Getting started with SEO 101:

If you to start getting some organic traffic from Google, but don't know where to start, here's how I recommend getting started.

I'll outline:

- On Site SEO
- Basic KW Research
- Longtail Traffic
- Content Approach

Let's go 👇

SEO is about trust.

Everything stems from trust.

If Google trusts your site, it will promote you to searchers.

If people trust your title(s), they'll click your links.

If people trust the content they are reading, they'll share & give backlinks.

Trust signaling is the goal.

How do you signal trust to Google?

- Fast page loads.
- Great user experience.
- Natural, human generated content.
- Bot readable content.
- Good schema structure.
- Long page dwell times.

Basically, providing great content and a great experience gives you a leg-up.

In search results, Google keeps track of these signals:

1. CTR (Click Through Rate) - When people see your titles, do they click them?

2. Bounce Rate - Do people immediately leave after clicking the link?

3. Page Dwell Time + Scroll Distance - Do people read your content?

Here's what you want:

High CTR
Low Bounce Rate
High Dwell + Scroll

✅ People are attracted to your titles.

✅ They actually make it to your fast-loading site.

✅ They stick around and read the content.

Check these boxes and you'll have a great foundation.

Flying is accidentally the best ever environment for DEEP work and reflection.

Writers like @rickygervais do their best work on airplanes.

Here's 6 reasons why.

THREAD...

What looks like a bug - can often be a feature.

“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

The restrictions we face on airplanes is what makes the experience so liberating.

AIRPLANE FEATURE 1 - HIGH EXIT COSTS

You can't find any escapes.

If you try to escape, you face death.

Negative incentives are built into the system.

"Incentives are a super power." - Charlie Munger

AIRPLANE ADVANTAGE 2 - NO INPUTS

There's no newsfeeds to refresh. No emails to reply to.

It's like knowing your heroin dealer is in a coma.

Boredom is built into the system.

Your monkey mind can't access dopamine - so it starts creating its own.

It is a distraction-free environment:

1. No socialising - You don't know anyone. No small talk.

2. No sound inputs - The engine acts as white noise.

3. No visual inputs - The seating structure means you see barely anybody.

Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is how much money do you need to become an Indiehacker?

Well here’s what my own finances looked like when I went all-in…

A thread 1/n

2/n

Kudos to @jrleonr for sharing a vulnerable post on IH.

Personally I don’t think $12,000 is enough financial cushion to go all-in, start an idea from scratch and get to ramen-profitability. It’s just too short of a

3/n

Here’s how much money I saved up over years of corporate work in order to take the plunge and go indie: $200,000

For context, I’m 40, single and had worked my way into quite senior positions by the tail end of my employment.

4/n

$200,000 was enough cushion for me to work on my own projects for years without drastically changing my lifestyle too much. In retrospect, I think I gave myself too much of a cushion. I basically played around for a year before getting really serious...

5/n

...but on the other hand, trying to stretch too small amount a money to the point where it drastically downgrades your lifestyle, affects the people you love and creates a constant atmosphere of anxiety is also counter-productive.

On Bayesianism, the Many Worlds Interpretation, and personal identity.

Some thoughts worked out in a letter to a friend, which is the kind of thing you do when off Twitter for a glorious week. (🧵)

“Chance is ignorance”—the Bayesian story; all probabilities represent states of mind, not states of the world. One *could* put (some) chances “in the world”, but let’s take Occam’s Razor seriously...

That the probability of a fair coin coming up heads is 50% simply means that marginalizing (tracing, as the physicists say) over the hidden facts leaves you, nearly, maximally ignorant of the outcome.

Quantum uncertainty (access below!) poses an apparent challenge to this story. There seems to be nothing to be ignorant about when it comes to (say) electron spin—there is nothing “inside” the

The electron is a simple object, in other words. So where does the uncertainty come from? One could follow David Wallace’s wonderful interpretation in terms of chaotic dynamics and decoherence, but let’s see if we can take another route...

Tip: Everybody wants backlinks, but few provide real value first in their cold outreach. Get high-quality backlinks by giving candidates a list of broken links on their sites and providing highly-relevant alternatives.

