Christmas #AmA - Ask me anything today ⤵️
Topics I frequently talk about:
- Running agencies
- Recurring service revenue (coined WordPress retainers in 2015)
- WordPress for the enterprise
- RevOps engineering
- Training
- AI for enterprise
- Sofia tech scene
- PE services
This is one of the changes shaping out my Q1 roadmap and 2025 goals - whereas organic search is an afterthought at best. I posted the longer story in my newsletter (published here yesterday + last Wednesday on beehiiv).
I've been observing this trend since the HCU update in 2023 kicked in, and it became more apparent after the March and May updates last year. We used to target keyword growth in order to expand content pillars and clusters. Nowadays, it's irrelevant or not delivering traffic as a result.
The snippets don't tell the full story of course and provide limited context. But that's what Google features nowadays.
The second row is my own blog. The traffic over the past 2 weeks is the lowest in SIX YEARS. Yet keywords have been climbing up.
Many of these keywords are now ranking in featured snippets or AI overviews or any other boxes. People don't click on links as they trust excerpts.
I noticed no direct correlation between organic keywords and organic traffic in most cases.
Semrush is estimating traffic without real data, but even when it's off, the actual results in this report are broadly the same (verified manually in GSC and Google Analytics).
They don't hold strategic control over everything, though. I'm sure the infrastructure doesn't run most of their load balancing principles. Sam and team take tons of independent decisions.
Haven't seen anything btw - any updates?
Aristotle's take on "how much change constitutes turning into a new vehicle".
I keep thinking about incremental improvements vs. turning a new page often.
Potterverse in MBTI.
Who's missing?
📝 I'm running a 25% discount for the Strategic Growth Circle program until the end of the year - both for my SMB ($100k - $500k) and SME ($3M+) cohorts.
20+ members joined in the last few weeks.
Here's a breakdown of the program.
asyncadvisor.com/strategic-gr...
Seeing billionaires who founded Fortune 500 companies sweating hard on-site in December was the norm this year, not an exception.
So global calibration is still undergoing.
Scale-ups were having it easier between 2016 and 2022, but the economic turmoil + the AI disruption both led to groundbreaking changes, rebooting original founders and sending them back to product-market fit.
While 9 to 5 folks get some days off, founders and executives have to balance out with wrapping up the calendar year, setting targets for the new one, covering for missing folks, and allocating clarity time.
- Launching 3 new agency/consultancy sites
- Starting new email campaigns for brand new offers
- Shaping out new niche vertical solutions
The last weeks of the year are busy for entrepreneurs.
- Shipping gift baskets to dozens of clients
- Refining Google SEM campaigns for January
- Budget planning for 2025 (profit targets for the next 12 months)
- Customer acquisition targets per retainer plan
My Strategic Growth Circle community clients this week:🧵
Done, the form allowed for 1 site only though
The header button isn't working (I missed the previous memo during the holidays)
I'd test the 2 sites, can you do with just two links to the sites and an email? The team is off until the end of the year for the holidays and I don't want to fill out long forms etc
What about links to service sites and other directories, not just SaaS?
I use listingbott.com for some of mine (and have a discount), how much is yours?
I dreamed about a continued Slack conversation with a SGC member last night after 4 hours of Slack responses on Monday, catching up with a week of messages.
These P&Ls and RACIs have been imprinted enough to keep crunching numbers while I sleep!
I broke GPT4o again.
We don't need endless innovation in LLMs; fixing degraded performance and wasting time on re-prompting is good enough.
(same answer 5 times in a row)
Posted the 4,700 LinkedIn newsletter blast, replied to some leads and former partners, looking into sprint planning for next week.
Be out for shopping and a brother in law b-day for a few hours, then back to closing the year strong.
What does your weekend look like? Drop a win in the comments.
I don't do speculative currencies, but it's an indicator that folks have spare cash to invest in that, too.
In down times, crypto is going down when fear and savings matter more than gambling on the blockchain
That's what we're poised to do :)
The circle is NOT a program that's profitable for me, but I care enough about motivated entrepreneurs trying to deliver quality solutions and go above and beyond. We're surrounded by mediocrity and slack and I'd rather support founders and executives who want to make a difference.
But the reality is - commodity vendors are a dime a dozen. Niching down is the only way out unless you're a $20M+ ARR agency. 📈
---
I responded to questions until 3am last night and spent 90 minutes recording Looms today. 🕒
5. Fear of niching down
My personal favorite (my own nemesis) is going niche to generate effective results.
When engineers, marketers, designers can virtually serve almost every business size, technical stack, and industry, hypothetically saying "no" to 95% of all businesses sounds crazy.
