone cut the content budget.  A staff writer quit and the backfill took forever.  The recent site redesign performs as well as a walrus on a unicycle.

But even as you say these things, they’ll sound like excuses to you.  And they’ll absolutely sound like excuses to the other party.

So here’s what you say instead:

I can do a detailed postmortem write-up on the traffic performance if you want.  But if you’re interested, I have an actionable plan for how to recover the traffic and I can show you that.

These two sentences will absolutely and completely reset the conversation.  You just need to be able to deliver on the actionable plan.  And that’s what I’m going to hand to you in the following sections, drawing on our now-unfair advantage of tons and tons of data.

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The Best Tool for Real Content Attribution? The Fermi Problem

I was recently scrolling through LinkedIn, admiring the art of the single-line hook followed by emoji bullets, when I stumbled on a really interesting question from Fio Dossetto.  The question is as follows:

As someone who self-identifies as neither a marketer nor “smarter than” anyone, I figured I’d leave the comments to the thought leaders and call it a day.  But I couldn’t get the question out of my head, especially since some variant comes up so frequently in discussions with clients.

So in this post, I’ll offer the two cents nobody asked for on the subject of challenging content attribution.

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