In a pottery class experiment Group A set out to make a flawless pot within a span of 30 days whereas Group B decided to craft one pot each day. Interestingly the impressive pots emerged from Group B, who managed to create 30 pots in as many days. This goes to show that when it comes to achieving success, continuous practice and repetition play a role, in ensuring quality. Embracing the process of iteration helps individuals overcome the fear of imperfection and find enjoyment in their work compared to being fixated on achieving perfection.

“Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward”. “Failing forward” is all about iteration, about risking failure (with a small and controlled scope of impact) in order to eventually achieve success.

1. Migrate a website in under 2 minutes
2. When more is less
3. Optimization
4. Always do your best
5. The key for achieving success

Migrate a website in under 2 minutes

I have an agency plan with WPEngine (I don’t pay for it) and yesterday, I decided to switch a site to production.

Everything finished in less than 2 minutes:
- backup on WPEngine with All-in-One WP Migration
- created a new website in Gridpane, imported the backup
- sudo nano /private/etc/hosts and point the domain to the Gridpane’s server IP
- remove the WPEngine auto-updater plugin
- login with SSO from Gridpane’s panel, change the admin password
- save the permalinks.

That’s it, that’s all.

When more is less

Feeling good about the whole process, I decided to do the same with my sister’s website, which is beautiful but a pain to use.

It was hosted on a 8cpu server with 16GB memory from PlanetHoster, that for an unexperienced eye, looked good. The site was loading in around 12s
Or maybe I should say that it was waiting 12s before loading 😂

And that’s when more specs and features offer less than a small(er) High Frequency Vultr VPS. Even 1Gb or 2 Gb are enough.

I moved the domain to Cloudflare and then I did the backup with the same All-in-One WP Migration. But then surprise … the backup had 1.3GB.

For a 7 pages brochure website this “performance“ is hard to beat.

Problem was that All-in-One WP Migration is free for backups under 500MB.

Normally, at this point, my choices were Duplicator and UpdraftPlus, but because WPVivid collected dust for too much time, I decided to try it.

I wasn’t wrong. Everything went smooth, I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to enable the incremental backup with BlakeBlaze. WPVivid also has an Image Optimization section, that’s doing WebP conversion, CDN integration and image optimization on the fly.

Optimization

The speed got better - around 3-4s (largest contentful paint) but the feel and speed was actually very good. Anyway, for an Nginx/Redis stack, this was unacceptable and I start looking around to catch the problem.

I did the test in Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Tools, I couldn’t believe my eyes: the site homepage size was 12MB ! One image was 6MB 😅

The other thing was that in viewports of 480px the site was loading 3000px images.

I fixed the size using Pixelmator and from a 6MB image I end up with a 60K WebP image 🤩
Then I replaced the images in place using WP Media Folder.

At this point I decided to install Super Page Cache for Cloudflare1 and Optimole2.

One last test and the site was finally loading under 800ms.

Always do your best

We can’t speak about this without mentioning “The Four Agreements“ from Don Miguel Ruiz and i strongly recommend you to read or listen to it.

I see this kind of mistakes very often:
- people trying to save money by painting themselves - that’s how I ended up few years ago, painting one room for a whole week 🤣🤣🤣
- asking amateur friends and family to do professional jobs

Not only we can damage our image, because we end up with a subpar product but when we buy cheap, we end up paying twice (because will have to buy again the right thing). Plus, we are loosing way more time, because we have to redo it.

While doing the second website transfer, I couldn’t stop thinking how instead of a 2m job, I ended up working for around 2 - 3 hours.
And I lost 2 - 3 hours because is way harder to come after someone did a bad job - you have to see what the heck is happening, to reverse engineer the problems and that often times is 2 - 3 times more time consuming that doing the job right from the beginning.

What businesses do not realize is the missing potential. Many are patting themselves on the back for doing $5M, without realizing that they could do $20M if they will do their best.

You need professionals, know when you have to do a step back and let them do the job.

Even today it happen to see the president of a company getting involved and taking decisions in place of his professional team and the hilarious point in this is that he actually hired them because they are professionals, so he should listen to them.

The key for achieving success

The key for success is delegation.

Delegation is indeed a powerful tool for achieving success. By entrusting tasks to capable individuals, leaders can focus on strategic decision-making and higher-level responsibilities.

1. Inbox Wizardry recap
2. Top choices for Email marketing
3. Transactional emails
4. Email API providers
5. BigMailer Pricing
6. Top benefits of using BigMailer
7. Multi-brand management and granular options
8. Optimize engagement with geo-tracking
9. Email Marketing best practices

Inbox wizardry, emails like a pro recap

In our first part, we learned how to setup our email. Now let’s start using it 🤩

If you already implemented SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI, you can just read the warm-up, validation and technicalities sections.

Sending cold emails without email warm up will lead to spam sooner or later.

On the other hand, the higher your email engagement, the more likely you are to avoid spam filters and land in the inbox.

Can we correlate sales with this? Yes!
Without email warm up -> low engagement rate -> lower sender reputation -> lower email deliverability -> lower open rates › lower reply rates › fewer sales

With email warm up -> higher engagement rates -> higher sender reputation -> higher email deliverability -> higher reply rates -> higher open rates; higher reply rates; > more sales

ISP’s (internet service providers) evaluates recipient engagement in understanding whether your messages are wanted or unwanted. ISP’s monitor signals such as opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam complaints, among other metrics.

Positive signals might be forwarded messages, messages that were replied to, messages that were opened, messages that were clicked, and more. The number of emails you send in a limited time frame may also impact your engagement rate. Negative signals include ignored messages, messages deleted without being opened, and messages that a user has flagged as spam.

Spam complaints are a significant negative signal. Even a small percentage of spam complaints can lead to poor deliverability. For example, a 0.2 percent rate of spam complaints is seen as high, so make sure your emails are professional and that you give your subscribers an easy way of unsubscribing so that they won’t flag your emails as spam.

