Practical digital marketing insights, tested in the real world.
Outreach fails for exactly two reasons, and only one of them gets written about. The first is that the email was not worth replying to. That is the reason every guide addresses, and the advice — personalise, be brief, offer value — is correct and insufficient. The second is that the email never arrived. Nobody […]
An engagement score built on opens is partly a score of machine activity, and it errs in the direction that costs most. Privacy protection pre-fetches content whether or not anyone read the message. So a contact who has not looked at an email in a year can register as consistently engaged — and stay in […]
Bulk sender requirements are the conditions Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft impose on anyone sending roughly 5,000 or more messages a day to their users: authenticated mail with an aligned From domain, one-click unsubscribe honoured within two days, and a spam complaint rate below 0.1%. Non-compliant mail is rejected at the server rather than filtered. The […]
The expensive automation mistakes are invisible from inside the platform, because the platform reports what it sent rather than how it read. A sequence with a 99% delivery rate can still be sending a purchase prompt to somebody who bought yesterday, addressing a customer as {{first_name}}, or continuing a five-email onboarding flow to a person […]
Searching for a statistic and finding it repeated in six articles is evidence of circulation, not of truth. That is the trap this whole job turns on. A fabricated figure propagates, because the second article cites the first, the third cites the second, and by the tenth the number has the texture of common knowledge […]
A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. That is the whole article in a sentence, and it is where most backup strategies fail — not at taking backups, which is easy and automated, but at the assumption that what was taken can be turned back into a working site. Four other things go […]
HARO is gone. Not deprioritised, not rebranded again — permanently discontinued on 9 December 2024, when Cision confirmed that "the Connectively (HARO) platform has been permanently discontinued." It was announced on 11 November 2024 and closed four weeks later, with Cision saying it had decided "to focus our attention on core offerings where we see […]
"Error establishing a database connection" means WordPress could not reach or could not use its database, and there are four causes: wrong credentials, a database server that is down, corrupted tables, or a compromised site. Work them in that order. Not because the first is most likely, but because checking it costs thirty seconds and […]
There are five ways back into a WordPress site you cannot log into, and they carry very different risks. Work them in this order: the password reset email, cookies and browser, the database, WP-CLI, and only then a temporary file on the server. The reason for that order is not difficulty. It is that the […]
On-page SEO is everything on the page itself that helps a search engine understand what it is about and helps a person decide to click it — and roughly half of the advice in circulation about it is built on limits Google does not publish. Two examples, both from Google's own documentation. There is no […]
Describing your voice produces generic writing with your adjectives applied to it. "Friendly but professional, approachable, expert without being stuffy" describes almost every brand that has ever written a voice guideline. A model given that description writes the average of everything matching it, which is exactly the register you were trying to escape. Showing works. […]
A blog needs four schema types, and two of the types most blogs are currently adding produce nothing at all. FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google on 7 May 2026, HowTo rich results were withdrawn in 2023, and neither type appears in Google's structured data gallery any more. That matters because a great many […]