Saturday 31 March 2018

A DevTools for Designers

There has long been an unfortunate disconnect between visual design for the web and web design and development. We're over here designing pictures of websites, not websites - so the sentiment goes.

A.J. Kandy puts a point on all this. We're seeing a proliferation of design tools these days, all with their own leaps forward. Yet...

But, critically, the majority of them aren’t web-centric. None really integrate with a modern web development workflow, not without converters or plugins anyway; and their output is not websites, but clickable simulations of websites.

Still, these prototypes are, inevitably, one-way artifacts that have to be first analyzed by developers, then recreated in code.

That's just a part of what A.J. has to say, so I'd encourage you to read the whole thing.

Do y'all get Clearletter, the Clearleft newsletter? It's a good one. They made some connections here to nearly a decade of similar thinking:

I suspect the reason that nobody has knocked a solution out of the park is that it's a really hard problem to solve. There might not be a solution that is universally loved across lines. Like A.J., I hope it happens in the browser.

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Friday 30 March 2018

Tracking Uncertainty of Work

Ryan Singer writes about project and time management issues that I’ve been experiencing lately. He describes two states of every project: uncertainty and certainty, or “figuring things out” and “making it happen.”

Ryan describes it like this:

Work is like a hill with two sides. There's an uphill phase of figuring out what to do and how to approach the problem. That’s the climb. After you reach the top, there aren’t anybody [sic] ruinous unknowns. You can see down to the other side and finish executing. It's straightforward to estimate and finish the work from that point.

As far as I see it, the hardest thing about the first half of every project is making sure that everyone on a team is communicating constantly as tiny design decisions can have enormous, cascading effects on an engineer. I think that’s something I’ve always struggled with since I just want to get to the "making it happen" part as soon as humanly possible. It also goes back to something Geoff wrote a little while back about setting good expectations before and during the project process.

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Vue Design System

We talk a lot about Vue around here, including some practical applications of it, but haven't gotten deep into designing for it. In this post, Viljami Salminen describes his Vue design process and the thinking that led him to build the Vue Design System::

A design system can help establish a common vocabulary between everyone in an organization and ease the collabo­ration between different disciplines. I’ve seen it go the other way around too when important decisions have been made in a rush. To avoid that, Vue Design System introduces the following framework for naming that I’ve found working well in the past...

Viljami lists Design Principles, Tokens, Elements, Patterns, and Templates as the way in which he structures a system and I think it’s a pretty interesting approach and a parallel to Lucas Lemonnier's post on creating design systems in Sketch, using Atomic Design as the structure. I particularly like how Viljami fits everything together in the example style guide that’s provided.

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Solved With CSS! Colorizing SVG Backgrounds

CSS is getting increasingly powerful, and with features like CSS grid and custom properties (also known as CSS variables), we’re seeing some really creative solutions emerging. The possibilities are still being explored on what CSS can do to make writing UI’s simpler, and that’s exciting!

One of those is now one of my favorite CSS features: filters. Let’s look at how we can use filters to solve a problem you may have encountered when working with SVG as a background image on an element.

CSS Filters

First, let’s start by with an overview of filters. They include the following functions:

  • blur()
  • brightness()
  • contrast()
  • drop-shadow()
  • grayscale()
  • hue-rotate()
  • invert()
  • opacity()
  • saturate()
  • sepia()

These effects can also be achieved with SVG filters or WebGL shaders, but CSS filters are the easiest way to implement basic transformations in the most browser-efficient manner. Because they are shortcuts of SVG filter effects, you can also use filter: url() and specify a filter effect ID onto any element. If you want to play around with custom filters, I recommend checking out cssfilters.co.

The Problem: Editing SVG Backgrounds

I love using the SVG (scalable vector graphics) format for web design. SVG is a great image format for the web, and since it’s based on code, it allows for high-quality responsive and interactive content. When you inject SVG onto the page, you have access to each of its internal elements and their properties, allowing you to animate them, update values (such as color), and dynamically inject additional information. SVG is also a great icon format, especially instead of icon fonts, and in smaller UI elements due to its high quality (think: retina screens) and small image size (think: performance).