A hard bounce occurs when you try to send an email to an invalid email address. If you have a high bounce rate, ISP’s get the signal that your mailing list isn’t clean, which detracts from your sender reputation.

Soft bounces can occur when a recipient’s email inbox is full, or when ISP’s flag spikes in your email volume.

Transactional vs marketing: transactional emails convey information such as order confirmations, receipts, password resets, order cancellations, etc. Marketing messages are promotional in nature in that their purpose is to get a consumer to buy your product or service. It’s considered best practice to separate out your marketing and transactional messages by sending them with different dedicated IP and subdomain combinations.

There are over 590 ESP listed on G2 so choosing the right one is not an easy task.

We have 3 main pricing models: Subscriptions based on number of contacts, Pay-as-you go plans or a combination of these two.

One factor that we need to be aware of is pricing tiers. When our list experiences rapid growth, which is common for blogs or startups, it’s essential to also take future pricing into account.

Top choices for Email marketing

Small businesses might go for MailChimp, VerticalResponse, Constant Contact.
Enterprises to InfusionSoft, HubSpot;
Bloggers might use ConvertKit, low cost transactional email (SendGrid and MailGun) and platforms that integrate with 3rd party services (BigMailer and Sendy) behind the scenes.

My setup is axed in general around Bigmailer.io or FluentCRM from WpManageNinja, from which I also use FluentSMTP and FluentForms.

What other options? EmailOctopus, with a free tier up to 2500 subs and Sendy, which is a one time $69 but you need to host it.

Transactional emails

FluentSMTP plugin is 100% free and open source that they will never monetize, being part of their “Five for the Future” initiative by WordPress foundation, which encourages organizations to contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development.

Email API providers

You can do API integration with SendGrid, Amazon SES, Mailgun etc

If your website is sending less than 100 emails per day, go with Sendgrid and don’t forget to setup the Sender Authentication (Domain Authentication, Sender Verification and Link branding) so you send everything under your own domain.

If you use Mailgun: you receive 1,000 free messages per month. If you send over this amount, additional messages are charged at a rate of $1.00/1,000 messages.

If you need more, go for Amazon, who’s charging email messages at $0.10 per 1,000.

I tend to use Sendgrid for site transactional emails and Amazon SES for Newsletter campaigns.

BigMailer Pricing

BigMailer offers unlimited brand management, web forms, templates, and image hosting on all its plans. 

It also has a generous free plan on which you can upload up to 1000 contacts, and connect to Amazon SES for sending emails. BigMailer’s paid plans offer 2 options:

1. Connect your own Amazon SES account – $10/month for every 10,000 contacts you upload.

2. Send via BigMailer (no SES) – $20/month for every 10,000 contacts with x10/month sending credits included.

Before starting out, you need to setup your Amazon SES identity.

Top benefits of using BigMailer

All accounts start on the Startup plan with BigMailer logo in email footer and unsubscribe page. Amazon SES use at extra cost of $0.1 per 1000 emails sent.

*Additional sending at $0.4 per 1000 emails sent.

Automatic handling of bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes
Support for bulk + auto/drip + transactional email campaigns
Email campaign engagement tracking and reporting
Powerful segmentation and location-based targeting
Drag-and-drop and HTML template editors, templates library

What I also like about Bigmailer is that their template builder is in fact the same as the one from Beefree.io. Their templates are looking very nice!

Multi-brand management and granular options

BigMailer’s built-in brand management allows you to manage multiple projects, websites, or micro-sites while still having only one account for logging in.

You can also create a fully branded and customizable unsubscribe page with preferences and your logo. You can also add a custom tracking domain to use for serving of the unsubscribe page and link tracking in your emails. Some platforms refer to this as white labeling, since the email recipient can’t easily identify the platform used to send the email. 

Optimize engagement with geo-tracking

When collecting emails with BigMailer’s webforms, they automatically capture the location (country, city, and latitude/longtitude) of the subscriber. This is done without saving the IP (the IP is detected, converted, and discarded), so you can stay compliant no matter where people are subscribing from.

You can then use the location data in BigMailer to optimize engagement rates and conversions by either a) sending emails to your contacts at the precise time they are most likely to check their email, and b) sending geo-targeted campaigns that automatically adjust offers or prices based on the recipient’s location.

Email Marketing best practices

If you are sending e-blasts in Canada, try to do your newsletter multilingual.
If you can’t do them multilingual, collect the subscriber preferred language thru the subscription form, then send a targeted newsletter for each language.

If you work in a B2B sector and the emails are in-house accounts or if those emails are actual clients, follow up the email openings with phone calls, while the interest is there. You can use Salesflare for this.

After three days, resend the same newsletter campaign to the accounts/emails who did not open the first campaign - they overlooked opening the email or they simply miss it.

Test your email before sending it - check the warm-up section from our previous article.

Make an habit out of it, always show up and respect their time - try to send a valuable newsletter - don’t do it just to check out an activity.

Keep your list clean and do this email list hygiene at least once a month: Clearout ($7/1000), Mailercheck ($10/1000), Emaillistverify ($4/1000 emails)

Iron triangle
An offer he can’t refuse

We want to attract more clients and what better way to do this but to give them some credit? Some free time or money, right?

What happens often times is that we give away some credit, they use it then they vanish and all we have left is a big churn rate (rate at which customers stop doing business with an entity).

So then how do we attract the right clients?

Well, if we have monthly plans, we can give away 2 months and that’s a common approach: get 2 months free when you pay for a whole year. This way we give them the credit but we secure the transaction - we make sure that we have their business for the year.

How can we adapt something like this for a credit system approach, if we use a Pay-as-you-go or a prepaid system?

We need a Bonus Spending Strategy

Here’s a simple way to do it: in order to ensure that you give away money to the right clientele, we have to remember the iron triangle: money, time, quality.

