Category: Promotion
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How to find people who link to your blog
When you write a popular blog post, there’s a good chance that someone has linked to it. You just don’t know when and where. One simple technique you can try is to search your first name and last name in quotations, and then the subject of a blog post. For example, my blog post about…
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Social media just doesn’t hit like a website does
Seven years ago, the Pigeons & Planes team shut down its music publication website, thinking it might be better to connect with people on social media platforms. Last month, it started up its website again. Here’s how founder Jacob Moore explains it: All that said, we’re not sure what a music website’s role is in…
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Five lessons for whispering into the Hacker News front page
A couple of years ago, I met a CEO of a series A startup. At the time, I was working as a content strategist on Figma’s marketing team, where I also found an informal role as the in-house Hacker News expert. At the time, Figma was expanding outside of its core design audience, and into new…
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Foundational content
There are many, many, good entrepreneurs with good businesses who have a website with only a homepage. If you’re one of them, maybe you haven’t put much effort into marketing promotion. (You might say, “We’ve done zero marketing!”) Or you might have hired some marketing firms in the past—SEM, publicity, social media, etc.—but you haven’t…
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Publish once before making it perfect the second time
In American football, teams score when they reach the end zone and make a touchdown. It’s rare for a team to go straight for the touchdown right away, because the decision is risky; instead, the team approaches the touchdown through running and passing short distances. With each next checkpoint they make, they buy more regulation…
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The power of proof assets
Every so often, you send an important professional document to someone. The most universal experience is applying to a job, which you do by sending HR your resume. Your resume is a proof asset; it describes your experiences, accomplishments, and expertise. If you lead a business, you send many documents like this. For example, you…
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Fans will always be fans, even if they come and go
During the first year of the pandemic, my wife and I spent a lot of time cooped up in our studio apartment in downtown Toronto. While we knew our travel options were very limited, and we didn’t know if a vaccine would be coming out, we found solace in a Korean variety show called Running…
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Figure out what’s working, and do more of it
When you start a new project, it’s useful to figure out what has worked for the team or company already. Most of this is a form of manual labor: setting meetings, asking questions, reading reports, proposing actual deliverables and completing them. It’s also a humbling exercise, to restrain the impulse to come up with answers…