What can a semi-exact-match name and handle organically do on its own, without much effort and promotion?

Recap on CheapClassicTrucks.com

On 01/05/2021 I bought this domain and setup social accounts for CheapClassicTrucks. A silent launch with very minimal, upfront time and promotion investment. I was simply curious to see what this name could do on its own.

At that time, I had only spent about 5 hours putting together a few assets to run its validation test:

1. Bought domain, spent ~2hrs building very basic submission page
2. Spent ~2hrs creating basic imagery, creative asset templates
3. Put 3 “coming soon” posts up on IG and didn’t touch social/website again until May 2021

• instagram.com/cheapclassictrucks
• cheapclassictrucks.com

At that time, 1 quarter in - 3 months later, with minimal effort put in, it had organically gained some traction.

Jan to Apr 2021, CheapClassicTrucks had:

• 100 Instagram followers via exact match handle/name search
• 10-15 posts and story @ tags, here and there
• 900 unique web visitors over 3-month period via exact-match, type-in traffic
  • Oversight on my part: site wasn’t even submitted for indexing until I realized this and spent ~5min verifying/submitting sitemap in Google Search Console on April 03.

Where CheapClassicTrucks.com stands today

Again, this isn’t by any means a viral story. Is it even fully validated, and worth pursuing? I still don’t know yet. For now, I’m just having fun re-sharing some classic trucks that I’m occasionally browsing through anyways.

Since that original 3-months-in post, here are some updated stats. Now, a few quarters in - a total of 9 months later, and again with minimal time investment. Things have organically gained even more traction.

Jan through Oct 2021, CheapClassicTrucks had:

• 600 Instagram followers via posts, recommendation + search discovery
• Many DMs, story tags, and messages/comments show CCT is being seen as credible/appreciated in the space
• ~2,000 unique web visitors, with impressions growing at a good rate since website content started being created
• 28 webpages are now live + indexed in search (majority including re-shared posts/listings, some re-purposed blog posts)
• 15 social posts have gone live, with decent engagement on each post

Google Search Console showing Impressions (purple line) growing, Clicks lagging.

I definitely spent more time on CCT since that initial retrospective post, yet it hasn’t been a heavy side project lift, by any means (this write-up is easily the most time spent on CCT-related things, all month).

I’ve shared 15 posts (and created a CheapClassicTrucks.com listing write-up post for each) between May - October 31, 2021 - averaging a light 2.5 posts per month workload. CCT social page followers, now at 600, have been consistently increasing. CCT organic website traffic is so-so.

Browsing classic trucks on Craigslist and other marketplaces is something that I do a couple of times per month anyways, primarily to value my own 1971 Ford F-250 pickup and to shop parts for that project pickup. When I see a listing that’s a great deal and/or worthwhile to create a short post about on CheapClassicTrucks, then I do so. Again, the cadence has been just a couple of times per month for the past 6 months or so.

I’m treating this all as an experiment, still. An experiment to see what a domain name/social page like CCT will organically do on its own, with a bit of my time invested here and there.

Perhaps I’ll build a proprietary marketplace to buy/sell classic trucks once a bigger audience has been grown here, or perhaps not. Perhaps a domain name investor will throw an offer my way, and I’ll then have more IP built-up to include in the sale, or perhaps not. Perhaps @cheapclassictrucks will grow into being a highly followed account like @classic_fordtruck_trader (67K followers), or @cheapoldtrucks (118K), or @cheap_classics (105K), or perhaps not. Perhaps I’ll start to personally blog about my own ‘71 F-250 project truck repairs, including tutorials and buying/parts sourcing tips, or perhaps not. We’ll see!

For now, I’m seeing what it does with this MVP framework and little time investment in-place. I don’t have any real expectations set for this, so as of now it’s neither exceeded or fallen short. CheapClassicTrucks is exactly what and where it is right now. I plan to continue to occasionally post/re-share people’s vehicle listings here, and see what the social page/website can continue to grow to.

Thanks for reading this update. What niche/market are you scoping out or running mini experiments in lately? Tweet me about it @scottmathson.

Are you into classic rigs, too? Follow @cheapclassictrucks on Instagram!

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Deciding to part ways early into joining Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and more) has undoubtedly been a difficult decision to make. Partly due to my prior decision to leave the team at Netlify that I’d helped form and grow for the past couple of years being an equally difficult transition. Throughout this transitionary stretch, I’ve learned to follow my gut more, to make more time for quiet and deliberate thinking, and to continually assess my areas of interest, my ambitions, and goals.

My intentions of this short post are to document. I’ve decided to remove Automattic from my LinkedIn profile, and I won’t be adding this stint to my portfolio. Not because I need to, but because it doesn’t reflect the impact and time that I’ve had at other organizations throughout my career in tech.

Throughout my professional career I haven’t been in the place that I was just in. That place of moving on after 3 months. That place of questioning, “What did I get myself into?”. It weighed on me. I was hard on myself. And I know that I could have made it work there in my role as Director of Growth Marketing for WordPress.com, and I was intentional and deliberate about making a lot of adjustment efforts, because I wanted to thrive. Yet I came to find that adjusting to their inner ways of working - the processes in how things are managed and seen through - was incredibly difficult at that exact moment, among other things.

And I lack passion in this space. Passion is consistently a motivating and driving factor for me.

With the way that things aligned, I am incredibly fortunate to have had inbound interest from other companies while I was going through this experience. This reaffirmed that my wide variety of experiences and skills are marketable, so I remained open and conversations started happening. I received 3 offers for equally great roles at equally great companies (a story for another time). I took my time in making that decision, my next steps became clear, and my mind was then made.

So I put in notice, resigned from Automattic, and we amicably parted ways. Again, my intentions of this post are to briefly document this as being a part of my career journey, and I don’t intend to go into more detail beyond this. In no way do I want my experience to reflect poorly on them as an employer, they were beyond good to me. These are my experiences reflected upon. Behind every great business is its people - and the Automatticians that I was fortunate enough to work with and come to know are all amazing!