Usually, this triangle is saying this:

• if you want to keep the quality but save time, you need to increase the money - that’s why you pay more if you are in a rush 😂

• if you want to keep the quality but save money, you need to give up time - that’s why you pay less when you don’t mind to wait 😉

In our case, we will keep the quality constant, since our service quality is the same. So let’s reverse engineer this idea 🤯

If our quality is constant and we want to give away a big amount of money … we need to shorten the time, right?

Let’s say we want to catch some clients that will spend $300 per month.

Make him an offer he can't refuse

A 2 months free credit will suffice and our offer will sound like this:

“Get $600 dollars if you spend $600 in less than 2 months”.

By placing this time restrain on our offer, only the right clients will pick up on the offer, since makes no sense for the general public to pick on this offer since they won’t afford to keep up with the spending.
Maybe they won’t even considering spending this much for that service.

Anyway, that’s how we can safeguard our money.

Email Service Provider (ESP)
Authentication - Validation - Protection
Brand Indicators for Message Identification
Implement BIMI for Free
Warm-up
Validation
Technicalities

Choose your Email Service Provider

A professional email address helps keep your brand consistent across all communication channels. When customers see the same domain in your emails, website, and social media, it strengthens your brand identity and helps build brand recognition. For the email address From Name, you can choose something like “Your Name” or “Your Name from Company”.

You can do a parallel between buying an email and buying a house, where you will have to share the same roads with your neighbors and you are under the same city rules as everybody else. We will speak about those factors in the Email Alchemy: Mastering Effective Email Marketing article.

These are the providers from which I usually buy emails: ZohoMail ($60/year), MxRoute (unlimited emails for $129 Lifetime), Microsoft ($100/year) or Google ($100/year) and as long as you take in consideration this article, you can choose whatever ESP you like.

Having the email address with one of these providers, simplifies the process of configuring and handling essential email authentication protocols such as DKIM, SPF, DMARC and BIMI. These methods play a crucial role in preventing email spoofing and phishing attacks, ultimately enhancing your brand credibility and ensuring successful email delivery.

When setting up the address, always choose TLS (Transport Layer Security) over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).

Authentication - Validation - Protection

When combined, SPF1, DKIM2 and DMARC3 serve as crucial email authentication methods. Their collective use provides robust protection against spammers, phishers, and unauthorized parties attempting to send emails on behalf of domains they do not legitimately own.

The email authentication system is a set of techniques used to verify that an email is genuinely sent by the person or organization it claims to be from. It helps prevent spam, phishing attempts, and other malicious activities that could damage your reputation or the trust recipients have in your emails.

In practice, all this is very simple and you just need some DNS records.
Speaking about DNS records, wherever you have your domain registered or your site hosted, move your DNS to Cloudflare.

I will give you some resources that you can use in order to create and verify these records or you can use the guide from your email provider: EasyDMARC or Dmarcly.
You can also use Cloudflare DMARC management, which is surprisingly is free - usually, DMARC management solutions are not free.

Do them in the following order:
1. SPF record generator → SPF record checker
2. DKIM record generator → DKIM record checker
3. DMARC record generator → DMARC record checker
4. BIMI record generator → BIMI record checker

While doing SPF records, you can use ~all for SOFTFAIL, a debugging aid between NEUTRAL and FAIL. Typically, messages that return a SOFTFAIL are accepted but tagged; then you should move to -all for FAIL, (SPF check fails).
Unless you use -all, your email is not protected.
You need to stay under 10 SPF records. If the number goes beyond 10, you need to "flatten" your SPF record so that all your legitimate emails can land in the inbox as desired.

Once everything looks and checks ok, you should make sure to switch the policy to “reject“ (p=reject) and remove rua (rua is an optional parameter), so you won’t receive tons of reports.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification

BIMI support is currently limited, so not all email clients or providers display the BIMI logo. If your domain is brand new, hasn’t fully launched or is only sending occasional or handfuls of messages, you may not see your BIMI logo displayed either.

BIMI is an emerging email specification that enables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients. BIMI leverages the work an organization has put into deploying DMARC protection and pass DMARC authentication checks.

DMARC policy must be at enforcement: Reject on the organizational domain and subdomain policy (i.e. p=reject; sp=reject) or Quarantine at 100 percent (i.e. p=quarantine; pct=100)

Implement BIMI for Free

Produce an SVG Tiny PS version of your official logo on your computer or using BIMI SVG Logo Converter from EasyDMARC.

You need to host this logo online and a good place is Cloudflare R2. Create a bucket for free, upload the file, get the public url.

Use BIMI Record Generator from EasyDMARC or Dmarcly and then update your DNS using the generated record; a= tag (authority is currently optional). Then verify it.

If you are a brand, recommended but optional is to acquire a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC exist to validate ownership of an organization’s logo) for your trademarked and validated logo or government mark.
At this time, VMCs are being issued by two accepted Mark Verifying Authorities: Entrust DataCard and DigiCert for around $1500.

You can start using BIMI without buying this certificate by creating a Google account (use my own email address), a Yahoo account (create an account with My Email) and a Microsoft Bing pages use your email or sign up with your Google account (the one linked to your own address). For Microsoft Bing pages to kick in, I think you need a linked Twitter account with at least 100 followers and a tween in the last 30 days.

Once you did this, voila - your logo will start appearing at least in these networks.

Warm-up

Now that you have everything setup, start sending emails 1-2 emails and gradually increase the sending quota with 2 emails per day.
If blacklisted, you can always use 0spam to unblock your IP.

Check you deliverability with MxToolbox, Mail-Tester (free) and Mailreach (check tabs for Deliverability, Content Analysis and Setup Analysis once you get the results).

Clean your email list (contacts). In order to verify a big list of email contacts, you can use Clearout ($7/1000), Mailercheck ($10/1000), Emaillistverify ($4/1000 emails) etc.

Validation

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression!