Thread 👇

If you're trying to boost your SEO with backlinks, "broken link building" is a better bet than your run-of-the-mill cold email. Here's how you do it.

First, find links to 404 pages from sites in your niche. You can do this by exploring blogs with a free tool called Check My Links.

But the easiest way to do it at scale is with services like Ahrefs or Moz. And you can also use these services to find out what other sites are linking to the broken page (the more the merrier).

Once you find something within your expertise, check out what the original article included by using archive .org. Then write something of your own that encompasses and improves upon it.

The 2020s will be known as the Remote Work decade

A few predictions of what is likely to emerge

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

🏦Third Space: Office and Working from Home will be joined by somewhere close by that a number of people will use

Supermarkets or local bank branches should emerge as a convenient ubiquitous location option – if they are smart

⏰Asynchronous Work: Offices are instantaneous gratification distraction factories where synchronous work makes it impossible to get stuff done

Tools that enable asynchronous work are the most important thing globally remote teams need. A lot of startups will try to tackle this

⚽️Hobbie Renaissance: Remote working will lead to a rise in people participating in hobbies and activities which link them to people in their local community

This will lead to deeper, more meaningful relationships which overcome societal issues of loneliness and issolation

🚜Rural Living: World-class people will move to smaller cities, have a lower cost of living & higher quality of life

These regions must innovate quickly to attract that wealth. Better schools, faster internet connections are a must

FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.

@naval returned to @tferris show to talk about science, happiness, reducing anxiety, and crypto

Key Takeaways:

Sequels suck because they cost 3x as much and have less time to come up with a good idea

1/20

Loves Richard Feynman because he did science and serious work but was a character who didn’t take himself to seriously. “A full stack intellectual hacker of life”

“Believing in science” is misguided. Science doesn’t need belief. If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science.

2/20

“If there was no truth to it, it wouldn’t hurt at all. If I said Tim Ferris is fat, that would just bounce right off of you. If I said Tim Ferris and Naval are fake gurus, that might hit us because we kind of suspect at some deep level, there’s a part of that that’s true.”

3/20

“Individuals can search for truth but groups search for consensus...The moment you make science about large groups and about voting and about consensus, you’re not really practicing science anymore.”

4/20

“In an ideal scientific world, you don’t go and survey 10,000 scientists. You pick the one smartest scientist.”

Jargon is useful when it is a compressed way of communicating knowledge. Jargon is not useful when it becomes a substitute for fundamental understanding.

5/20

Choosing a business partner could be the 2nd most important relationship you ever choose (after who you marry.)

I just got out of a 5-year partnership that had become toxic.

Here's where I went wrong.

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

1. If business partnership was like marriage, I'd married someone that I'd only been on a few dates with and barely knew.

I partnered out of insecurity with someone who talked a good game and seemed strong in the areas I felt weak.

This insecurity cost me $$$

2. Questions I wished I had asked before taking on a partner:

- What are my goals for this business?
- What are my strengths and weaknesses?
- What parts of starting/building this business am I the most unsure about?
- What might my perfect partner look like?

3. Qualities to look for in a business partner:

✅ Financially sensible & secure
✅ Shared vision & goals
✅ Emotionally intelligent (high eq > high iq)
✅ High integrity
✅ Similar work ethic

4. How to split equity

50/50 isn’t a business decision, it’s a settlement.

It’s a common way to decide equity splits because a down-the-middle split seems 'fair'. However, it's also lazy and more often than not is a bad deal for one person, and gets worse the longer it goes on

A few thoughts on tax policy. Thread:

So you are worth >$100M or perhaps even a few billion. There are only two ways to become this rich.

