Hello,

A friend told me how my recommendation for a new car changed things in their family! They ended up buying not the brand I suggested; but his dad – who opposed anything other than his favorite brand – now goes on recommending the brand I suggested to all his friends.

​​So much for a little advice…

Alex Hillman recently said: Confident decision making is one of the hardest lessons to learn. We spend much of our lives outsourcing decisions to other people. It’s also why the “advice industry” is so freakin’ huge.

But not all advice is good. As a matter of fact, most advice is out of context and from people who haven’t practiced it themselves.

Don’t take any advice on its face value.

Not even the advice I keep dishing at you 😀

Notes on owning your own business

The dirty little secret of small business (in the US, at least) is that most of them are not making money, and never will. They may be running “in the red” for years – with some other source of money making up the difference.

Owning your own business is likely not going to be what you imagine it will. Ross Hartshorn has written about his top business lessons – and I strongly recommend reading and internalizing them.

Lesson 2 is my favorite – and even what Ross’s wife said…

Essential lessons if you own or plan to own your own business

External links are good for SEO too

We discussed how to utilize internal linking to improve SEO in last week’s newsletter.

I guess you haven’t yet taken action on it.

If you did, you’d have started seeing improvements in your traffic and ranking.

But hold on, don’t go on a guilt trip now!

Block some time this week to act on at least a couple of things from what we’ve been discussing over the last few weeks.

Please do.

Now some quick notes on linking to other people’s sites from your site.

• Linking to others is not bad, linking to low quality / spammy sites is bad.
• Link out only to high-authority sites and good content. Most importantly, link only when the other site provides value to the reader.
• Linking to another page tells the search engine that your content is related to the other site’s content. So if their content is good, you will gain some “trust”.
• Limit to one or two external links per page.
• You can use external links in “references” or “additional resources”.
• If you’ve linked to someone, you may also want to reach out to them and get a link back to your site.
• When in doubt, you may use the ‘nofollow’ tag for external links.

Nielsen’s principles for interface design

Jakob Nielsen published his 10 heuristics for user interface design back in 1994. If you’ve ever been curious about why you find some apps and websites easier than others, or if you’re building your own software, you have to study these!

10 usability heuristics for user interface design

A writing prompt

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Think about the things that you need to add to your life to feel more fulfilled and happy. What are some things you can remove?

What’s keeping you busy these days? Did anything from this email help you? Do reply and share.

Thanks,