If you are working for an important email or a campaign, take your time and analyze the content of your email campaign before you send it, apply the recommendations to fix deliverability red flags - you can use Email Insights from Mailercheck.

Before sending, check if your emails will reach the inbox or land in the spam folder and learn where emails appear in Gmail; find out if your emails appear under the Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates or Forums tabs of the subscriber’s inbox. Make the necessary changes to your emails based on the inbox reports so you can reach the desired inbox folder.

Technicalities

Reputation

• Fewer complaints - start by sending to known contacts and make sure that they answer you back; it's a plus if they can add you to their address book.
• No spam traps in your contacts
• No black lists - your email (domain/IP) doesn't appear in any blacklist.
• 60/40 text to image ratio - but if you are over 500 characters you will be fine.
• Prioritize your content - use the first 1/3 of your content for what's more important
• Few bounces - clean your list so you avoid sending to outdated emails or emails out of service.
• Consistent volume - a big variation in your sending volume it's a signal that you bought emails.

Authentication

• Infrastructure - check your IP; provider overall quality score; the engagement of their subscribers and the industry they operate in.
• Process feedback loops - on spam reporting or unsubscribe, take that address out from your email.
• Abuse reporting mailbox - To ensure email deliverability, it’s vital that you have an abuse reporting mailbox setup and monitor it frequently. You can implement it through the use of an email header. Many mailbox providers without feedback loops will forward complaints to those mailboxes instead.
• Avoid url shorteners and if you want to use them, implement them under your own domain.
• Avoid spammy subject
• Relevant content - A significant factor in email deliverability is sending relevant content that your subscribers want to read.
• Aesthetically consistent - Your website and other marketing materials will have a consistent look. Your email campaigns should be the same. It’s vital to maintain brand consistency throughout your newsletters. If your designs are all over the place, you run the risk of your customer not recognizing your email.
• Plain text combined with html
• Mobile-friendly designs - almost 50% of email opens now occur on mobile devices.

Other factors

• Offer easy unsubscribe
• Prefer double opt-in list
• Personalized through segmentation - give your subscribers exactly what they want

Table of Content
1. Problem
2. Analysis
3. Check your Speed
4. Solution
5. Simply Static

Problem

When I’m judging my website from a technical point of view, I’m trying to check few checkboxes.

Speed. Not only browsing will be delightful, but first impression matters and visitors will see that is well crafted. In the same time, they will wonder what’s special about this website and how come is that fast.

Multilingual. I like to have multilingual websites, to cover larger audiences and boost my SEO in the same time. Problem is that multilingual solutions are hitting the web server and database server pretty hard.

Solve the optimization constraints. Wordpress optimization is very complicated with tons of demands:
- server needs higher specs and this will only grow with time and db size 😅
- caching: Page Caching, Database Query Caching, Object Caching, Opcode Caching, Mobile Caching, User Caching, Edge Caching (CDNs)
- plugins over plugins for multilingual, forms, site caching, server caching
- On average, a typical business website powered by WordPress usually has around 20 to 30 plugins installed. However, if your website utilizes advanced features and functionalities, this count can easily exceed 50 plugins1.
- content delivery network (Cloudflare, BunnyCDN)
- security

Analysis

A solution will be to to throw money at the problem and the problem will be solved (pr patched).

If you are very good, you can solve all this with a hosting similar to Gridpane (look at their Core plan, which is free) and a High Performance server from Vultr (get $100 with this link) server vCPU/s: 2 vCPUs; RAM: 4 GB; Storage: 128 GB NVMe.
You can also go with the Panel version, that includes 50 Sites, Unlimited Servers and split the bill with 2-3 friends or clients.

Anyway … I’m digressing. The point is that you don’t need high performance configuration or specs, nor to pay around $1000 for an optimization service, if you serve a static version of your website.

Check your speed

A good speed is under 1s, a very good will be around 0.5s but ideally around 0.25s

With Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom Tools you can check your site speed separately on mobile and desktop. It’s really easy to use.

If you convert your WordPress site to a static website, the content will be delivered to the user directly from the server. Static sites eliminate round trips to the database to generate a web page, significantly reducing page loading time. Php server side processing is also eliminated.

Improve your site security

For your Wordpress site, security enhancements are a must and Wordfence provides robust security measures, including a Web Application Firewall (WAF), malware scanning, and login security.
It helps protect your WordPress site from threats, unauthorized access, and malicious code.

Personally, I don’t use Wordfence, as it’s putting additional and unnecessary stress on the server and you can manually solve them without Wordfence2.

Static websites

Instead of hitting the php processor and the database, you build your static version of your website once and then it’s served from an Edge Caching content delivery server that’s next to your visitor. BunnyCDN has 123 global PoPs (points of presence).

Static websites are also more secure because they have fewer entry points of attacks, thanks to the fact they aren’t connected to a database. There is no database for hackers to attack, for example, via SQL injection.

Simply Static

I know Patrick Posner, the owner of Simply Static for about 4 years now, while the software itself is around since 2015.
You cans see the product roadmap here.

Key points:
Can be hosted on the same website in a local directory.
Automated deployments thru webhooks
Pair it with BunnyCDN, 1 storage zone per website

Integrations: Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, SimplyCDN, Amazon S3, GitHub, BunnyCDN, WordPress

Support: Multilingual, Multisite, Forms, Comments, Search

Why to skip it: if you're not a technical person, don’t go for it.
Simply Static won’t work with Woocommerce. Anyway, it’s better to separate the company website from the e-com side of it.
This can be transparent for the public, if you keep the same layout and navigation - only you will know that in fact you are running two instances of Wordpress.

Why to buy: Speed, optimization, security, save money.

Even if you don’t plan to implement it right now, buy it now and use it later, since this is a one time payment of $59, instead of $99 yearly.
I think the deal will be up until April 9 and you will have 60 days to refund it, in case you don’t like it.

