Ok people have been asking me so here's a quick walkthrough showing how to prep your data (e.g. google sheets) ready for publishing (e.g. substack) using Figma!

Thanks to @Kevin_Indig for letting me use his data

tella.video/toms-video-a5nm Some background reading on making your charts look nice - whether it's for Substack or for a board presentation:

newsletter.seomba.com/p/lets-get-rid…

Thesis: I want MORE personal libraries, small collections, indie databases and weird collections on the web.

Frustration: still too damn hard to publish things like this to the web.

More:

tomcritchlow.com/2023/01/27/sma… Publishing "documents" to the web feels relatively well-served but publishing collections and indexes to the web is still hard - we're stick in this uncanny valley of Notion and Airtable and the like.

Where is the tooling for these use cases? How can we enable more weird indexes

What's the best way to build a website as an archive or library?

Planning a new project where I'm going to keep an index of 100s (1000s?) of links to catalog and index a particular topic. Ideally every link will have a stable URL, there will be search etc.

What's the best solution?

What are examples of websites that do this kind of thing well?

Many SEO professionals randomly stumble into SEO as a career path.

SEO attracts the weirdos, misfits and tinkerers.

But because of this, many don’t really do any deliberate career development, trusting to “stumbling into a career”

You can't get a senior role that way though... Here’s a thread about deliberate career development for SEO professionals.

Not just learning how to rank websites, but how to reach senior roles as an SEO professional.

Whether you’re in-house, agency-side or freelancing.

Let’s talk about personal growth.

Most agencies suck at client communication.

If you work at an agency, it’s YOUR job to ensure that the work you’re doing is landing the right way with your client.

Here’s how: Firstly, client management matters. Good client relationships allow you to:

✅ Deliver more impactful work to your clients

✅ Retain and upsell clients over longer periods of time

✅ Reduce your anxiety and stress

✅ Build more resilient relationships

"Cognizance of and harnessing the way that one’s vibe impacts the world is a way to exercise agency."

This essay is important - I believe we're entering an era of vibes as the dominant cultural force.

appliedarts.mirror.xyz/Cq5e2QGJl6zoCG… A universal theory of vibes embraces:

Vibes flatten history - they reject history and time as a guiding principle to only exist in the now

Vibes are reflexive - they cannot exist without their counter-vibe

Vibes are meaning 2.0 - they guide social movements in new ways

Here's a new thing I built! It's an experiment, a sketch of an idea in code called:

⚡Electric Tables

It's an experiment in structured data and treating the web as a texture...

tomcritchlow.com/2022/01/26/ele… I find myself often trying to assemble a list of URLs to compare. Things like:

- gift shopping
- trip planning
- saving media (books, music etc)

I want them to have structured data, but putting them into a spreadsheet manually is time consuming and clunky.....

How do you navigate a career when you don't know who you want to be or where you want to go?

I believe networked writing (aka blogging) is a potential way through:

seomba.substack.com/p/navigating-a… Writing is a form of "manifesting lily pads" as my friend Brian puts it:

https://twitter.com/itsbdell/status/1418241799211167751?t=qrujOy433XvoDzOMmah3nw&s=19

New Quotebacks version is live in the Chrome store with a few updates: tomcritchlow.com/2022/01/24/quo… Most notably - it now saves the highlighted quote AND the full article text so it archives the full article for you.

See the new "click me for full article view" button:

I've had a ton of fun and learned so much building the SEO MBA this year.

Here's a thread of reflections, notes and learnings from the journey so far. I did a ton of hiking with my family in 2020, with lots of creative time for thinking and reflecting.

I was mulling new projects and considering new ideas, but it wasn't until Dec 14th 2020 when all the pieces fell into place.

You can literally see the OMG in my notes!

Twitter threads have some amazing magic - historians sharing the history of supply chains, comedians sharing rants, insiders sharing details behind the scenes - can you imagine if twitter had a "top threads" explorer? It would be so much more interesting than whatever "trending topics" is

I've had a bunch of friends asking for career advice recently and my advise is always some version of the same message:

Don't treat your career options as a deterministic path from A -> B It's a category error to think that you can equate your current identity and label with a future identity and label.

Even a known label like "vp marketing" is a wildly different situation and reality depending on company, size, industry etc.

Just a really great piece from @sariazout on the coming era of community knowledge networks: sariazout.substack.com/p/check-your-p… What will this future look like?

Discord x Arena?
Slack x Roam?
Blogs x Wikis?

Some generalizations from my time indie consulting:

- most companies do way too little user research and know almost nothing about their users

- most companies have almost zero conception of what "brand" actually means

- most companies have too many KPIs and awful dashboards Continued:

- most companies talk a good game about innovation but have explicit structures in place to prevent rapid change

- most execs, despite being senior are starved for autonomy (vp layer gets hella crowded)

- most employees have zero clue what the companies strategy is

Mulling on the concept of "long conferences" via @genmon interconnected.org/home/2020/05/2… and wondering about intersections with open/cross domain blogchains Like - what if we all agreed to blog a topic together for a month? That feels.... flat. But maybe some nice naming and a nice website would help?

Trying to write a blog post about the challenges of remote-consulting. It's been a real challenge for me - for a few specific reasons. Firstly - the foundation of *strategic* work is doing work "in context". I talk about that in this piece: tomcritchlow.com/2019/04/04/the…

Had a few Qs recently from folks on how to find clients as a freelancer or independent. Sure - the advice to "blog" or "start a newsletter" is technically good advice but it's not very helpful.

Here's a thread on some tips and advice that might help 👇 For context - everyone's experience is difference - but I'm an independent consultant and ~60% of my all time revenue comes from just four people....!

Not four *clients* but four individuals that I know - that refer the majority of my business.