The Inbound Newsletter #2
Today we are featuring content about Career success, SEO reporting, Customers experience and skills for PMs. Also presentations & effective communication, and more.
🙏 Thanks to Will Reynolds from Seer Interactive, Jerome Hardaway, Jess Jurva from Conductor and Leah Tharin.
Blogs / Articles - The Inbound Newsletter (TIN)
⚙️ Junior to senior: An action plan for engineering career success - Thanks to Jerome (Microsoft and Executive Director @Vets who Code), we are going to learn a bunch of things.
Even though it’s written on a technical basis (for engineers), you can use these pieces of advice in several industries.
Key takeaways:
You’ll see the key technical competencies that managers prioritize for career advancement. It is kind of finding the cheats sheet in order to grow faster. Learn what others are aiming from you, and do it. You’ll move faster.
Connect the dots between engineering / product, and revenue.
Show that you care of the business, not just doing the tasks you’ve been asigned.
Communication skills expected from senior developers / role positions. They need you to communicate effectively.
Be proactive. Always.
Try to mentor new hires. Start learning the necessary skills to manage other people from day one.
Write documentation. Written documentation builds the basis of every company. No one wants to do it. You do it.
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⚙️ The ultimate guide on SEO Reporting - 10x your SEO by reporting effectively - Thanks to Conductor, Tom Critchlow (SEO MBA), Jess Jurva (Chief Customer Officer at Conductor) we’ll truly understand the way to report and be good at executive communication with the c-level within your company.
Key takeaways:
Do’s
Be concise and communicate in c-level’s language (Revenue, Brand, Market share, Audience), not yours (SEO jargon)
Don’ts
Inflate your numbers talking about overall organic traffic. You need to think of non-branded traffic.
Provide too much details. They don’t want them, they trust your knowledge.
Skip bad news nor negative trends. It’s preferable that you tell them if you have the chance. It is part of communicating effectively.
Learn how to communicate SEO results to the C-suite (lots of actionable tips).
A few templates for SEO reporting.
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⚙️ Quality Is in the Eye of the Beholder - April 07. Not even the 2008 recession had unfolded, yet. Debanjan Mitra and Peter N. Golder gave us this very simple, clear idea, but also something worth reading periodically. Quality is in the eye of the beholder.
Key takeaways:
I am going to quote this directly. “Consumers are slow to notice positive or negative changes in a product’s quality, and that could have important implications for your company’s marketing plan.”
Companies usually cut costs to widen its margins. Product quality suffers. The problem is that there is lag between this, customers acknowledgment and even their ‘vote’ to change things.
Understanding this and trying to proactively identify lags in consumers' perceptions of quality can provide a competitive advantage when planning and timing market maneuvers.
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⚙️ Learn how to learn - Not-that-obvious skills for product managers - Leah Tharin shared with us this (and four more others) skills that PMs should have. Even though it says “in 2023”, as for myself it’s something worth knowing for the whole decade.
Key Takeaways:
The five main skills are:
Running your team with outcomes, instead of agile processes. Think of outcomes and let go a little bit of control in the process.
Understanding company valuation investing. If you get to know this (“learn the business”) you can prioritize better. It’s not for everyday tasks, it’s more important in the long run.
Crafting Business cases. I’ll quote directly: “Knowing how to structure, write and challenge a business case is more than just creating nice slides.“
Understanding Sales & Marketing. The basis. Not that much here.
Learn how to Learn. In a fast-paced environment, you’ll have to learn lots of things. Every year. Try to find your way to learn (eg. mine is here, reading and writing. Leah wrote the same 😊. It will be a little uncomfortable, as usual.
Social - The Inbound Newsletter (TIN)
💻 Combine your data together, please - Otherwise, you could be losing lots of money 😅. This is, more or less, what Will Reynolds said on Twitter. I know for sure you are running PPC and SEO. But this is not only for that.
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💻 Community-based opportunities to make a business - Greg Isenberg was pretty clear with this. Find a community, build around it and make some huge money.
Key Takeaways:
There are a few steps:
Find a tiny underserved niche
Generate startup idea (“Bundle utility + education + community” means people connecting & making relationships. Own this? Charge for it).
Build an audience (easy-peasy, right?)
Build a waitlist. Add a little scarcity. At least at first.
Create memorable ad campaign (opc). This is for exponential growth.
Launch and monetize. Now we are talking about numbers. Then keep pushing and making it bigger.
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💻 Do a full presentation, but with 0 words - This is pretty much what Eric Schmidt told to Gokul Rajaram while they were both working at Google, back in 2006.
Key takeaways:
The bigger the audience, the lesser the words.
Titles are strong communicators.
Keep them ideally of max 8 words.
They must be action oriented. And here I’ll quote. “Eg: not “Subscriber retention” but “Subscribers continue to be retained strongly” or even better “Net revenue retention continues to be > 100%”.”
You can put the text in speaker notes. It’s not bad for a few thousands people presentation.
Use memorable images
So that would be all for today. See you soon and thanks for reading. I’ll leave you with a quick NPS pool. Because what is not measured, cannot be improved.