Table of Content
1. Categories and perspectives
2. Branding
3. Visuals
4. Article Structure
5. Flow
6. Navigation
7. Podcast
8. Technicalities

We are imagining crafting the best article template, in the light of a personal or company brand and not from the perspective of a book or article writer.

Categories and perspectives

Considering that in one year we will pretty much do a full cycle, passing thru all the categories and subjects that we’re focussing on in our activity, we should think about what we will write in the following year and imagine where do we want to be.
With this silver line in mind, write down the categories and perspectives from which we will act on the subjects.
Example: my horizontals might be categories like Business Development, Marketing, Advertising, Growth Hacking, E-Commerce etc; my verticals or perspectives might be: How To, Reviews, Case Studies, Behind the scenes, Bootcamps etc

In this article cover, I expressed the article Categories using “How To” and “Branding” and the perspectives, using the “Substack” and “SEO“ icons.

You can represent however you want this categories and perspectives, as long as you are consistent. In the below example, the perspective is written explicitly: “Review” and “Explained”; this is a clear indicator for a reader that he can expect more “Review” articles. It also make it easy for a reader who’s scrolling thru multiple article to filter and focus on the area that he wants, since the category or the perspective is easily recognizable.

Branding

I won’t get too much into this, but before everything, you should have written down your mission statement comprising a simple and brief description that encompasses the purpose of a company defining your culture, goals, and values.

Next in line would be your brand identity - the visible elements of a brand, such as color, design, and logo, that identify and distinguish the brand in consumers' minds.

Then with these two in mind, you should design yourself a cover template that you will use for your article and social media.

Visuals

A good visual should be consistent and should comprise the following elements:
- use your brand colors
- keep the same layout globally or craft a few for each category or perspective
- 1920px x 1048px with your main focus on 1048px x 1048px area, because on some platforms, the sides that excess the 1048px will be cropped out (not showed)
- make sure to include in your main area the title, category and perspective.
- put the article number, logo etc in the extended area
- keep the text size over 80px - 100px in order to be legible.
- title can be on 1, 2 or 3 rows - center it vertically.

Article structure

If you write a long article, where you’re reaching 15000 characters, you might want to split it in 3 articles, map every article to a section that doesn’t appear on the homepage (make it hidden), then write in the first article and link the other two using a table of content.
When you publish the articles, publish the last two first and choose to not notify your readers thru the newsletter and publish only the first one on the homepage alongside with a email notification. This way, your homepage will look clean and your readers won’t feel bombarded.

If you happen to show these categories on the homepage, what you can do is to double each category, with its pair being hidden.
Ex: Marketing & Marketing articles (hidden); you publish your main in Marketing and the other 2 in Marketing hidden.

Ideally, we should keep the article under 5000 characters or 700-1000 words, that’s around a 5 minutes reading time.

Title should be 60 - 80 characters from the SEO point of view.

Flow

Start with a Hook so they can see in the preview and realize after reading just a few words the value that you bring to the table.

Have a table of content so they have an article overview and be able to navigate the article using it.

From the writing perspective, you can use the Pyramidal structure or the Inverse Pyramidal Structure.

Use the Pyramidal Structure if you are inclined more towards the storytelling: start with a catchy introduction, gradual build up to the main point, keep them in suspense as they anticipate the core message and end with a summary.

Use the Inverse Pyramidal Structure if your readers are seeking quick answers and you want to give out essential facts from the beginning - who, what, when, where, and why - and then you will continue with additional context and details, then expand in the conclusion on the the broader implications.

Navigation

Let’s craft our table of content upfront, for readers to have it included when they receive the newsletter.

Write down your blog title; in my case: https://weekly.tekbassador.com/

Convert your section names by making everything lowercase and replacing the space with a dash (note that I am writing the categories as they appear in the article body, not numbered, as I wrote them in the table of content); in my case:
Categories and perspectives → categories-and-perspectives
Branding → branding
Visuals → visuals
Article Structure → article-structure
Flow → flow
Navigation → navigation
Technicalities → technicalities

Convert your articles title by making everything lowercase and replacing the space with a dash: “Crafting the perfect Article“ → “crafting-the-perfect-article”

We will then concatenate our “blog title”, “/p/”, “article title”, “#§”, “section-name”. 1
You can write the Section sign (§) by using Opt + 6 on a mac and I alt+0167 on a pc.

Now take each one of these links, go to our table, select each section title, type Cmd+k or Ctrl+k (insert link) and paste the link.
https://weekly.tekbassador.com/p/crafting-the-perfect-article#§categories-and-perspectives
https://weekly.tekbassador.com/p/crafting-the-perfect-article#§branding
https://weekly.tekbassador.com/p/crafting-the-perfect-article#§visuals
https://weekly.tekbassador.com/p/crafting-the-perfect-article#§article-structure
https://weekly.tekbassador.com/p/crafting-the-perfect-article#§flow
https://weekly.tekbassador.com/p/crafting-the-perfect-article#§navigation
https://weekly.tekbassador.com/p/crafting-the-perfect-article#§technicalities

Podcast

I wrote a few days ago “You need to start a podcast like yesterday” and I hope that by now you start it already 🥳

For important articles or as a long time strategy, is good to pair the article with the podcast episode. You can publish the podcast first (without sending the e-blast and notifications), in order to have it live and published, get the podcast episode link and insert it at the beginning of your article alongside with a call to action (Listen “Article name“ on this link).

This way, when you publish the article, your readers will receive the article and the podcast at the same time and they can decide if they want to listen or to read.

Technicalities

• Use shortcuts while writing:
  To write down the Table of Content in a compact format, choose the block form and at the end of the row, type Shift+Enter.
  That will create a New Line, instead of a new paragraph.
  Type # followed by space to create an H1 heading.
  Type ## followed by space to create an H2 sub-heading.
  Type ### followed by space to create an H3 sub-heading.
  Type * or - followed by space to create a bulleted list
  With text selected, press press cmd/ctrl + K to add a link.

