Post by account_disabled on Jan 27, 2024 4:50:07 GMT
Martech Zone is a project of passion for me that’s been publishing articles on how to research, learn, and discover sales and marketing technology for over 18 years! A decade ago, we dominated search and honestly didn’t have a lot of competition. Now, we have thousands of sites across the web where both companies and publishers are working to assist businesses with the exploding landscape of MarTech. Running a publication aggregating information freely available across the web isn’t a lucrative business, I assure you. But it’s been a passion, hobby, and maybe a slight addiction for me for several reasons: Learning – If I want this publication to remain relevant, I must keep up with the latest technologies and platforms. I have an excellent reputation online and don’t want to tarnish it by putting information out that leads my readers to make mistakes, especially those I’ve made. Publishing almost daily keeps me knowledgeable about my industry. Recording – Many of the articles I share aren’t simply those I am sharing with others; they are also articles I often reference for myself and my clients. I can’t tell you how often.
I’ve done a similar task for a company and remember that I’d found a solution before… so I check my site! Practice – It’s my opinion, but speaking and writing well are the most significant skills that lead to success that I believe you’ll ever have in business. You’d be aghast at my grammar and spelling mistakes if you read one of my articles over a decade ago. While I still utilize Grammarly, I make far fewer mistakes than I ever have in the past. Writing articles requires me to organize my thoughts and succinctly communicate them. This is core to every conversation you’ll ever have with Country Email List an audience, a client, a boss, a team member, or even a significant other. Accomplishment – Sales and marketing are grueling and usually lack immediate gratification. Even on the worst day of my job, I can breathe a sigh of relief when I finish work that day and publish a new article on the site. During the pandemic, my clients were truly decimated with cashflow issues with the subsequent lockdowns. My overall revenue dropped more than 70% in that time and I was forced to make significant cuts to my lifestyle, leaned on credit for relief, and had to look for any means of making a living. I was also financially supporting two other households… so I had to dig deep. Site Issues With Martech Zone Martech Zone revenue barely covered WordPress hosting and maintenance costs since I never had an outbound sales team or formal sponsorship program. I knew there was an opportunity to grow my advertising revenue and reach with the site, but it was going to take a ton of work. With my business down the tubes, I definitely had time on my hands! The site had a number of issues: Speed – the site was extremely slow and needed many infrastructure, theme, and plugin changes to operate well within Google’s Core Web.
Vitals (CWV). It wasn’t about SEO; it was really about the user experience (UX). My readers would always complain that the site was slow. Broken HTML – I had many issues with poorly formatted articles, missing images, and other HTML issues through multiple iterations and site migrations. Broken Links – Many articles I had written pointed to sites and platforms that no longer existed. When I crawled my site, I found thousands of articles with bad links that I needed to update or remove. Old Content – Having an article on the State of {insert industry} from a decade ago was irrelevant to the site’s readers and often clogged internal search results or related articles. New users would often land on an irrelevant page and abandon the site. I don’t blame them! Consistency – When I started blogging, writing an article with a single paragraph wasn’t uncommon. Today, however, readers are looking for more comprehensive, well-organized articles broken up with sub-headings, bullet points, and well-illustrated articles. There are about 5,000 articles on Martech Zone… and the majority of them had problems. Eighteen years of content is quite an undertaking to fix and I had to set some productivity goals for myself. Each weekday I would either publish 1-3 articles or correct or remove.
I’ve done a similar task for a company and remember that I’d found a solution before… so I check my site! Practice – It’s my opinion, but speaking and writing well are the most significant skills that lead to success that I believe you’ll ever have in business. You’d be aghast at my grammar and spelling mistakes if you read one of my articles over a decade ago. While I still utilize Grammarly, I make far fewer mistakes than I ever have in the past. Writing articles requires me to organize my thoughts and succinctly communicate them. This is core to every conversation you’ll ever have with Country Email List an audience, a client, a boss, a team member, or even a significant other. Accomplishment – Sales and marketing are grueling and usually lack immediate gratification. Even on the worst day of my job, I can breathe a sigh of relief when I finish work that day and publish a new article on the site. During the pandemic, my clients were truly decimated with cashflow issues with the subsequent lockdowns. My overall revenue dropped more than 70% in that time and I was forced to make significant cuts to my lifestyle, leaned on credit for relief, and had to look for any means of making a living. I was also financially supporting two other households… so I had to dig deep. Site Issues With Martech Zone Martech Zone revenue barely covered WordPress hosting and maintenance costs since I never had an outbound sales team or formal sponsorship program. I knew there was an opportunity to grow my advertising revenue and reach with the site, but it was going to take a ton of work. With my business down the tubes, I definitely had time on my hands! The site had a number of issues: Speed – the site was extremely slow and needed many infrastructure, theme, and plugin changes to operate well within Google’s Core Web.
Vitals (CWV). It wasn’t about SEO; it was really about the user experience (UX). My readers would always complain that the site was slow. Broken HTML – I had many issues with poorly formatted articles, missing images, and other HTML issues through multiple iterations and site migrations. Broken Links – Many articles I had written pointed to sites and platforms that no longer existed. When I crawled my site, I found thousands of articles with bad links that I needed to update or remove. Old Content – Having an article on the State of {insert industry} from a decade ago was irrelevant to the site’s readers and often clogged internal search results or related articles. New users would often land on an irrelevant page and abandon the site. I don’t blame them! Consistency – When I started blogging, writing an article with a single paragraph wasn’t uncommon. Today, however, readers are looking for more comprehensive, well-organized articles broken up with sub-headings, bullet points, and well-illustrated articles. There are about 5,000 articles on Martech Zone… and the majority of them had problems. Eighteen years of content is quite an undertaking to fix and I had to set some productivity goals for myself. Each weekday I would either publish 1-3 articles or correct or remove.