I’m incredibly grateful for their understanding and generosity, for their belief in me, and I want to thank everyone at Automattic for this opportunity. I wish all of my former colleagues there the best of luck in their career now and into the future, and I look forward to watching their business continue to succeed.

I wanted to upgrade my webcam setup, and happen to have an older Canon DSLR lying around that doesn’t get much use nowadays. So, it made sense to put it to use as an external video source on my MacBook Pro to up my video quality!

Being a bootstrapper at heart, making budget-friendly purchases is always top of mind. So, I truly bought the bare minimum to get things setup. However you choose to go about it, it really shouldn’t cost that much to get started, and you can always upgrade if/when needed down the road. I’m not making video content, and/or my work video meetings aren’t extremely frequent, so this setup outlined works just fine for me.

This post outlines how I connected my Canon DSLR camera as an external webcam to my laptop.

Table of Contents:

• What’s Needed: Camera, USB Cable (or HDMI/Camlink), Tripod/Mount
• Download + Setup Canon EOS Webcam Utility Software
  • macOS Big Sur tip when installing Canon’s Webcam Utility
• Setup Camera and connect USB to laptop
  • My test video after getting things setup

What’s Needed: Camera, USB Cable (or HDMI/Camlink), Tripod/Mount

As mentioned, I have a Canon EOS Rebel T6 DSLR camera with an EFS 18-55mm lens and that’s what this post will primarily cover setting up. Yet whatever camera setup you have, there’s likely a first-party or third-party supported software and/or hardware out there to will fit your needs.

Thankfully, with my Canon + Canon’s software (more about Canon webcam software below) mini USB is fully supported to set this up as an external webcam. No big barrier to entry at all! I purchased this particular USB cable on Amazon ($7.99 - 6-foot mini USB) which is quite versatile and compatible with most Canon DSLRs. Do check product details/reviews to ensure yours is also compatible!

Perhaps it better suits your needs from the get-go to get something like the popular HDMI tethering device ‘Camlink’ (~$125-150). Chris Coyier wrote a blog post about his setup using HDMI Camlink + an Elgato keylight.

Next you’ll need some sort of camera mounting/tripod system. Whether you do-it-yourself/macgyver some camera tripod setup yourself (I’ve definitely done this on tripod setups in the past) or you buy a new one, this will be needed. Again, not needing a professional video studio setup for my use-case, I bought this basic, yet versatile DSLR desk clamp mount on Amazon ($29.90 - 11” adjustable arm (pictured below)).

Bonus tip: I heard from a colleague that getting an external camera battery adapter is a good idea so that your camera’s battery doesn’t die halfway through a call, and with it you won’t have to worry about charging your battery anymore. I didn’t get one of these AC power adapter kits right away, yet may eventually.

Download + Setup Canon EOS Webcam Utility Software

In 2020, Canon announced both a Windows and macOS webcam utility software that allows you to easily get started with 1. Canon EOS DSLR 2. USB cable 3. Canon’s Software. Here’s a link to download either operating systems’ Canon webcam software. It lists compatibility with Zoom, Hangouts/Meet, Teams, Skype, Messenger, YouTube Live, Slack, and on - covering most use-cases when using this external DSLR webcam setup.

Steps to download Canon’s Webcam Utility software:

1. Select operating system - Windows or macOS (macOS Big Sur v11 in my case, kind of…note on this below)
2. Select your compatible Canon EOS model (EOS Rebel T6 in my case)
3. Download the applicable software, go through install
4. Follow prompts to restart computer

macOS Big Sur tip when installing Canon’s Webcam Utility

Note: On Canon’s software download page, after selecting my compatible camera, I selected macOS Catalina even though I am on macOS Big Sur (see photo, above). Canon’s Webcam Utility software does not yet support v11+ as of April 2021. But actually it kind of does…everything is working just fine with this Catalina version on Big Sur. And one more tip is to ensure your camera has WiFi/NFC disabled to work correctly.

Trust me, I had to do a decent amount of troubleshooting to figure this out, but shoutout to this helpful video for answering my question. Again, disable WiFi/NFC on your Canon camera for this to work! 📸

Other camera’s software: If you’re not using a Canon, here’s links to some other make’s first-party softwares.

• Sony Imaging Edge Webcam Utility
• Fujifilm X Webcam Utility
• Nikon Webcam Utility
• Olympus OM-D Webcam Utility
• Panasonic Lumix Thether for Streaming

A final option for macOS users is a Camera Live + CamTwist setup. There’s a good write-up about this CamTwist OSS setup here (you’ll need to know some basics around using a command line/terminal).

Setup Camera and connect USB to laptop

Once the 1. software download is complete, and 2. you’ve finished your camera-to-workstation mounting/tripod setup, you’ll need to 3. get your camera hooked-up for being an external/mirrored webcam on your laptop.

1. Set Camera to ‘Movie Mode’ (with full HD setting)
   • I set mine to 1920x1080, 30fps (Zoom recording output a 720 video, though)
2. Set to Auto or adjust exposure, ISO, etc. to your liking
   • I originally had mine on Canon’s Auto focus, yet changed to Manual after testing
3. Connect mini USB to camera and then to laptop or dongle/hub

In case you missed it in the tip above, make sure that you have disabled WiFi/NFC on your Canon. You may then need to disconnect/reconnect the USB cable to get a signal after making this Menu/settings change.

Open Zoom or another app supported by Canon’s Webcam Utility and then change your system’s video source settings via zoom.us > preferences > video > select ‘EOS Webcam Utility’ on camera dropdown. Try turning your camera on/off and/or disconnect/reconnect the cable to your laptop if things don’t register right away.

My test video after getting things setup

And that’s it, you should be all set! In my case, beyond the original cost of my Canon camera (shoutout to a Costco holiday bundle a few years ago), this was all achieved for less than $40 and just took an hour or two one afternoon. I’m looking forward to putting things to use in future video calls and meetings!

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Often, focus is largely skewed to owned channels - optimizing our own websites, social channels, and other properties we can directly manage, yet this leaves so much off-site growth over-looked. Now, don’t get me wrong - you do have the most control over your own, app-led/product-led as well as marketing-led initiatives, yet experimenting off-site can bring tremendous results!

Particularly when you marry the best of both together via an off-site acquisition channel leading to on-site, owned flows. Build this out to scale on its own via user-generated usage, adoption, and community-led growth.

This is the case with the incredibly powerful “Deploy to x” flow!

‘Deploy to Netlify’ as a marketing channel, inspected

Undoubtedly one of the earliest pioneers of this is my very own employer, Netlify. Netlify introduced the “Deploy to Netlify” button in 2016, with then-CTO David Calavera, CEO Matt Biilmann, and others who brought this idea to reality.

This flow truly removes any barriers to entry! One-click and you’re into the site creation workflow in-app (a few clicks if you haven’t signed up yet).

Visualizing what this looks like, off-page/off-site on GitHub:

"Deploy to Netlify" button example on my search-optimized Jekyll static site boilerplate.

Clicking that “Deploy to Netlify” button brings users in-app, into the site creation workflow where the project is then setup/deployed in a matter of minutes:

Here, see it in action and give it a shot by clicking the deploy button below to get full context:

How URL attribution looks, in-practice: https://app.netlify.com/start/deploy?repository=https://github.com/scottmathson/virtuacon-jekyll-boilerplate?utm_source=scottmathson.com&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=scottmathson-deploy-button-post

Netlify’s Cassidy Williams, Principal Developer Experience Engineer, recently wrote: “…just click the handy “Deploy to Netlify” button, and it will clone the project for you and you can customize and tweak it to your heart’s content…”.

Technically speaking, GitHub (or personal blogs (link above) or wherever else the buttons are utilized) are the actual referral channel(s) here, with “deploy to” buttons being the strategy.

But the magic of this experience is apparent, yet how has it scaled since launch? What are some stats?

Show me the numbers

Of course, I’m only going to reveal publicly available data that anyone can access, here. With some time, manual research, and know-how you can access the below information using Google search site operators and/or tools like SEMrush.

At the time of writing this (April 2021) the app.netlify.com subdomain has nearly 280,000 backlinks, the largest majority of which (you guessed it) lead to this: app.netlify.com/start/deploy flow - 232,000 links, to be exact.

Nearly 50% of these inbound, deploy-driven links are led by off-site channels: primarily github.com, like in the “Deploy to Netlify” button in repo example above. Of course, not everybody is going to be using this “Deploy to Netlify” recommended verbiage, but what we can see via a Google search operator site:github.com "deploy to netlify" is that there are ~20,000 indexed references on github.com with “Deploy to Netlify” verbiage included. There’s some on GitLab, too.

As mentioned, everything indexed here isn’t including the button, but the majority is.

Again, this GitHub referral is typically similar to that GitHub README screenshot example above. Check out another, Cassidy’s Next + Netlify Markdown Blog Starter. It’s not all off-page via earned efforts, we’d frankly be remiss if we didn’t utilize this on other channels for this acquisition channel. Thus, it’s utilized on other, owned channels like Jamstack.org directories.

(https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/netlify-cms/)

With some of the above stats outlined, you can do the math for as to what this type of acquisiton channel at-scale could mean for any business. It’s quite the powerhouse of an off-site acquisition channel, leading users into on-site signup flows.

Who else is doing “Deploy to x”

“Immature artists copy, great artists steal.” -Steve Jobs

Now, that concept can be quite controversial, yet it’s apparent in tech. Just look at Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Spotify, and others currently vying for that market share of the live audio space. Or Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and others stories product features throughout the years.

In regards to “Deploy to x” marketing, primarily focusing in on utilizing this on GitHub’s developer platform, here’s some others who have announced similar functionality throughout the years.

• Heroku: https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-button
• Vercel (prev Zeit): https://vercel.com/blog/deploy-button
• Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deploy-to-azure-button-for-azure-websites-2/
• Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/introducing-cloud-run-button-click-to-deploy-your-git-repos-to-google-cloud
• Cloudflare: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/deploy-button
• DigitalOcean: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/add-deploy-do-button/

And the list goes on.

Again via some Google site search operators, we can see that GitHub has ~14K repositories indexed on-site with “deploy to heroku” verbiage,~14K repos indexed with “deploy to Azure” verbiage, and on.

Conclusion and who’s next?

I hope that I’ve helped contextualize some of the power of acquisition channels like this. At-scale, this is an amazing referral channel bringing new users into the top-of-funnel, and deepening product engagement with existing users.

Where might this go? Who else might utilize a similar approach?

Though hard to predict, I see this as quite the opportunity for a variety of other companies/products like Shopify (OSS Apps/Themes Marketplace “install App” integration/workflow), or Slack (OSS slackbot “install bot”), or WordPress (OSS themes/plugins “start with Theme”), or Zapier, and on. Getting real meta, GitHub could implement an actions-focused “deploy Action” workflow from their own marketplace and other’s individual repositories.

Again, I find any/all acquisition channels fascinating, and I believe that “deploy to x” is not one to be overlooked.

Aside: “Powered by” marketing

Another, adjacent channel is the all-powerful “powered by”. Now, this is on-page, and a bit of an aside from the main contents of this article. Yet “powered by” deserves an honorable mention here (maybe I’ll follow-up with its own article).

We’ve all seen this in the footer of sites/products: “Powered by Statuspage” (DigitalOcean example), “Powered by WordPress”, “Powered by Shopify”, and on. It’s worth doing site operator searches around that! These referral paths on the bottom of user’s websites/products are powerful. From day one, I’ve done “powered by” marketing on Plink’s freemium pages.

"Powered by Plink" example on How I Built This with Guy Raz freemium episode page

You click it? I'll see https://plinkhq.com/?ref=lpage&id=1150510297 (podcast ID) attributed in analytics

As with others using this method, I’d recommend this being optional for paying users, giving them whitelabel and functionality to remove any “powered by” branding that they may not desire to have on their page.