• Don’t forget to use a custom domain for your publication - grow your brand.

• If you use referral links in your articles, use a custom url shortener on your custom domain as well: go.customdomain.com/keyword

• track your articles and referral links in an excel file or a google sheets.

• add folders to google drive, in order to feed resources at the end of the article. Folder name should include the article number: “#001 Article name”
  When share the link choose “For anyone who has the link”

• Serialize the articles. Examples:
  Tekbassador Weekly #129: Title
  Tekbassador Weekly S1 E129 (change the season each year)

Let me know if you have questions and I will do my best to help you out 🥳

We need images for ERP, Excel order forms, Shopify, Amazon, TheBay and what not.

Image requirements might be: ERP 500x500, Excel Order Form 300x400, Amazon: 1500x1500, TheBay 984x1312 and Shopify (Dawn theme) 700x700.

We always need many types of images with different resolutions but do we need a set of images for each job? Or there is a smarter way that can save us time and remove repetitive work?

We will be able to generate all these resolutions if we have as a solid base, a source image with the dimensions of 2000x2000px.

TLDR: Have the 2000x2000px images ready & use the image transformations using TwicPics. You can find this discussed at the end of the article, alongside with the files and the Resources section.

Workflow

• improve image quality

• organize folders and filenames

• process images

• organize images

Improve image quality

This is often times a necessary step, even if the picture has a good resolution. Because in few steps, we can de-noise, de-band and upsample the resolution.

For this, you can use Gigapixel from TopazLabs, Pixelmator Pro, Luminar Neo, Photoshop etc.

Personally, I created a Shortcut using “Shortcuts“, that is doing an automation using Pixelmator Pro (you can find the file in the Resources section):

• resize the selected image to a height of 2000px with an auto width, keeping the proportions.

• cropping the image to 2000x2000 (position center).

• optimize the “Cropped image“ for Web in JPEG format, Quality 87.

• add to the Initial file name “-11-2000”

• save the Renamed file to a folder named “11-2000”

Organize folders and filenames

Folder structure: [Brand Name] / [“Image Ratio”-”Image Resolution”]
Example: Rolex/11-2000 (11 represents the image ratio, 2000 represents image resolution)

File structure: [SKU]-[“Image Ratio”-”Image Resolution”]_[“position”]
Example: ROL-11-2000_front.jpg

Position can have these values: front, side, back, detail, social, box.

Image ratio can be 11(1:1), 34 (3:4) etc

Process images

In order to be able to automate all these image ratios we can use URL transformations using one of these services:

Cloudflare Images ($5.00 per 100K images stored per month, $1.00 per 100K images delivered per month), Cloudinary (it’s complicated 😅), TwicPics (Free 3GB & unlimited transformations / Paid: $19/month).

You can read about how to do URL transformations using Cloudflare, using Cloudinary and using TwicPics.

In practice, the price doesn’t matter and you can use any of them, because you use them only at onboarding, without public access. Therefore, we will do our pick based on speed, flexibility and convenience.

Ok, will do the demo using Cloudinary and TwicPics.

Produce the images using Cloudinary

Actually, this is the hardest choice, because they are a bit API oriented and the UI is not making simple all the operations, but I will present it to you just because ... Maybe you like Cloudinary 😅

Upload images to Media Explorer (hint: tag them); use a common prefix for all the images or batches - we will call them using parts of their name that is common to all of them.

We can go to the Media Library and copy the link to the images, one by one.

Or, we can retrieve them programmatically, using the terminal.

Generate the Access keys from your Profile. Note your cloud name and the prefix of the requested images.

Note that curl and cld commands are doing the same thing - I just offered you two options.

curl https://<API_KEY>:<API_SECRET>@api.cloudinary.com/v1_1/<cloud_name>/resources/image/upload?prefix=cld > list.json

If you are into Cloudinary, you can even install their command line interface (CLI)

pip3 install cloudinary-cli

export CLOUDINARY_URL=cloudinary://<API_KEY>:<API_SECRET>@<CLOUD_NAME>

cld admin resources type=upload prefix=cld > list.json

We now have the list of file urls in this json file and we need to extract these urls somehow. For this, you can use an app like JSON 2 ++ or DevUtils.

If you don’t have them handy, you can use ConvertCSV or Gigasheet.

Once you have this csv file, you just have to remove the versioning, in this case, remove the “v1710562444” part of the url
http://res.cloudinary.com/gwcacloud/image/upload/v1710562444/cld-sample.jpg
So we end up with an url like this:
http://res.cloudinary.com/gwcacloud/image/upload/cld-sample.jpg

Cloudinary URL transformations

I don’t know if you make it up to here, but we need a coffee, right? ☕️

I don’t know how you can keep reading … I’m bored to death 🤣🤣🤣

Break the initial URL in two pieces and insert in-between a new column so we can form the final url by concatenating the transformation part in the middle.
COL A (root URL): http://res.cloudinary.com/gwcacloud/image/upload/
COL B (transformation): t_s760-r34-p20-p20-q90
COL C (File name): cld-sample.jpg

Final URL: https://res.cloudinary.com/gwcacloud/image/upload/t_s760-r34-p20-p20-q90/cld-sample.jpg
Note that in this case, q90 is optimizing the jpeg to a quality of 90.

760-11-20-20-auto
https://res.cloudinary.com/gwcacloud/image/upload/t_copy_of_760-11-20-20-auto/cld-sample.jpg

In the first transformation, we want to generate an image of 800x800px (1:1 ratio), with 20px padding (white space) - let’s say that we wanted to make sure that we have at least 20px white all around.

Transformation steps: Fit to 760px, Crop to 1:1 (a bit useless),Quality auto, Add a 20-pixel wide white border to the image.

760-34-20-20-auto
https://res.cloudinary.com/gwcacloud/image/upload/t_760-34-20-20-auto/cld-sample.jpg

In this second transformation, we want to generate an image of 610x800 (3:4 ratio), with 20px padding (white space) - let’s say that we wanted to make sure that we have at least 20px white all around.