I find that often, when SVG is used for these smaller elements, or as a large area of illustration, it’s included as a background image for simplicity. The drawback to this is that the SVG is no longer under your control as a developer. You can’t adjust individual properties, like fill color, of an SVG background because it is treated just like any image. This color conundrum can be solved with CSS! Filters to the rescue!

Adjusting Brightness

The first time I discovered the SVG background challenge was when I was working on a website that had white SVG icons for social share icons that lived on a background determined to match that application. When these icons were moved onto a white background, they were no longer visible. Instead of creating a new icon, or changing the markup to inject inline SVG, you can use filter: brightness().

With the brightness filter, any value greater than 1 makes the element brighter, and any value less than 1 makes it darker. So, we can make those light SVG’s dark, and vice versa!

What I did above was create a dark class with filter: brightness(0.1). You can also do the opposite for darker icons. You can lighten icons by creating a light class with something like filter: brightness(100) or whatever is suitable to your needs.

Icons with a fill color of #000, or rgb(0,0,0) will not brighten. You need to have a value greater than 0 in any of the rgb channels. fill: rgb(1,1,1) works great with a high brightness value such as brightness(1000), but even brightness(1000) will not work on pure black. This is not an issue with light colors and white.

Adjusting Color

We’ve now seen how to adjust light and dark values with a brightness() filter, but that doesn’t always get us the desired effect. What if we want to inject some color into those icons? With CSS filters, we can do that. One little hack is to use the sepia filter along with hue-rotate, brightness, and saturation to create any color we want.

From white, you can use the following mixtures to get the navy, blue, and pink colors above:

.colorize-pink {
  filter: brightness(0.5) sepia(1) hue-rotate(-70deg) saturate(5);
}

.colorize-navy {
  filter: brightness(0.2) sepia(1) hue-rotate(180deg) saturate(5);
}

.colorize-blue {
  filter: brightness(0.5) sepia(1) hue-rotate(140deg) saturate(6);
}

The world is your oyster here. SVG is just one use case for multiple filters. You can apply this to any media type—images, gifs, video, iframes, etc., and support is pretty good, too:

This browser support data is from Caniuse, which has more detail. A number indicates that browser supports the feature at that version and up.

Desktop

Chrome Opera Firefox IE Edge Safari
18* 15* 35 No 17 6*

Mobile / Tablet

iOS Safari Opera Mobile Opera Mini Android Android Chrome Android Firefox
6.0-6.1* 37* No 4.4* 64 57

One final note here is to remember your user! Filters will not work in Internet Explorer, so please send a visible image to all of your users (i.e. don’t use a white SVG with an applied filter on a white background, because your IE users will not see anything). Also, remember to use alternative text for icon accessibility, and you’ll be golden to use this technique in your own applications!

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How to Target Featured Snippet Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

Once you've identified where the opportunity to nab a featured snippet lies, how do you go about targeting it? Part One of our "Featured Snippet Opportunities" series focused on how to discover places where you may be able to win a snippet, but today we're focusing on how to actually make changes that'll help you do that. Give a warm, Mozzy welcome to Britney as she shares pro tips and examples of how we've been able to snag our own snippets using her methodology.

Target featured snippet opportunities

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Today, we are going over targeting featured snippets, Part 2 of our featured snippets series. Super excited to dive into this.

What's a featured snippet?

For those of you that need a little brush-up, what's a featured snippet? Let's say you do a search for something like, "Are pigs smarter than dogs?" You're going to see an answer box that says, "Pigs outperform three-year old human children on cognitive tests and are smarter than any domestic animal. Animal experts consider them more trainable than cats or dogs." How cool is that? But you'll likely see these answer boxes for all sorts of things. So something to sort of keep an eye on. How do you become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities?

Last time, we talked about finding keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. There are a couple ways to do that. We talk about it in the first video. Something I do want to mention, in doing some of that the last couple weeks, is that Ahrefs actually has some of the capabilities to do that all for you. I had no idea that was possible. Really cool, go check them out. If you don't have Ahrefs and maybe you have Moz or SEMrush, don't worry, you can do the same sort of thing with a Vlookup.