1. You start a business that becomes very successful.
2. You inherit wealth from your family. 1/

Whether you created a great company or inherited a lot of wealth, you are now sitting on a capital asset. You don’t really have any ordinary income (not meaningful to be relevant) and you never will. To the extent you ever pay taxes, it will be capital gains. 2/

The highest tax rate that the super rich will ever pay on their income (or wealth) is 20% capital gains tax. So, the super rich pay the equivalent effective tax rate of any American earning $75K (when you include FICA taxes). Same as a teacher or a cop. 3/

The question following from this obvious injustice in the tax system is the appropriate policy for taxing capital income. Economic policy would suggest that the best tax rate on capital is 0%. Why? ...4/

...Because in a capitalist society you want capital flowing efficiently without friction to its most productive use. Benefits of that are obvious. 5/

1) I was 30 years old. And in what many would consider a dream job. But I was pretty miserable. Because I knew I was letting my real dream--to become a screenwriter/filmmaker--die.

2) Sitting in my office one night, it hit me, if I did let the dream die, I would become toxic, because that's what death does, and that toxicity would ooze out of me, onto those I loved.

3)In that instant, I decided to make a shift, to find a way to finally, after years of denying it, do the thing. Try, at least. So I went to my best friend, @DavidLevien, who was already writing, and asked him for help.

4) David gave me The Artist's Way and said that when we had the right idea, he and I would write a screenplay together.

5) Soon thereafter, I had to good luck of walking into an illegal poker club in NYC, called David in the middle of the night, and we decided to write the thing.

I've spoken to around 1,000 companies over the last 6 months about their plans for remote work going forward

Here are a few things I've learned

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

🏢 HQ's are finished: companies will cut their commercial office space by 40-60%

The will allow every worker to work from home 2-4 days a week, and come into the office 1-2 days a week

🌍 Fully distributed: ~30% of the companies we talk to are getting rid of the office entirely and going remote-first

Companies doing this have seen their workers decentralize rapidly, leaving expensive cities to be closer to family

⭐️ Access talent: The first reason they are going remote-first is simple – it lets them hire more talented people

Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they can hire the best person in the world for every role

💰 Cut costs: The second reason they are going remote-first is because it lets them be far more cost-efficient

Rather than spending $20,000 / worker / year on office space they can provide the best remote setup on the planet for $2,000 / worker / year

🇵🇹 Lisbon is pretty great:
- locals are insanely friendly and hospitable and keep wanting to show you around and invite you to go on trips or drinks or parties etc.
- weather is close to perfect, warm but not too hot
- lots of cafes, great food
- very walkable
- very affordable

- if you can speak a bit of Spanish you can get around speaking Portuñol, a mix of Spanish and Portuguese and they get it; also everyone speaks English otherwise anyway
- a lot of the remote working ppl who'd be in Asia if not for COVID borders closed, are now in Lisbon

- met multiple ppl who are setting up residency in Portugal, as it gives Americans a visa for EU and gives Europeans a tax residence elsewhere, interesting

- Lisbon from very quick glance feels a bit like Barcelona without the arrogance and pompousness, just humble and chill ppl

- the entire service industry here seems to be run by Brazilians, affordable labor and they speak the language

🇵🇱 Polish Perfection 🇵🇱

@iga_swiatek becomes the first Grand Slam singles champion from Poland and does not drop a set en route to her first career title 6-4 6-1 over Kenin.

#RolandGarros

La magie Iga ✨

🇵🇱 @iga_swiatek devient la première Polonaise à remporter un tournoi du Grand Chelem et la plus jeune championne depuis 1992.

Elle remporte la finale 6-4 6-1 contre Sofia Kenin.

#RolandGarros

Why you need to be selfish: (thread)

I have had countless conversations with people looking for a way to build a brand/audience/community online.

Here's the one thing I think everyone asking that question should be thinking about.

You need to be selfish.

Why?

Because (at a high level) if it helps you, it will eventually help others.

At a tactical level, it's provides the motivation to keep going.

The lack of instant feedback on what we share publically is enough to extinguish most projects before they even get moving.

But allow me to reframe the idea:

You need to do things that benefit you even if no one sees them.

Did posting @visualizevalue images into a void 18 months ago do anything for my career as a designer?

Yes.

Would I have kept going if there wasn't some selfish drive to be more competent? (and make more money, work with better clients, etc)

No.