These are the transformation steps: Fit on Height to 760px, Crop using Ratio 3:4, Quality auto, Add a 20-pixel wide white border to the image.

Get all Images for the desired sizes

Once the links are constructed in Excel, we just have to feed these links to a Download manager like Downie or jDownloader, in order to download them all.

Remember … the whole point of all this was to make your life easier with product onboarding into your ERP or for product listing. So this download is for backup purpose. In the onboarding process we will actually use the links 🔗 🥳

TwicPics URL transformations

Follow this setup guide and Create an account with TwicPics, create a workspace.

Please note that I added the “cb-11-2000” - this is simply to have this value in the resulting urls so I can understand that this link is for a square image with a size of 2000px.

For the Source URL, I added the same and that means that in the R2 bucket, we actually have a directory called “cb-11-2000”. Why? Because maybe we want to host different types of source images. Perhaps next month I will host a new brand called Rolex and I will need source images of 3000px; in this case I might create a directory called “RX-11-3000”.

Go to Cloudflare R2 (Zero Egress Fee Distributed Object Storage) and make a bucket (the Source URL from the previous imagine is actually the R2 Public bucket).
Get your Account ID and API Tokens.

Go to the bucket settings, enable the Public access and copy the Public R2.dev Bucket URL.

Edit CORS policy and enable access from your TwicPics subdomain

[
{
"AllowedOrigins": [
"https://subdomain.twic.pics"
],
"AllowedMethods": [
"GET"
]
}
]

Fire up Filezilla Pro or whatever else you use in order to connect to Cloudflare R2 and enter your Account ID, Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.

If you need help configuring the connection to Cloudflare R2, follow this guide.

Once this is done, you can directly upload the source images to the chosen R2 directory.

Fun with Excel

Please note the TwicPics url transformations.

Let’s say that we want to have product images in excel, with a ratio of 3:4 and a size of 300x400px, without inserting them.
We want the images to appear once we enter the product name/sku.

Go to the second sheet (Sheet2) in excel and make the following formulas:
A2: =IMAGE(H2)
B2: ASM-0138
C2: https://cbrands.twic.pics/cb-11-2000/
D2:
E2: '-11-2000_frontc
F2: =F1
G2: '.jpg?twic=v1/cover=3:4/resize=300/resize=300x400
H2: =CONCATENATE(Sheet2!$C$2,Sheet2!B2,Sheet2!$E$2,Sheet2!$G$2,"&v=",Sheet2!$F$2)

Go to Sheet1 in excel and enter:
A2: ASM-0005
B2: =IFERROR(IMAGE(CONCATENATE(Sheet2!$C$2,A2,Sheet2!$E$2,Sheet2!$G$2,"&v=",Sheet2!$F$2)),"")
Drag the B2 formula all the way down to the next 300 cells, or whatever products you have. While you do that, only the A2 will change, the other values are locked to The second row from Sheet2 so this will change in fact just A2, A3 etc; since in Col A you have the product name, this will be the only changing part from the newly generated url.

Ok, what’s the logic?

In Sheet2 we have setup the URL forming logic and we place it into the Sheet2, in order to be out of sight.
Let’s dissect the URL that formed in Col H:
https://cbrands.twic.pics/cb-11-2000/ASM-0138-11-2000_frontc.jpg?twic=v1/cover=3:4/resize=300/resize=300x400&v=4

https://cbrands.twic.pics/cb-11-2000/ASM-0138-11-2000_frontc.jpg is the original file, hosted on R2
twic=v1 is the API version, no need to touch that
cover=3:4 is cropping the original file in the 3:4 ratio
resize=300 picture is vertically resized to 300px
resize=300x400 image is resized to 300x400 (unnecessary)

There is an interesting restriction in using TwicPics - in the free version, there is no cache purging nor Purge by asset (Enter the URLs of your assets to purge them from the cache.)

What that means? Since their cache life has the duration of 1 year, if you update any file in R2, there will be no update on TwicPics and you will see the old cached image.

That’s why, every time you update an image on R2 (keep the same name) you need to increment the value of F1. This will increment the query string of versioning.
Using this technique, assets will be invalidated from both the CDN and the browser caches.

Now, that you learned how to do links for whatever image sizes you could possible need, you can use these links whenever you need to onboard products or need images in an Excel file.

I hope you enjoyed the article! Please find the Resources on this link.

You want to do a podcast and you should start one like yesterday - it will help you grow, overcome the impostor syndrome and put you on the right track.

Maybe you feel like you’re not ready but you will never be - you need to start doing it, start doing mistakes, because only in this way you will be able to improve.

You should see how Gary Vee started. Heck, even this date he’s not mastering his audio 😅

Don’t worry, by the end of this article, I will give you a simple and straight forward solution but not before I will make you aware of the right process - we need to learn how to walk before we start running 🙃
If you don’t want to know all the nitty-gritty, skip to the end and read The Entrepreneur way.

What do we need - don’t panic, everything is optional

Good Mic in a quiet environment (I will show you later how a noisy environment can be solved).
Rode NT1 - if you don’t mind seeing you mic in the video.
Sennheiser MKE 600 this would be the best choice and you save 3x money vs Sennheiser mkh416 (which is the industry standard for movies and voice over).
iPhone/Android - use Motiv Audio from Shure and while recording, try to keep the recording level around -12dB.
But honestly, even a Deity V-Mic D4 or any mic is better than your phone - you should do your minimum effort 😅
Software: Logic Pro (90 days perpetual trial), DaVinci Resolve Studio
Plugins: Sonible smart:bundle, Waves Clarity VX, Vocal Rider
I like the Sonible plugins because they are dynamic and adapt/ride track in real time.
TDR Limiter 6 from Tokyo Dawn, Dialog enhancer from DaVinci.
Audio interface: Zoom F3 in 32-bit float (this is like raw file in photography - it allows you to correct the sound in post production).