So I know this looks a little crazy for those of you that aren't familiar. Super easy. It basically allows you to combine two sets of data to show you where some of those opportunities are. So happy to link to some of those resources down below or make a follow-up video on how to do just that.

I. Identify

All right. So step one is identifying these opportunities. You want to find the keywords that you're on page one for that also have this answer box. You want to weigh the competitive search volume against qualified traffic. Initially, you might want to just go after search volume. I highly suggest you sort of reconsider and evaluate where might the qualified traffic come from and start to go after those.

II. Understand

From there, you really just want to understand the intent, more so even beyond this table that I have suggested for you. To be totally honest, I'm doing all of this with you. It's been a struggle, and it's been fun, but sometimes this isn't very helpful. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times I'm not even looking at some of this stuff when I'm comparing the current featured snippet page and the page that we currently rank on page one for. I'll tell you what I mean in a second.

III. Target

So we have an example of how I've been able to already steal one. Hopefully it helps you. How do you target your keywords that have the featured snippet?

  • Simplifying and cleaning up your pages does wonders. Google wants to provide a very simple, cohesive, quick answer for searchers and for voice searches. So definitely try to mold the content in a way that's easy to consume.
  • Summaries do well. Whether they're at the top of the page or at the bottom, they tend to do very, very well.
  • Competitive markup, if you see a current featured snippet that is marked up in a particular way, you can do so to be a little bit more competitive.
  • Provide unique info
  • Dig deeper, go that extra mile, provide something else. Provide that value.

Examples

What are some examples? So these are just some examples that I personally have been running into and I've been working on cleaning up.

  • Roman numerals. I am trying to target a list result, and the page we currently rank on number one for has Roman numerals. Maybe it's a big deal, maybe it's not. I just changed them to numbers to see what's going to happen. I'll keep you posted.
  • Fix broken links. But I'm also just going through our page and cleaning it. We have a lot of older content. I'm fixing broken links. I have the check my listings tool. It's a Chrome add-on plugin that I just click and it tells me what's a 404 or what I might need to update.
  • Fixing spelling errors or any grammatical errors that may have slipped through editors' eyes. I use Grammarly. I have the free version. It works really well, super easy. I've even found some super old posts that have the double or triple spacing after a period. It drives me crazy, but cleaning some of that stuff up.
  • Deleting extra markup. You might see some additional breaks, not necessarily like that ampersand. But you know what I mean in WordPress where it's that weird little thing for that break in the space, you can clean those out. Some extra, empty header markup, feel free to delete those. You're just cleaning and simplifying and improving your page.

One interesting thing that I've come across recently was for the keyword "MozRank." Our page is beautifully written, perfectly optimized. It has all the things in place to be that featured snippet, but it's not. That is when I fell back and I started to rely on some of this data. I saw that the current featured snippet page has all these links.

So I started to look into what are some easy backlinks I might be able to grab for that page. I came across Quora that had a question about MozRank, and I noticed that — this is a side tip — you can suggest edits to Quora now, which is amazing. So I suggested a link to our Moz page, and within the notes I said, "Hello, so and so. I found this great resource on MozRank. It completely confirms your wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Britney."

I don't know if that's going to work. I know it's a nofollow. I hope it can send some qualified traffic. I'll keep you posted on that. But kind of a fun tip to be aware of.

How we nabbed the "find backlinks" featured snippet

All right. How did I nab the featured snippet "find backlinks"? This surprised me, because I hardly changed much at all, and we were able to steal that featured snippet quite easily. We were currently in the fourth position, and this was the old post that was in the fourth position. These are the updates I made that are now in the featured snippet.

Clean up the title

So we go from the title "How to Find Your Competitor's Backlinks Next Level" to "How to Find Backlinks." I'm just simplifying, cleaning it up.

Clean up the H2s

The first H2, "How to Check the Backlinks of a Site." Clean it up, "How to Find Backlinks?" That's it. I don't change step one. These are all in H3s. I leave them in the H3s. I'm just tweaking text a little bit here and there.

Simplify and clarify your explanations/remove redundancies

I changed enter your competitor's domain URL — it felt a little duplicate — to enter your competitor's URL. Let's see. "Export results into CSV," what kind of results? I changed that to "export backlink data into CSV." "Compile CSV results from all competitors," what kind of results? "Compile backlink CSV results from all competitors."

