When Showing Up Becomes A Measure
Editor’s Note: This newsletter was originally published on January 24th, 2021.
I am by nature a positive person with a positive outlook. Even among things that might seem difficult or negative, there are opportunities and wins among the challenges.
Stephanie and I were on a date. Among the Covid-related challenges, one that we see often is the lack of staff for businesses (especially restaurants). This manifests as random closures & inconsistency for whether or not you can actually enter places.
It has effectively become a coin-flip whether businesses will be open and serving or not.
It is not unique and, talking to business owners, is a daily problem for them. Today, we visited a restaurant that apparently closed as we were sitting there without even telling us. (#GoFigure??)
Throughout all of this, it is becoming a reality that simply SHOWING UP and delivering sets you apart. Within our competitive environment, the requirements for success seem to be getting lower and lower! You can differentiate yourself by being someone who puts forth an effort.
Consider – Tom Brady is the 44-year-old starting QB for the #1 seed Tampa Bay Buccaneers who lost to the Los Angeles Rams yesterday. What does it really say about the wide-open opportunities available at the highest levels when a 44-year-old man is competing against players who DADS he beat?
Opportunities abound! Success truly is achievable (possibly today more so than ever before)!
All it takes is a willingness to show up and try!
I’m in the process of reading Never Split The Difference (Amazon affiliate) by Chris Voss. It’s a great book on negotiating that I’d definitely recommend.
He shares the above quote from Mark Cuban in his section highlighting “No” as infinitely more important in negotiating than “Yes”.
It is antithetical to normal Sales & Negotiation training which focuses on the agreement as to the pathway of successful conclusion/conversion. In those cases, we are trained to ask “Yes”-leading questions, but as Voss notes, most prospects recognize that they’re being manipulated and it immediately breeds distrust.
As noted in Cuban’s quote, starting at “No” grants more feeling of control to your partner and more clearly sets boundaries for the eventual agreement.
I’ll post notes after finishing the read, but I’ve already seen enough to recommend it if you want to get better at negotiating. (Who better to learn from than a former FBI Hostage Negotiator like Chris Voss?)
The control/responsibility matrix https://t.co/vy61nF0a1R
— Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog) January 23, 2022
For those checking out the book reviews, I reviewed Twelve And A Half (Amazon affiliate link) by Gary Vaynerchuk. You can check out my notes at this link.
Keep a lookout as I have finished reading the following books and will be posting my notes for those very soon!
- E-Myth Revisited (Amazon affiliate link) by Michael Gerber [review notes link]
- One Million Followers (Amazon affiliate link) by Brendan Kane
- Content Inc. (Amazon affiliate link) by Joe Pulizzi
- Twelve And A Half (Amazon affiliate link) by Gary Vaynerchuk
How to generate 100 ideas to write about in 30 minutes - even if you think you have nothing to say (THREAD):
— Dickie Bush 🚢 (@dickiebush) January 19, 2022
dIf you run a hosting service, and have a "you might be a bot" interstitial, make sure it uses a non-200 HTTP result code (perhaps 503), and that it doesn't have a noindex on it. Serving a noindex+200 will result in pages being dropped from search, if search engines see it. pic.twitter.com/LFGQcq2dzf
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 17, 2022
Other Links
WordPress vulnerability in “WP HTML Mail” plugin
As one who uses WP for my website (and builds them for others using WP), when these types of vulnerabilities get uncovered, I try to share the details so that we can keep our sites as secure as possible. The attack vector is only estimated to affect around 20k sites, but because this plug-in is used in conjunction with others like WooCommerce, NinjaForms, etc (which are used by some of the biggest sites with the largest user bases), it could have widespread exposure.
Ensuring that you follow good practices of keeping your site, platform version, and plugins up-to-date is an effective way to ensure good security for yourself and your visitors.
If you need help managing & maintaining your site (or possibly creating one), feel free to let us know. We will connect and identify ways where we can help.
Google set of reduce website “recrawls”
It is commonly known that Google’s bot technology “crawls” webpages and the results of this can impact your ranking in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Lesser-known is that Google “recrawls” already evaluated pages over time which (depending upon certain criteria) can affect rankings (and traffic). (Note: It is for this reason that SEOs suggest updating & refreshing content on your site to ensure that it stays current and relevant.)
Because crawling (and recrawling) is a computing resource-intensive process. Google is considering limiting recrawls on lesser-updated web pages (or types of pages). Pricing or recommendation pages might still merit consistent recrawling while About or “brochure” type pages might not.
A good practice is to focus intent and effort toward updating and refreshing your existing content in the same way that you strive to add new material.
Here are a couple of extra SEO & Content-related links that you can check out.
How to Have More Effective Virtual Meetings
As we have all been having more and more interactions virtually, being an effective presenter and facilitator (in a digital environment) has been more important than ever. If you’ve gotten frustrated interacting with a bunch of #MutedBlankScreens, you know how it feels! I shared these hints and techniques that I have been using to make mine more effective. Be sure to try them out & let me know how they help you!
While this post on our website is focused specifically on Bankruptcy Attorneys, the ideas are relevant across a number of legal (and non-legal) verticals. Be sure to check it out.
I gathered the best marketing resources for startups.
— Easlo (@heyeaslo) January 22, 2022
Save 100+ hours researching.
A thread:
