I’ve been writing for 28 years. These days, I write for fun, not survival, so there may be a little less going on here. Have a look at the 1,000+ posts I wrote on Portent.com
Digital Marketing’s Golden Rule: Build for Bots, Create For Humans
If you want to shut out the noise, stick to one principle: Build for bots, create for humans. Build infrastructure that supports discoverability across all platforms, from social media to search to AI. Create multimodal content that delivers exactly what your human audience needs at just the right time.
Continue readingBuilding A Zero-Code AI SEO Workflow: Reference Materials
Links, the presentation, and some other stuff for folks who attended my talk about AI-powered SEO workflows.
Continue readingUsing AI to generate ALT text for 27,000 images
Writing ALT text sucks. Writing ALT text for 27,000 images is enough to send me right off the Cliffs Of Insanity. I got AI to do the work for me. Here’s how.
Continue readingHow To: Build A Content Audit Assistant With ScreamingFrog and AI
You can’t build an AI content auditor. You can build an AI content audit assistant that analyzes your site’s existing content, traffic data, and crawl data for opportunities. I’ll show you how I do it, from the inputs — ScreamingFrog, Google Analytics, DataForSEO — to the prompts and project.
Continue readingUse AI to Improve Content Audits (not perform them)
General-purpose AI can’t perform content audits. It can, however, improve them. Here’s how.
Continue readingHow to: Compress Images With Squoosh
5 megabyte images kill kittens. And capybara pups. And your users’ will to live.
Fortunately, there’s an easy image compressor: Squoosh.app. The name alone makes it worth a try, right?! You can compress the heck out of utterly bloated image files in a few seconds.
So, I broke my own rule and recorded a Squoosh how-to.
Continue readingAI Is Not Clickless Search
AI is not clickless search. Once you realize that, and the fact that it’s actually a whole separate earned media channel, marketing for AI makes more sense.
Continue readingReturn On Time Invested: Presentation Stuff
The slides and all supporting links, video, and tutorials from my Return On Time Invested presentation. Also includes a nifty Loom video about using Squoosh.app!
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Coax. Persuade. Cajole.
Using Generative AI Right
I used ChatGPT to generate a cycling training plan and got a valuable reminder that generative AI can’t think. But it knows a lot. Getting it to convert that knowledge into something useful takes a little coaxing and persuading. Cajoling, even.
Continue readingPlague Words And Their Alternatives
I won’t bore you with a long post. This is a list of words and phrases you should leave out of your business writing and (most) marketing copy, and a few alternatives (plus snarky remarks).
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