So you can look through this. All I'm doing is simplifying and adding backlinks to clarify some of it, and we were able to nab that.

So hopefully that example helps. I'm going to continue to sort of drudge through a bunch of these with you. I look forward to any of your comments, any of your efforts down below in the comments. Definitely looking forward to Part 3 and to chatting with you all soon.

Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all soon. See you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Thursday 29 March 2018

MozCon 2018: The Initial Agenda

Posted by Trevor-Klein

With just over three months until MozCon 2018, we're getting a great picture of what this year's show will be like, and we can't wait to share some of the details with you today.

We've got 21 speakers lined up (and will be launching our Community Speaker process soon — stay tuned for more details on how to make your pitch!). You'll see some familiar faces, and some who'll be on the MozCon stage for the first time, with topics ranging from the evolution of searcher intent to the increasing importance of local SEO, and from navigating bureaucracy for buy-in to cutting the noise out of your reporting.

Topic details and the final agenda are still in the works, but we're excited enough about the conversations we've had with speakers that we wanted to give you a sneak peek. We hope to see you in Seattle this July 9–11!

If you still need your tickets, we've got you covered:

Pick up your ticket to MozCon!

The Speakers

Here's a look at who you'll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we've already worked out:


Jono Alderson

Mad Scientist, Yoast

The Democratization of SEO

Jono will explore how much time and money we collectively burn by fixing the same kinds of basic, "binary," well-defined things over and over again (e.g., meta tags, 404s, URLs, etc), when we could be teaching others throughout our organizations not to break them in the first place.

As long as we "own" technical SEO, there's no reason (for example) for the average developer to learn it or care — so they keep making the same mistakes. We proclaim that others are doing things wrong, but by doing so we only reinforce the line between our skills and theirs.

We need to start giving away bits of the SEO discipline, and technical SEO is probably the easiest thing for us to stop owning.

In his talk, he'll push for more democratization, education, collaboration, and investment in open source projects so we can fix things once, rather than a million times.


Stephanie Briggs

Partner, Briggsby

Search-Driven Content Strategy

Google's improvements in understanding language and search intent have changed how and why content ranks. As a result, many SEOs are chasing rankings that Google has already decided are hopeless.

Stephanie will cover how this should impact the way you write and optimize content for search, and will help you identify the right content opportunities. She'll teach you how to persuade organizations to invest in content, and will share examples of strategies and tactics she has used to grow content programs by millions of visits.


Rob Bucci

CEO, STAT Search Analytics

"Near me" or Far:
How Google May Be Deciding Your Local Intent for You

In August 2017, Google stated that local searches without the "near me" modifier had grown by 150% and that searchers were beginning to drop geo-modifiers — like zip code and neighborhood — from local queries altogether. But does Google still know what searchers are after?

For example: the query [best breakfast places] suggests that quality takes top priority; [breakfast places near me] indicates that close proximity is essential; and [breakfast places in Seattle] seems to cast a city-wide net; while [breakfast places] is largely ambiguous.

By comparing non-geo-modified keywords against those modified with the prepositional phrases "near me" and "in [city name]" and qualifiers like “best,” we hope to understand how Google interprets different levels of local intent and uncover patterns in the types of SERPs produced.

With a better understanding of how local SERPs behave, SEOs can refine keyword lists, tailor content, and build targeted campaigns accordingly.


Neil Crist

VP of Product, Moz

The Local Sweet Spot: Automation Isn't Enough

Some practitioners of local SEO swear by manual curation, claiming that automation skips over the most important parts. Some swear the exact opposite. The real answer, especially when you're working at enterprise scale, is a sweet spot in the middle.

In this talk, Neil will show you where that spot is, why different verticals require different work, and some original research that reveals which of those verticals are most stable.


Dana DiTomaso

President and Partner, Kick Point

Traffic vs. Signal

With an ever-increasing slate of options in tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, marketers of all stripes are falling prey to the habit of "I'll collect this data because maybe I'll need it eventually," when in reality it's creating a lot of noise for zero signal.

