The 20 Percent is a weekly newsletter that brings you breakthrough ideas applied to website marketing.
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. Link building is something I’ve been avoiding for a long time. I only became good at it when I understood that it’s not about spamming people. It’s about creating something helpful to others and believing in it strong enough to promote it. In this … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. Consistency is one of the most important factors contributing to the success of an online business. And like any good piece of advice, it’s also deceptively difficult to put into action. Sometimes I feel that “being consistent” is the business equivalent of “carbs are … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. Early human societies were largely dependent on foraging and hunting. The food supply was unpredictable, and humans had to deal with feast or famine cycles—periods of abundance followed by periods of scarcity. With the advent of agriculture, life became more planned, and feast or famine … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. Pablo Picasso is often quoted as saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Whether Picasso did indeed say that is open to some debate, but Steve Jobs was certainly a brand convert. Radical originality doesn’t have a high return on investment. Instead, there is a high … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is about building your opportunity space with content curation: Consistently creating original content is hard. It’s hard because creativity needs fostering, and original ideas need time to mature. But writing your content from scratch isn’t the only way to build an audience. There’s an … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing. The marketing that has suffused our entire lives is not the marketing that you want to do. The shortcuts using money to buy attention to sell average stuff to average people are an … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea comes from the mid-1990s and is called The Overton Window. The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Wil Reynolds, founder & director of strategy at Seer Interactive. In a service industry like mine, if you out care your competition, you will kill them. If you care more about your customer’s outcome, if you care more about your team’s outcome… we can destroy our … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that … Read More
Hello friends, and welcome to this edition of The 20 Percent. This week’s breakthrough idea is from Daniel Hillis, co-founder of The Long Now Foundation. “When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by … Read More