Skip to content

publishing

Members Public

CJ’s Newsletter: 200 Abnormally Useful Ideas

Over in the VIP Lounge, I published a small ebook of readers’ favorite quotes from 20+ years of publishing.  I started it last month because I thought it would be the easiest project ever — a nice extra for paid members, filtering my collection of ~2,000 quotes down to the

Members Public

SeO what?

A new algo dropped from Google and it appears to have the world of SEO in a tizzy. So what? If you’re like me, you’ve learned to recoil at the thought of playing by the rules of someone else’s game instead of serving your readers.  And besides,

Members Public

I was wrong about AI

I updated my principles for creating with AI to find out if anything’s changed since I wrote it in 2023. I got pretty angry about a prediction I got totally wrong — never make predictions within a principle — lesson learned. I go in-depth about it all in an upcoming

Members Public

Can personal brands save big business?

NP Digital asked 200 companies about their employees’ personal brands. If you’re guessing that most companies said, “Huh? what?” you’re probably right. Over 80% of the companies didn’t support their employees’ personal brands. Only 18 of the companies reported that they both supported employees with personal brands,

Members Public

Stop asking me if I exist.

Is this true for you? I keep getting emails from newsletters asking me if I’m still around. Maybe it’s because I use Apple products, which emphasize privacy, and mask a lot of opens and clicks that newsletters (still?!) use to determine engagement, as if we were living in

Members Public

Where does blogging fit in your newsletter strategy?

I got this question from a reader recently: “Have you written about how a blog and a newsletter could interact together? Two problems: 1. We’ve monetized each newsletter. Can I monetize the blog? 2. Can I train my audience to visit a ... blog (?) ... every day?” I moved my blog

Members Public

SEO elder abuse

According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far. He also reports that your SEO decreases over time, if you’ve published a lot of posts that no longer get the traffic they

Members Public

Recommended Reading

No one goes north this time of year, so I took a weekend off and headed up north with my son on a road trip to Door County. A whole bunch of new books were released, so the timing was perfect to catch up on some reading. Alex Van Halen’

Members Public

Revenge of the Essayists

I was wrong. In my last post, I explained where the biggest companies were going with AI, on the backs of creators. But I assumed the biggest corporations in the world had legal teams that understood the basics of creators’ rights under the law. But Microsoft proved me wrong this

Members Public

What’s with the hostility towards personal publishing?

It's about money, of course. Google may have a problem with us. A few weeks ago, Google had a big leak. While details are still lacking, it seems like there’s a bias against personal sites when it comes to search results. From Mike King: “Google may be