We're still approaching our metrics from the organization's perspective, and not from the customer's perspective. Why, for example, are we not reporting on (or even thinking about, really) how quickly a customer can do what they need to do? Why are we still fixated on pageviews? In this talk, Dana will focus our attention on what really matters.


Rand Fishkin

Founder, SparkToro, Moz, & Inbound.org

A man who needs no introduction to MozCon, we're thrilled to announce that Rand will be back on stage this year after founding his new company, SparkToro. Topic development for his talk is in the works; check back for more information!


Oli Gardner

Co-Founder, Unbounce

Content Marketing Is Broken and Only Your M.O.M. Can Save You

Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we're so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists.

We need our M.O.M.s!

No, he isn't talking about your actual mother. He's talking about your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens.

In this session you'll learn:

  • Data and lessons learned from his biggest ever content marketing experiment, and how those lessons have changed his approach to content
  • A context-to-content-to-conversion strategy for big content that converts
  • Advanced methods for creating "choose your own adventure" navigational experiences to build event-based behavioral profiles of your visitors (using GTM and GA)
  • Innovative ways to productize and market the technology you already have, with use cases your customers had never considered

Casie Gillette

Senior Director, Digital Marketing, KoMarketing

The Problem with Content & Other Things We Don't Want to Admit

Everyone thinks they need content but they don't think about why they need it or what they actually need to create. As a result, we are overwhelmed with poor quality content and marketers are struggling to prove the value.

In this session, we'll look at some of the key challenges facing marketers today and how a data-driven strategy can help us make better decisions.


Emily Grossman

Mobile Product Marketer & App Strategist

What All Marketers Can Do about Site Speed

At this point, we should all have some idea of how important site speed is to our performance in search. The mobile-first index underscored that fact yet again. It isn't always easy for marketers to know where to start improving their site's speed, though, and a lot of folks mistakenly believe they need developers for most of those improvements. Emily will clear that up with an actionable tour of just how much impact our own work can have on getting our sites to load quickly enough for today's standards.


Russ Jones

Principal Search Scientist, Moz

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Russ is our principal search scientist here at Moz. After a decade as CTO of an agency, he joined Moz to focus on what he's most interested in: research and development, primarily related to keyword and link data. He's responsible for many of our most forward-looking techniques.

At MozCon this year, he's looking to focus on cutting through bad metrics with far better metrics, exploring the hidden assumptions and errors in things our industry regularly reports, showing us all how we can paint a more accurate picture of what's going on.


Justine Jordan

VP Marketing, Litmus

A veteran of the MozCon stage, Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named an Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.

At MozCon this year, she's looking to cover the importance of engagement with emails in today's world of marketing. With the upcoming arrival of GDPR and the ease with which you can unsubscribe and report spam, it's more important than ever to treat people like people instead of just leads.


Michael King

Managing Director, iPullRank

You Don't Know SEO

Or maybe, "SEO you don't know you don't know." We've all heard people throw jargon around in an effort to sound smart when they clearly don't know what it means, and our industry of SEO is no exception. There are aspects of search that are acknowledged as important, but seldom actually understood. Mike will save us from awkward moments, taking complex topics like the esoteric components of information retrieval and log-file analysis, pairing them with a detailed understanding of technical implementation of common SEO recommendations, and transforming them into tools and insights we wish we'd never neglected.


Cindy Krum

CEO & Founder, MobileMoxie

Mobile-First Indexing or a Whole New Google

The emergence of voice-search and Google Assistant is forcing Google to change its model in search, to favor their own entity understanding or the world, so that questions and queries can be answered in context. Many marketers are struggling to understand how their website and their job as an SEO or SEM will change, as searches focus more on entity-understanding, context and action-oriented interaction. This shift can either provide massive opportunities, or create massive threats to your company and your job — the main determining factor is how you choose to prepare for the change.


Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist, Moz

Dr. Peter J. Meyers (AKA "Dr. Pete") is a Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. Guarding the thin line between marketing and data science — which is more like a hallway and pretty wide — he's the architect behind MozCast, the keeper of the Algo History, and watcher of all things Google.