People are curious, people want to use products/tools used by those that they admire use. “Powered by” is social proof, testimonial, and just plain smart acquisition all-in-one. Being able to then attribute which sites/products/pages bring in the most referrals via this channel is an important metric to know which high-referring relationships to further nurture (and perhaps even incentivize via affiliate programs, etc). “Powered by” is another great acquisition channel atop “Deploy to x” discussed above!

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What can a semi-exact-match name and handle do on its own, without any promotion and ~5hrs of work?

This is the first time I’m writing about the validation test for CheapClassicTrucks. I’ve lost count, but it’s probably no. 45 on my list of small projects made throughout the years. It’s still very much so a work-in-progress, and I’ve invested very little into it (~5hrs, $9.06 for domain).

The Classic Vehicles Market

The classic vehicle niche and industry fascinates me. I’ve long been an admirer of classic rigs, and even though I don’t have a history or much skill around vehicle mechanics, I’ve always wanted a project pickup to learn skills on. Last year, I got an old pickup to tinker with, more below.

In my classic vehicle research and Craigslist browsing throughout the years, I quickly discovered that there is quite the cult following among classic vehicle enthusiasts. Per-make, per vehicle generations/years, per body style - you name it - folks are extremely passionate about this! There are forum posts upon forum posts on the web that are filled with knowledge, advice, and classic vehicle shop talk/storytelling. Not to mention a web filled with millions of classic vehicle for sale listings.

My own diligence and research of this niche (surprisingly a ~$26B market) was done via my own classic vehicle search. And after years of searching, I finally committed to purchasing my own restoration project last Fall - a 1971 Ford F-250 Camper Special pickup. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of tinkering with, upgrading/rebuilding, and cruising that time machine of a vehicle.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Scott Mathson (@scottmathson)

This market, not that indifferent from stocks or even NFTs, is based around restored, classic vehicle asset class. And within this market, there’s continually growing supply (and demand) - buying/selling/holding of said classic rigs. There are collectors out there who buy high and keep a garage full of 50, 60, or 70 year old classics.

Look at the business built around this market at https://bringatrailer.com (founded by SF-based entrepreneur in 2007, acquired by Hearst Autos in 2020). BAT has seen 46K auctions through their platform (quite interesting to explore their market/sales data, per make/model: https://bringatrailer.com/auctions/results). Their model: sellers pay a one-time $99 fee, and buyers pay 5% fee. Their average sale price is 5- to 6-figures!

But what about the 2-7K market?

What is CheapClassicTrucks?

There’s those who, like me, enjoy getting these classics out on the open road. Those who enjoy the meditative aspect of rebuilding a 50 year old 2-bbl carburetor, those who enjoy changing out the sludgy old oil. Those who are often found browsing private-party listings of more affordable, classic rigs. Project rigs and daily driver worthy vehicles.

Now, I’m only a dabbler in domain name investing and domain development. Yet I’ve definitely dabbled in it more than I’ve dabbled in DIY vehicle mechanics already, though I expect to be doing more on my project pickup this Summer. I do prefer building full-blown SaaS products and services like Plink (podcast smart links), or continually maintaining and growing content sites like Makerviews (maker/artist interview site). But occasionally, I browse expiring domains and hand register new ones. That’s the case with CheapClassicTrucks.

Instagram is a visual community where a lot of these classic vehicle owners/buyers will share and browse. Just looking at some of the community pages built upon IG in this niche make its volume clear, those like the quickly growing @classic_fordtruck_trader (48K followers), or @cheapoldtrucks (100K (from the couple behind @cheapoldhouses)), and on. Let alone the amount of content mentioned being shared on social platforms - IG hashtags like #squarebody (684K posts) and #classictrucks (300K posts) are just a couple examples.

Exact match domains like ClassicTrucks.com and their social handles are long since unavailable.

I’m fascinated by niches, by communities of people passionate about shared ideas and products. And I’m fulfilled by building things, exploring niches, and having a creative outlet via creating projects. Sometimes the best thing to do before diving head first into a new project is a bit of validation, run a micro experiment to see if there’s demand. Then, after a validation pass, focus on building the supply out and continuing to grow the demand.

On 01/05/2021 I bought the domain and setup social accounts for CheapClassicTrucks, my latest micro experiment project. I then spent very little time putting together a few things to run its validation test.

1. Bought domain, spent ~2hrs building very basic submission page
2. Spent ~2hrs creating basic imagery, creative asset templates
3. Put 3 “coming soon” posts up on IG and haven’t touched it since

• instagram.com/cheapclassictrucks
• cheapclassictrucks.com

Now, this isn’t by any means a viral story. Is it even fully validated, and worth pursuing? I don’t know yet.

But 3 months later, without any more effort than what I outlined above, it has organically gained some traction.

Jan to Apr, 1 quarter later, CheapClassicTrucks now has:

• 100 Instagram followers via exact match handle/name search
• 10-15 posts and story @ tags, here and there
• 900 unique web visitors over 3-month period via exact-match, type-in traffic
  • Oversight on my part: site wasn’t even submitted for indexing until I realized this and spent ~5min verifying/submitting sitemap in googlesearchconsole Apr 03.

So, with virtually no promotion and very little time spent here, beyond this initial silent “go-live” drop on the web, it’s cool to see what a name and handle can do on its own. Occasionally I login to the account and look through who’s followed - and it’s exactly the persona (demand) needed and expected - DIY mechanics, classic vehicle enthusiasts looking to sell/find their next project.

Again, I’m going to let this organic discovery experiment run a bit longer before deciding pass/fail. Maybe I’ll invest some more time, another handful of hours, or ideate more sophisticated growth test(s) around this.

I didn’t set any expectation for this, so its neither exceeded or fallen short - it is exactly what it is all on its own. Based off my limited understanding of the web traffic and social followers, I’m sure that I could likely convert ~10% of them to list a rig at a $9.99 fee. And I’ve briefly scoped out some further development here, in the case that I do decide to pursue this project on the side.

It’d undoubtedly be a fun challenge in way of automation. I could repurpose some of the interview submission automation I’ve built around makerviews.com, while also integrating with other APIs for automation and workflows around the listing submission > posting > promotion flows.

I’ll see what the account/profiles can organically acquire on its own for a bit longer.

What niche/market are you testing out lately? Tweet me about it @scottmathson.

Are you into classic rigs, too? Follow @cheapclassictrucks on Instagram!

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I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with a variety of software companies, both large and small, and with small and local businesses and individuals, alike. All of whom face this reality of competition within their respective markets.

How do we currently respond to competition or how should we be responding? How impacted are we by other’s actions? Are we being reactive or proactive?

A resounding theme amongst the companies and individuals that I personally admire most is that they are fully aware of their competition, yet they are not debilitated or broken by, nor are they retaliating when competitors swoop low, trying to battle with them.

Competition is particularly cut throat in the software industry (or software as a service (SaaS)), and this is not limited to being true amongst just large, public companies. Startups are trying to assert dominance and make their place known in the market, and it may even be more cut throat at that level.

Yet there’s another route, a better option.

Eugenio Pace, CEO and Co-founder of Auth0, often repeated a phrase internally to that growing team of 650 individuals at his identity and security scale-up. Paraphrased, it went something like this:

I’m not worrying about the competition. The advantage that we can bring to the market is in focusing on what we have control over and doubling down on that. Advancing our own product and offering with focus, developing solutions that best serve our customers, is how we’ll win.

Recently I was reminded of his mantra and this approach, after news broke that Auth0 had been acquired for $6.5 billion by their largest competitor Okta. Had these company’s leaders been focused on competing with each other via common tactics within the industry like paying to piggy-back on each other‘s trademarks and earned awareness or directly “talking shit”, for lack of a better term, on each other throughout their websites, or any other harsher forms of attacking each other, then this combining of forces would never have seen the light of day. Had they built a point of view of one another as being enemies versus potential partners, then this would have never happened.

Undoubtedly this type of deal isn’t happening very often (due to adopting “the enemy way”) and this combining of seemingly competitive forces has raised question from skeptics. Yet these leaders ultimately decided that their combining of each other’s parallel missions, products, and offerings - that their teaming up - would be the best way forward for the future of this space. They were selflessly thinking of their own teams, their financial backers, their customers - developers and businesses - and they were thinking of their customer’s customer.

Instead of acting selfishly, they put everyone who relies on them first.

It doesn’t stand to do anybody any favor to over-focus on what our competitors are doing. Keep up with them, be curious about their approach, yet stay true to your own mission, build your own unique product, and remain open-minded.

I personally have had plenty of competitiveness instilled in me from various mentors, coaches, managers, and in my own actions and ways of approaching things throughout the years. Yet I’m noticing that in my efforts to be more introspective, to be more aware of defensiveness, and in questioning a knee-jerk reaction, it’s made me be more thoughtful and act in ways that I can be more proud of.

I’ll likely always be researching competitors and admiring their different tactics and techniques, it’s part of what I do. Yet I’m focusing on opening my mind to a more curious, focused, and open approach. There’s this toxic “growth at all costs” approach within the industry that, upon studying, makes clear that it does no good for anyone involved in its ways.

Both prospective and active customers alike are sensitive to bullshit. So, in any effort to better your company’s metrics and success, consider how taking the route of practicing cut throat competitiveness, along with all of its BS, actually negatively affects growth. Consider how this tactic may be interpreted by a potentially loyal customer of your brand. Customers can, do, and will recognize these things.

SaaS doesn’t have to be so cut throat.

In running my own, small software product for the past couple of years (smart podcast linking service Plink), I’ve been taking this open-minded approach more often than not. I’m actually quite close and continue to have conversations with nearly all of my direct competitors. We’ve even explored potential collaboration and partnerships.

Now this isn’t to say that the times like that in 2019 when I’d learned that one of them had just raised millions of dollars in fundraising or more recently that one of them had been acquired by a larger company, didn’t affect me in an emotional way. But the way that I choose to respond to that is key. And I’m choosing to respond with congratulations versus envy. I’m more aware than ever that behind every company are passionate humans like you and me.

Perhaps you’ll try practicing growing your product and its mission without any hurtful and attacking tactics, the kinds that unfortunately run rampant in technology and the broader world. Perhaps you’ll listen to interviews and study leaders that have a humble versus arrogant nature. Take notice how these leader’s drive, values, and focus are what makes their companies actually have a larger, more positive impact in the long run.

We can all learn from each other. We can all ensure that markets and industries move forward. And we can do our part to ensure that it’s done in a humane and thoughtful manner, together.

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This was broadcasted live, the video replay is embedded below.

SEO on the Jamstack

My presentation’s slideshow is below so you can explore the slides for an overview of the Jamstack, its architecture, and benefits. Shoutout to my colleagues at Netlify for sharing some assets to include! I split the presentation 50-50 into slideshow and a live demo. The main focus of this presentation was to present the benefits of static sites, alongside showing how you can create search-optimized static sites (Jekyll boilerplate repository included) and deploy them in mere minutes.

How to create search-optimized static sites (Jekyll boilerplate/starter template)

This Jekyll static site boilerplate accompanying the presentation, includes basic pages and posts layouts, automated structured data markup (JSON-LD Schema) for WebPage and BlogPosting, a sitemap.xml file, blog XML feed, optimized frontmatter fields mapping to on-page metadata, and more.

I recommend following along with the demo and walk-through of this repository (7 minutes into the ~35 minute presentation in video below), where I also go over how to go about deploying a static site (deploy to Netlify here). I also did a brief showcase of some of the presentation’s strategies in-place on static sites that I’ve worked on like auth0.com, netlify.com, and more.

Some of the resources/tools mentioned:

• https://www.netlify.com/
• https://jekyllrb.com/
• https://gohugo.io/
• https://www.11ty.dev/
• https://headlesscms.org
• https://www.contentful.com/
• https://stripe.com/
• https://pages.github.com/
• https://www.cloudflare.com/
• https://ctr.tools
• https://auth0.com/
• https://desktop.github.com/
• https://tagmanager.google.com/
• http://analytics.google.com/

Note: at 30min when deploying to GitHub Pages, CNAME should be committed bare without https:// etc.

Link to slideshow portion of presentation.

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Interested in learning how Cloudflare ranks for nearly 8,000 highly searched keywords in the span of 32 webpages? Read on!

This article highlights Cloudflare’s DNS content hub as the main case study, and shows what a solid web content strategy can return in terms of rankings in search. Using publicly-available data and figures, I showcase what this approach has actually done for Cloudflare.

There’s a lot to unpack and analyze here, so I’m releasing this case study in a series of posts. The next part explores organic traffic analytics - subscribe to the newsletter to be notified when more parts of this series are published.

Worth noting: beyond using their CDN and other products and services (including DNS), I have no affiliation with Cloudflare. Yet I do have a deep understanding of this market, a decade-long career at the intersections of marketing, development, growth, and software, and I’m passionate about this industry.

Table of Contents:

• Cloudflare’s DNS Content Hub - Part 1: SEO and Keywords
  • Notes about the data and methods used in case study series
  • Where this DNS content stands in search rankings
    • Rich results and search enhancements
  • On-page markup, i18n, and structured data findings
• Next up: Cloudflare’s DNS Content Hub - Part 2: Organic Traffic

Cloudflare’s DNS Content Hub - Part 1: SEO and Keywords

Throughout this article we’ll be looking at Cloudflare’s DNS learning center pages (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/), including subsequent pages within this subdirectory (32 pages indexed in search as of April 2020). The entire learning center collection of content (/learning/), grouped into categories like SSL, CDNs, and more, is performing very well in search. For this case study, I wanted to zero-in on one section: the DNS content that collectively ranks for more keywords than most blogs, and does so within a relatively small span of well-crafted and thought-out webpages.

What does this mean in terms of search rankings for these DNS pages?

Looking ahead into the next part in this series a bit - from publicly-available data, we can see these pages account for xx% percentages of the entirety of total site-wide traffic from organic channels (search engines).

I go in-depth about keywords, positions in search, and much more, below.

First: Cloud who?

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American web-infrastructure and website-security company, providing content-delivery-network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain-name-server services (source).

Again, Cloudflare isn’t a client of mine (I help organizations optimize and grow their web traffic and refine their content strategies) and I have no affiliation with them. I highly value research and learning and wrote this series to provide inspiration and insight into the potential outcomes of a thought-out content marketing and web strategy. I’ve worked on and continue to optimize a variety of web-based catalogs and content hubs myself, yet chose to write about one that I have no hand in beyond this case study analysis.

Domain Name System (DNS) is a core part of Cloudflare’s business - they offer a DNS infrastructure with built-in DDoS mitigation that’s used by customers like Crunchbase, Discord, Marketo, and Zendesk. From an internal case study with DigitalOcean (DO), showcasing how DO answers 10,000 DNS queries every second on Cloudflare’s DNS platform, an engineer attests:

“Cloudflare’s DNS Firewall is exactly what we needed to protect our DNS infrastructure. It is the leading company working in the DNS and web DDoS mitigation space.” - Sam Kottler Platform Engineer, DigitalOcean

This DNS resolver’s page is a great example of product marketing - this page owns top positions in search for both branded and non-branded queries relating to “1.1.1.1”. As well, webpages living under the DNS glossary subdirectory (/learning/dns/glossary/) accounts for a large majority of the ranked content. Glossary content is a fantastic strategy as it both educates current and new customers and facilitates more discovery/awareness via showing up in searches of context keywords relating to the main pillar.

Their content ranking so well in search undoubtedly means more signups and more revenue for the business.

Notes about the data and methods used in case study series

Before we dig in, I’m utilizing and sharing screenshots from industry tools like SEMrush - specifically sourcing data from SEMrush Research dashboard. This dashboard shows publicly available data based off of their database that consolidates information from a variety of sources across the web.

Within SEMrush, data can be filtered into views by country, by user-agents (devices like Desktop or Mobile), by date, and on. Here’s how I average keyword- and traffic-based stats within these filtered views, for figures discussed throughout this series.

By country: Top countries visiting www.cloudflare.com:

Traffic to Cloudflare’s domain by country (via SEMrush, Alexa Internet, SimilarWeb, and more):

1. United States (accounting for ~40-50% of total monthly traffic)
2. India (~5-10%)
3. United Kingdom (~3-6%)
4. Canada (~2-5%)

[China is also in the top (~18-22%), yet CN country data is not available in SEMrush]

• Using United States data as a main source of truth, while including:
• Averages from the top 3 countries outside of US visiting Cloudflare’s domain
  • India, United Kingdom, and Canada

Method/formula: US data sum + average of IN, UK, and CAN = value. This formula allows for a more manageable discussion and shows data from countries with majority viewership. I’ll reference more of the formulas used, throughout.

I also utilized other tools like Moz for cross-referencing/double-checking stats, and of course inspected things directly in Google SERPs via “site:” searches, as well as on-page markup inspection in Chrome dev tools, etc.

Now, let’s dig into some data.

Where this DNS content stands in search rankings

So, how do these DNS-focused webpages do in terms of search rankings and positions?

Looking at the subdirectory that houses all of this content (www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/) - April 2020:

• Collectively ranks for 7,800 keywords
• Ranking for keywords with monthly search volume ranging between 1K-1.4M+
• Of the 7,800 - 658 keywords rank in the Top 3 results in organic search
  • 1,594 keywords ranking somewhere on page 1 results

Impressive, right? What could these type of rankings mean for your or your client’s businesses?

Keywords (kws) ranking stats method:

Cloudflare’s DNS content hub subdirectory ranks for 6,500 kws in US (pictured above), while also ranking for 1,450 in IN, 1,350 in UK, and 1,100 in CAN (pictured below). These figures include kws this content ranks for within Google’s top 100 organic results.

India

United Kingdom

Canada

Screenshots from SEMrush organic dashboards.

Total keywords:

• US kws ranking: 6,500 +
• IN, UK, CAN average: 1,300
  • Cloudflare’s DNS content ranks for 7,800 keywords

Keywords in Top 3:

• US kws in top 3 organic results: 528 +
• IN (150), UK (137), CAN (103) average: 130
  • Cloudflare’s DNS content ranks for 658 keywords in Top 3

Keywords on page 1:

• US kws in top 3: 528 + keywords in 4-10: 782 = 1,310
• IN (320), UK (297), CAN (235) average: 284
  • Cloudflare’s DNS content ranks for 1,594 keywords in on page 1

Again, I’m using the method outlined above, yet they undoubtedly rank for more across other countries and locales.

Rich results and search enhancements

These DNS pages hold a variety of rich results and search enhancement features like featured snippets within results on Google. Meaning that beyond ranking organic results position 1 (regular blue link listings) for hundreds of highly competitive, highly searched terms, some pages from Cloudflare rank for the dubbed “position zero” and have other enhancements, too.

• Query: DNS - 74K US searches/month (1.4M global) - difficulty 80/100 (very hard)
• Organic no. 1: What Is DNS? | How DNS Works | Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-dns/)
• Feature: Site links - inline results to other pages and anchored headings within the subdirectory:

Desktop

Mobile

• Query: DNS name - 1.3K US searches/month (4K global) - difficulty 82/100 (very hard)
• Position 0 (featured snippet): What Is DNS? | How DNS Works | Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-dns/)
• Feature: Featured snippets - featured results that showcase imagery, expanded descriptions, and other visual highlights:

Desktop

Mobile (shifts to position 1 organic)

These examples are just two queries of the many that this content hub and subdirectory holds rich results and search engine results page (SERP) features for. They also rank for a variety of other terms with features including Knowledge Panel inclusion, People also ask, FAQ, Image pack, Video carousel, and more.

Beyond these results, and as pictured in the SEMrush organic research screenshot above, most terms that this content ranks for within the top 3 organic results (and page 1 and beyond) have consistently high monthly search volume.

The top 10 organic keywords bringing in the most traffic here average 25,000 monthly searches. Multiply that average search volume of the top 10 keywords to see that those keywords alone give this domain 2.5M impressions per month. I go into impressions, click-through rates, and more in future parts of the series.

On-page markup, i18n, and structured data findings

From both inspecting the on-page markup and other elements like the sitemap, here are a few takeaways.

• They’re keeping this content up-to-date - it wasn’t a set it and forget it project - kudos to their approach! This content hub was first-published late 2017/early 2018, and in looking at the sitemap, we can see signals like showing updates to the content as recent as November of 2019.

• They may be running tests and experiments on these webpages. Inspecting the page markup in dev tools shows that Google Optimize is implemented via Tag Manager, signaling they’re possibly running A/B and/or CRO tests on this content hub. Optimize scripts are called throughout a large majority of Cloudflare’s marketing site, so whether or not they’re running tests on this content, experimentation is a strategy that I continually advocate for. I’m seeing a handful of lead gen and other possible tests they should consider running.

• Opportunities:

Some on-page and other international SEO markup optimizations could be had. Given their global traffic, among other factors, they have started focusing efforts on internationalization and localization of their content, including <link rel="alternate" hreflang=""> attributes (missing self-referencing hreflang) at the root, yet none in this learning center. Also, there is no inclusion of <xhtml:link> elements with hreflang in the sitemaps. So, they do have some optimization opportunities in way of i18n.

homepage with rel="alternate" hreflang

de (German) translation, yet no hreflang

Looking at the structured data, their Article Schema implementation has some inline errors. Inspecting further reveals that there’s optimizations to be had that could possibly make them eligible for even more, rich results and features in search (Google structured data testing tool result).

Overall, their learning center content has been and continues to be a very solid strategy for them that they’ll see returns on investment from for years to come. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed analyzing this content hub.

Next up: Cloudflare’s DNS Content Hub - Part 2: Organic Traffic

I choose to analyze Cloudflare’s DNS pages as they’re a great example of authority, reputation, and credibility building through content. This hub shares their thought leadership, and because I can’t resist adding this pun, domain expertise.

Naturally, I’ve conducted more organic research and explored this content hub much further, outlining what kind of actual traffic their ranking for these keywords bring in on a monthly basis. Traffic analytics is the core focus of the second part of this series. Beyond that, other future parts explore even more data from my analysis of this Cloudflare content hub - including backlink analysis, information architecture and internal linking, and more.

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Cloudflare’s DNS Content Hub Case Study - Pt. 2: Traffic - Teaser: nearly 50% of the 74,000 people searching “dns” in Google, each month, end up clicking on Cloudflare’s result. One keyword, one landing page - bringing in 34,780 organic visitors to the site per month, 104,340 per quarter, and 417,360 per year.

Day in the Life of a Remote Worker: Scott Mathson

Justine Shu, WeWorkRemotely / September 5, 2019

This spotlight illustrates how each remote worker finds freedom and productivity in their everyday life, in their unique way. Get inspired and see how you can improve your workspace, workflow, and work/life balance.

Name: Scott Mathson

Current Job: Senior Web Strategy & SEO Manager at Auth0

Current Location: Missoula, Montana, USA

Current Computer: 15” MacBook Pro

Current mobile devices: iPhone 6

What does your typical workday look like?

• 7-8:00a - Enjoy the morning with my wife and our pets. Feed the animals (and sometimes ourselves, though I’m not much of a breakfast person), go outside and enjoy morning coffee, taking in the surrounding mountain views. I wake slowly and take my time in the mornings, do a bit of journaling, check-in on phone notifications, and go over the day’s calendar events.

