Past Newsletters
Reinventing media companies in 2021
Welcome to the 8th and final newsletter for 2020! Thank you for reading. There’s no shortage of colourful commentary on this year – so I’ll skip straight past that. But if there’s one thing I’ve seen from being in the trenches with digital publishers, it’s the importance of agility and running a lean operation. Those…
Read MoreStop focusing (so much) on SEO
While the subject line is a little clickbait-y, there’s an important point I want to make. SEO should be thought of as an acquisition tool; the first step in building your audience. Obviously, SEO is critical to the exposure and growth of media business, so it’s understandable why so many publishers focus on growing traffic…
Read MoreFaster Google Tag Manager – How to reactivate old content – The thriving NYT – No to meetings
Having the fastest website possible should permanently feature on your priority list. It’s on yours, right? Second to ad tech, the biggest culprit causing poor performance are the many javascript trackers and analytics tags you’ll find on most publishing sites. And one of the greatest misconceptions is that moving this code from your website to…
Read MoreAds. They’re complicated.
Hello, and welcome if this is your first time reading. In today’s email I want to talk about ads. If you have no interest in ads or don’t run ads and never will. Feel free to skip this email. In what may seem like a bit of a cop out, I don’t have a single…
Read MoreLast month I wrote about the need for digital publishers and media businesses to get focused on their data game. This reminds me of 2018, when Google set deadlines for creating secure websites. Back then, many publishers were in denial about the implications of this change, and some got left behind. I can see this…
Read MoreAre you sitting on a goldmine of data?
Short answer? Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about the data publishers create. There’s a lot of it, and publishers can collect even more. It’s been said many times: Data is the new gold. My take? There’s no way around it. Publishing businesses of the future will be heavily valued on their ability to manage…
Read MoreFix your category pages for users and SEO
In the last couple months, The Code Company has worked on three fairly large projects that have all involved in-depth SEO analyses by different consultants/agencies. One of the most interesting recommendations they’ve all had in common is their poor use of the category archive pages. As it goes, once you’ve learned something, your frequency bias…
Read MoreWeb stories are coming, with a lot of opportunities
Over the last couple of months I’ve been watching with great interest what Google is doing—when it comes to the development of WordPress plugins—to improve the lives of digital publishers using the most popular CMS on the planet. Last week, during the BigWP event that’s put on by WordPress VIP and Automattic. Paul Bakaus from Google…
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