Britney Muller

Senior SEO Scientist, Moz

Britney is Moz's senior SEO scientist. An explorer and investigator at heart, she won't stop digging until she gets to the bottom of some of the most interesting developments in the world of search. You can find her on Whiteboard Friday, and she's currently polishing a new (and dramatically improved!) version of our Beginner's Guide to SEO.

At MozCon this year, she'll show you what she found at the bottom of the rabbit hole to save you the journey.


Lisa Myers

CEO, Verve Search

None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us

Success in SEO, or in any discipline, is frequently reliant on people’s ability to work together. Lisa Myers started Verve Search in 2009, and from the very beginning was convinced of the importance of building a diverse team, then developing and empowering them to find their own solutions.

In this session she’ll share her experiences and offer actionable advice on how to attract, develop and retain the right people in order to build a truly world-class team.


Heather Physioc

Director of Organic Search, VML

Your Red-Tape Toolkit:
How to Win Trust and Get Approval for Search Work

Are your search recommendations overlooked and misunderstood? Do you feel like you hit roadblocks at every turn? Are you worried that people don't understand the value of your work? Learn how to navigate corporate bureaucracy and cut through red tape to help clients and colleagues understand your search work — and actually get it implemented. From diagnosing client maturity to communicating where search fits into the big picture, these tools will equip you to overcome obstacles to doing your best work.


Mike Ramsey

President, Nifty Marketing

The Awkward State of Local

You know it exists. You know what a citation is, and have a sense for the importance of accurate listings. But with personalization and localization playing an increasing role in every SERP, local can no longer be seen in its own silo — every search and social marketer should be honing their understanding. For that matter, it's also time for local search marketers to broaden the scope of their work.


Wil Reynolds

Founder & Director of Digital Strategy, Seer Interactive

Excel Is for Rookies:
Why Every Search Marketer Needs to Get Strong in BI, ASAP

The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. I'll document my obsession with Power BI and the insights I can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.


Alexis Sanders

Technical SEO Account Manager, Merkle

Alexis works as a Technical SEO Account Manager at Merkle, ensuring the accuracy, feasibility, and scalability of the agency’s technical recommendations across all verticals. You've likely seen her on the Moz blog, Search Engine Land, OnCrawl, The Raven Blog, and TechnicalSEO.com. She's got a knack for getting the entire industry excited about the more technical aspects of SEO, and if you haven't already, you've got to check out the technical SEO challenge she created at https://TechnicalSEO.expert.


Darren Shaw

Founder, Whitespark

At the forefront of local SEO, Darren is obsessed with knowing all there is to know about local search. He organizes and publishes research initiatives such as the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey and the Local Search Ecosystem.

At MozCon this year, he'll unveil the newest findings from the Local Search Ranking Factors study, for which he's already noticing significant changes from the last release, letting SEOs of all stripes know how they need to adjust their approach.


Grab your ticket today!


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Focusing on Focus Styles

Not everyone uses a mouse to browse the internet. If you’re reading this post on a smartphone, this is obvious! What’s also worth pointing out is that there are other forms of input that people use to get things done. With these forms of input comes the need for focus styles.

People

People are complicated. We don’t necessarily perform the same behaviors consistently, nor do we always make decisions that make sense from an outsider’s perspective. Sometimes we even do something just to… do something. We get bored easily: tinkering, poking, and prodding things to customize them to better suit our needs, regardless of their original intent.

People are also mortal. We can get sick and injured. Sometimes both at once. Sometimes it’s for a little while, sometimes it’s permanent. Regardless, it means that sometimes we’re unable to do things we want or need to do in the way we’re used to.

People also live in the world. Sometimes we’re put into an environment where external factors conspire to prevent us from doing something the way that we’re accustomed to doing it. Ever been stuck at your parents’ house during the holidays and had to use their ancient-yet-still-serviceable desktop computer? It’s like that.

Input

Both mouse and touch input provide an indicator for interaction. For touch, it is obvious: Your finger acts as the bridge that connects your mind to the item on the screen it wants to activate. For mice, a cursor serves as a proxy for your finger.

However, these aren’t the only forms of input available to us. Keyboards are ubiquitous and can do just about anything a mouse or touch input can accomplish, provided you know all the right keys to press in the right order. Sometimes it’s even easier and faster than using a mouse!