• 8-9:00a - Go into home office and check-in on more notifications, catching-up on Slack messages, planning for the day and accepting/scheduling following days’ meetings. Go through email inbox, briefly responding to, cleaning, deleting, and reading through a variety of emails, including a handful of newsletters that I enjoy following. Occasionally I’ll work mornings from my local coworking space or coffee shops, too.

• 9-11:00a - Morning time is usually my most productive time period. Mornings are my head’s down, hands-on contribution time, often spent reviewing pull requests for new content/webpages/features/bug fixes and editing and writing (copy, code, and content).

• 1-1:00p - Mid-morning into early afternoon is typically when I’ll go into meetings, whether group Zoom calls, recurring meetings, 1-on-1’s, or otherwise. During this time, I check back in on my inboxes and notifications, updating folks and receiving updates from folks on statuses of latest initiatives, campaigns, and a variety of web projects.

• 1-3:00p - I create afternoon, recurring/ongoing calendar time-slots to be dedicated to checking in on reports for current projects, tests and experiments running, latest campaigns, and more. I’ll go over automated reports, build-out manual reports, review web property analytics, and other numbers. I take time for lunch sometime within this afternoon block.

  I set ongoing blocks of time within afternoons to align how current OKRs/KPIs are tracking and thinking through the strategy - planning and creating actionable tasks. Documentation is key, especially for remote teams, so I spend afternoons starting, contributing to, and editing many documents, task/project stories, and more. At Auth0 we primarily work within G-Suite (Docs, Sheets, etc.), GitHub (Issues, Pull Requests, etc.), and Atlassian (Confluence, JIRA, Trello, etc.).

• 3-6:00p - This block of time is also prime for 1-on-1 meetings, video syncs, and other meetings. If not in calls/meetings, or discussing things via Slack, I’ll revisit pull requests, issues, and initiatives I’m overseeing, contributing to, or having discussions in, and focus on reviewing, suggesting, and making code changes in a variety of repositories. Every day is unique and different, yet this is a good general overview of my schedule.

• 6:00p+ - Time with my wife enjoying things like cooking together, house projects, watching movies/shows, going to concerts, art shows, walking our puppy, and more. As well, I’m often attending meetups, doing agency/studio contract work (Mathson Design Co.), side project work, and some late meetings and chatting/planning.

Describe your workspace setup:

Switching to a standing desk (Autonomous.ai referral link to save on a desk) has been amazing, ergonomically. I aim to stand more than 50% of the time throughout a day. I work on a 15” MacBook Pro, which sits on a sticker-covered laptop stand, and hooks into a 23.5” HP external monitor. Atom text editor, Terminal, GitHub Desktop, and other coding-related software usually stays on the left external monitor, and I keep browser with Documents, Gmail, Analytics, Slack, Spotify, and more open on the MacBook.

[Second image of Scott at Missoula’s C3 Coworking Space did not originally appear on weworkremotely.com]

What do you listen to while you work?

Bon Iver and other laid-back music. Spotify’s Discover playlist algorithms really know me. As well, I am a big podcast fan (and podcaster, myself) and listen to a lot of podcasts. I give episodes a lot of focus, so listening to podcasts lends itself to certain tasks - I consume podcasts while doing dishes, on breaks, when driving, and other similar times.

Aside from your phone and computer, name a gadget you can’t live without in your workspace:

Wireless keyboard and mouse. As I shared above, I position my laptop on a stand, so without this wireless hardware, I’d be typing/scrolling at a pretty non-ergonomic ~45-degree angle. Pieces of hardware like external keyboards deserve attention. Though I’ve used mechanical keys in the past, I’m currently enjoying using Apple’s Magic keyboard and mouse.

Thanks again to Justine Shu and the rest of the crew at WeWorkRemotely. They have an awesome Slack community of remote workers from around the globe - be sure to check it out. If you enjoyed this interview, let me know on Twitter.

Coneboy, their cheerful, Distrokid-eque mascot, is seen on apparel like hats, buttons, and tees, in film festivals and other event’s sponsors lineups, on their ice cream trucks, in grocery store ice cream aisles, and many other locations.

Handcrafted, small-batch ice cream served from their original location, is within walking distance of an evening along a river’s edge in downtown Missoula. People go to Big Dipper for an experience. The entire brand, its products, storefront design, the happy team, upbeat music, involvement in community, and their integrity continue to shape this experience.

This Big Dipper experience is intentional - their brand, the product, the overall vibe is intentional. I am fascinated by and deeply admire small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) like Big Dipper who focus on creating experiences around consistency, from product to service to packaging - all consistent. Businesses who exist to wholly serve their friends, family, and their local communities. I am seeing this happening more among SMBs than with large tech organizations.

What if more tech startups started thinking like this?

They’re continually experimenting with new and interesting, locally-inspired flavors, partnering with area chefs, breweries, coffee roasters, and other businesses. Standing in (the always long) line at the flagship Higgins Ave. storefront, your eyes naturally look to the handwritten seasonal and specialties board. Some flavors stick, some flavors don’t, yet most importantly Big Dipper isn’t afraid to experiment.

Having heard co-owner Charlie Beaton speak at a local, Missoula business event a few years ago, I recall him speaking to the fact that they have never really had 5- or 10-year business plans. Big Dipper has evolved organically, nothing forced. Expansion for them has come in the form of storefront growth, as well as wholesale distribution.

Shortly after this event, they launched a Big Dipper Select line. This evergreen expansion came 21 years into the business and through strategic partnerships they have pursued new opportunities around this like distribution to area stores and restaurants, alongside serving their ice cream to visitors of Montana’s Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks.

The Beatons remain humble, never seeking to be in any spotlight, though folks like Good Morning America, Food and Wine Magazine, and USA Today have all shone a light on their business. Sharing an experience with longtime, loyal customers sitting at a wooden bench outside of their establishments are what continues to bring them joy.

Startups can learn so many brand, marketing, and product lessons from SMBs like Missoula, Montana’s Big Dipper Ice Cream. Stay curious, continue to look outside of your own niche and industries, and be consistent.