Benjamin Estes's Posts

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Say a SaaS company hires you as a content marketer. They’re in the People Operations space, and your mandate is to kickstart their thought leadership program. Your employer has plenty of smart people designing software, and many of them have already written articles in their area of expertise. Some of them have even created microsites—on team building, compensation practices, inclusion, and more. However, you notice that the tone and design of these microsites don’t quite seem to match your brand message.

Your teammates’ expertise makes a thought leadership program possible, but what do you do with the materials they’ve created?

In 2013, Nabisco won the internet with a single tweet. That year, the Super Bowl famously suffered a power outage. Between the time the lights went out and then were brought back, their Oreo team managed to create a promotional image, write copy, and then tweet it.

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Technical SEO audit definition

Technical SEO is the discipline responsible for determining whether the implementation of a website is reducing the organic search traffic coming to that site, and then fixing those implementation problems. A technical audit uncovers such issues.

Why use a checklist?

An excellent technical audit inspects many things in many places. Without keeping track, you might forget what you’ve done—or what you have yet to do. Checklists are perfect for keeping track of this complexity.

You’ve probably summarized data with a single number, like an average. For instance, the median is an average. It tells you what number is in the middle of your data if you sorted the numbers from smallest to largest.

Averages tell you nothing about how the numbers are spread out. Think about the mean transaction value for an online store. Do most of your customers spend about that much? Or do ninety percent of them pay substantially less, while those remaining are big spenders? A histogram can answer this question.

What is a histogram?

A histogram is a chart describing the distribution of data. It partitions the range of the data and shows how many values fall into each partition.

How to make a histogram

1. Choose how many bins you need.

Imagine starting a job as Director of Growth for a SaaS startup. The company measures your success by growth in revenue for your subscription product line. It’s a big task, the pressure is high, your mind reels as it grasps for a starting point. After mulling it over you take your trusty whiteboard marker, and on the nearest board you write:

How might we increase revenue?

1. How might we increase signups?

2. How might we decrease churn?

3. How might we increase subscription fees?

These issues cover all relevant ideas, and none of them overlap. This simple example shows the essence of MECE. Examining each of these problems will be more straightforward than the original “increase revenue” prompt.