Think about the last time you were using Cut, Copy, Paste, and Save functionality. Maybe it was the last time you were working on a spreadsheet? Were you switching between mouse and keyboard input to get things done as efficiently as possible? You probably didn’t give that behavior a second thought, but it’s a great example of switching input on the fly to best accomplish a goal. Heck, maybe you even took some "me time" during this thankless task to poke the Like button on Facebook on your smartphone.

If you have trouble using your hands, other options are available: Wands, sticks, switches, sip and puff devices, voice recognition, and eye tracking technology can all create input in a digital system. These devices will identify a content area and activate it. This is similar to how you can hit the tab key on a keyboard and the next cell in a spreadsheet will be highlighted, indicating that it has been moved to and is ready to be edited.

In this video, video editor and accessibility consultant Christopher Hills demonstrates the capabilities of Switch Control, software that helps people experiencing motor control impairments use hardware switches to operate their computing devices.

It’s worth pointing out that you could be relying on this technology one day, even if it’s only for a little bit. Maybe you broke both of your arms in an unfortunate mountain biking accident, and want to order some self-pity takeout while you recuperate. Maybe you’re driving and want to text your family safely. Or maybe you’ll just get old. It’s not difficult to think of other examples, it’s just not a concept people like to dwell on.

If it’s interactive, it needs a focus style

We can’t always know who is visiting our websites and web apps, why they’re visiting, what they’re going to do when they get there, what conditions they are experiencing, what emotions they’re feeling, or what input they may use. Analytics might provide some insight, but does not paint a full picture. It’d be foolish to have the tail wag the dog and optimize the entire experience based on this snapshot of limited information.

It’s also important to know that not everyone who uses assistive technology wants to be identified as an assistive technology user. Nor should they be forced to disclose this. Power users—people who leverage keyboard shortcuts, specialized software, and browser extensions—may appear to navigate like a user of assistive technology, yet may not be experiencing any disability conditions. Again, people are complicated!

What we can do is preemptively provide an experience that works for everyone, regardless of ability or circumstance.

Identify and activate

:focus

With these alternate forms of input, how do we identify something to show it can be activated? Fortunately, CSS has this problem handled—we use the :focus and :active selectors.

The grammar is straightforward. Want to outline a link in orange when a user focuses on it? Here’s how to describe it:

a:focus {
  outline: 3px solid orange;
}

This outline will appear when someone navigates to the link, be it by clicking or tapping, tabbing to it via keyboard input, or using switch input to highlight it.

A common misconception is that the focus style can only use the outline property. It’s worth noting that :focus is a selector like any other, meaning that it accepts the full range of CSS properties. I like to play with background color, underlining, and other techniques that don’t adjust the component’s current size, so as to not shift page layout when the selector is activated.

Then say we want to remove the link’s underline when activated to communicate a shift in state. Remember: links use underlines!

a:active {
  text-decoration: none;
}

It’s important to make sure the state changes, from resting to focused to activated, are distinct. This means that each transition should be unique when compared to the component’s other states, allowing the user to understand that a change has occurred.

We also want to make sure these state changes don’t rely on color alone, to best accommodate people experiencing color blindness and/or low vision. Here’s how a color-only state change might look to a person with Deuteranopia, commonly known as Red-Green colorblindness:

I purposely removed the underline and the browser’s native focus ring from the link in the video to better illustrate the issue of discoverability. When trying to tab around the page to determine what is interactive, it isn’t immediately obvious that there is a link present. If colorblindness is also a factor, the state change when hovered won’t be apparent—this is even more apparent with the addition of cataracts.

:focus-within

:focus-within—a focus-related pseudo class selector with a very Zen-sounding name—can apply styling to a parent element when one of its children receives focus. The focus event bubbles out until it encounters a CSS rule asking it to apply its styling instructions.

A common use case for this selector would be to apply styling to an entire form when one of its input elements receives focus. In the example below, I’m scaling up the size of the entire form slightly, unless the user has expressed a desire for a reduced animation experience:

See the Pen :focus-within Demo by Eric Bailey (@ericwbailey) on CodePen.