Filler words removal (“uhs”, “erms” and “hms”)

We can use Descript or DaVinci Resolve Studio for this but TLDR: who cares?
Take care of this after one year, don’t loose sleep over this in the beginning.

Environment noise cleaning

If you are a computer, use Krisp or Voice Isolation.
Another solution is to record directly in DaVinci or Logic Pro and put Clarity VX (in Broad 1 mode) as effect - this will eliminate all the noise. DaVinci also have Voice Isolation integrated but can’t be applied in real time - only once the recording is done.

Gate, EQ, Compressor, Limiter, De-Esser, De-Hummer, De-Click, De-Breath, De-Plosives

You can use Izotope RX 10 Advanced or Sonible smart:bundle. As an alternative, both DaVinci and Logic Pro have integrated plugins for this.

The professional Workflow & Sound mastering

You can learn how to do it by watching the videos and using the cheatsheets that I’ve put together at the end, in the Resources section. Over there you can also find the Logic Pro “Podcast Editing Template”.

You can put your voice audio files in one of the 4 voice tracks and the background music in the Music track.

If you press “X” key, you will see the mixer: basically any of the 4 vocal tracks are triggering ducking on the music track. The music track also has the gain adjusted with -6dB.

You can see how the audio tracks are sending signal to Bus1 and the Music Side channel (Music SC) has the input from Bus1.

What else? All the tracks have a Fade-In / Face-Out of 100 with a curve of 20.

The Entrepreneur way

I know, all is cool and nice, just that we don’t have time and we want to … just do it 🥳

Do your recording in wav file, with the recording level around -12dB. A good hint in doing this is to rehearse and read 1-2 times the text that you want to record and eventually say one phrase at a time.

Then you can use a service like Auphonic, with a preset like this one (2h/month free; $132/year paid) or Adobe Podcast (1h/day free; $100/year paid, access to Adjust strength and access to Design with Adobe Express Premium; All Premium features for design on express.adobe.com).

Both of them will do a good job; I think Auphonic is a bit better, since with the free version of Adobe Podcast you can’t adjust the strength of processing and Auphonic is doing more.
Both will remove noise, reverb and do the audio normalization.

Once you have this clean and normalized file, all you have to do is to insert the processed file in the provided Logic Pro Podcast template.

Learn DaVinci, Logic Pro, Compression, EQ & Mastering:

Cheatsheets:

Resources:

Videos & Cheatsheets

If you're promoting products on Google or selling on Amazon, UPC codes are essential. Got your own code trunk pre-2002? Then this read isn't for you!
If you want to learn how to make your own in Excel, jump to the end 😉

In 2002, the Uniform Code Council (UCC) adopted a lease-only model for barcode prefixes, imposing renewal fees worldwide.

Prefix holders sued the UCC over its monopoly, winning a $3.89 million settlement and securing ownership rights for those with prefixes before August 2002.

The recommended source to buy them is GS1, where they are pretty expensive and they have a substandard business conduct.

A pack of 1 UPC codes is $157 and 100 is $525.

The catch is, if you need more codes next year, you must also pay for those you used before, even if you don't use them anymore. So, acquiring new codes plus paying the obsolete ones from last year can rapidly increase your costs.

Here's my strategy

I am trying to optimize the number of UPC’s I use and I also want to use them without activating them, because once they are activated, the info that’s registered, can’t be changed.

One of the problems is “how do we know our UPC codes”, because once you buy them, they are not just handing them over to you. You have to create them first.

Since my product assortment is under 100 products at any given time, I created an excel file where I assigned an UPC code to each SKU. When a product/sku is sunsetted, I keep the same UPC and I substitute the old product with the new product.

I think you saw that already. Did you ever read some Amazon product reviews where they sell a horse and the review is about flowers? 🤣🤣🤣

That's the case.

It's even a recommended procedure. If you do Amazon Vendor Central and your sales are north of $10M, your account manager will even ask you to provide new substitutes for the sunsetted products so your traffic and sales will keep going.

In order to do this, you have to use generic Names and descriptions that will fit your next year replacement as well.

When you fill in the info for a barcode, you will need to provide the following info:

Product Type (Ex. Consumer Unit), Global Product Classification (Ex. 10001105 - Watches), Country of Sale (Ex. Canada, United States), Product Description (Rolex watch 1 Piece), Product Name (Ex. watch), Brand Name (Ex. Rolex), Functional Name (Ex. watch) - in both english and french.

Notice the generic terms. This allows me to change the underlying product whenever I want.

How about Google Merchant center etc?

Well, if it's just about Shopify, Google Advertising or Google Merchant center, where you still need valid UPC codes (or GTIN), I have a tip for you.

To use this tip, you can buy even 1 or 10 UPC codes, because we will generate the rest of them by ourselves.

How to produce UPC codes?

I will give you the details for the most common ones (UPC EAN13).

write your GS1 Canada Company Prefix in an excel file, one digit per cell.

- sum the digits in the odd positions (SUM_ODD)

- sum the digits in even positions and multiply their sum by 3 (X3)

- sum the digits in the odd positions SUM_ODD with the X3.

- round the (SUM_ODD + X3) to the next 10 and substitute from this number (SUM_ODD + X3)

In math terms, it's like we're doing
CEILING((SUM_ODD + X3),10)-(SUM_ODD + X3))

Example:
if (SUM_ODD + X3) = 126
if CEILING((SUM_ODD + X3),10) is 130
then (CEILING((SUM_ODD + X3),10)-(SUM_ODD + X3)) is 4
”4” is your 13th digit, or the checksum of the barcode.

You can validate your newly created UPC codes on GS1 and on UPC Validator from Finale Inventory.

Please find the excel file attached on this link.

Tekbassador explores the vast world of software and tech, specifically as it relates to making money and business development. Follow along as we look at new platforms and products.

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