The selector is still relatively new, so I’m sure we’ll get more clever applications as time goes on.

Politics

People also have opinions. Unfortunately, sometimes these opinions are uninformed. Outside the practice of accessibility there’s the prevalent notion that focus styles are "ugly" and many designers and developers remove them for the sake of perceived aesthetics. Sometimes they’re not even aware they’re propagating someone else’s opinion—many CSS resets include a blanket removal of focus styles and are incorporated as a foundational project dependency with no questions asked.

This decision excludes people. Websites and web apps aren’t close-cropped trophies to be displayed without context on a dribbble profile, nor are they static screenshots on a slick corporate sales deck. They exist to be read and acted upon, and there’s rules that help ensure that the largest possible amount of people can do exactly that.

:focus-visible

The fact of the matter is that sometimes people will insist on removing focus styles, and have enough clout to force their cohorts to carry out their vision. This flies in the face of rules that stipulate that focus mechanisms must be visible for websites to be truly accessible. To get around this, we have the :focus-visible pseudo-selector.

:focus-visible pseudo-selector styling kicks in when the browser determines that a focus event occurred, and User Agent heuristics inform it that non-pointer input is being used. That’s a fancy way of saying it shows focus styling when activated via input via other than mouse cursor or finger tap.

The video of this CodePen demonstrates how different styling is applied based on the kind of input the link receives. When a link is hovered and clicked on via mouse input, its underline is removed and shifts down slightly. When tabbed to via keyboard input, :focus-visible applies a stark background color to the link instead.

Chromium has recently announced its intent to implement :focus-visible. Although browser support is currently extremely limited, a polyfill is available. Both it and :focus-within are in the Selectors Level 4 Editor’s Draft, and therefore likely to have native support in the major browsers sooner than later.

You may know :focus-visible by its other name, :-moz-focusring. This vendor prefixed pseudo-selector is Mozilla’s implementation of the idea, predating the :focus-visible proposal by seven years. Unlike other vendor prefixed CSS, we’re not going to have to worry about autoprefixing support! Firefox honors a :focus-visible declaration as well as :-moz-focusring, ensuring there will be parity for our selector names between the two browsers.

One step forward, one step back

Browser support is a bit of a rub—the web is more than just Chrome and Firefox. While the polyfill may provide support where there is none natively, it’s extra data to download, extra complexity to maintain, and extra fragility added to your payload.

There’s also the fact that devices are far less binary about their input types than they used to be. The Surface, Microsoft’s flagship computer, offers keyboard, trackpad, stylus, camera, voice, and touch capability out of the box. WebAIM’s 2017 Screen Reader Survey revealed that mobile devices may be augmented by keyboard input more than you may think. Heuristics are nice, but like analytics, may not paint a complete picture.

Another point to consider is that focus styles can be desirable for mouse users. Their presence is a clear and unambiguous indication of interactivity, which is a great affordance for people with low vision conditions, cognitive concerns, and people who are less technologically adept. Extraordinarily technologically adept people, ones who grok that screen readers and keyboard shortcuts are essentially Vim for a GUI, will want the focus state to be apparent as they use the keyboard to dance across the screen.

Part of building a robust, resilient web involves building a strong core experience that works in every browser. The vanilla :focus selector enjoys both wide and deep support to the degree that it’s a safe bet that even exotic browsers will honor it.

The world is full of things that some people may see as ugly, while others find them to be beautiful. Personally, I don’t see focus styles as an eyesore. As a designer, I think that it’s a foundational part of creating a mature design system. As a developer, describing state is just business as usual. As a person, I enjoy helping to keep the web open and accessible, as it was intended to be.


If you’d like to learn more about the subject, UX Designer Caitlin Geier has a great writeup on focus indicators.

The post Focusing on Focus Styles appeared first on CSS-Tricks.



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The revolutionary project management tool

Understanding Logical Properties And Values

Wednesday 28 March 2018

Just How Much is Your Website Worth, Anyhow? An Easy Guide to Valuation

Posted by efgreg

We all work hard building our businesses.

We put in the sweat equity and all the tears that can come with it to build something truly great. After another day hustling at the office or typing furiously on your keyboard, you might be wondering… what is the end game here?

What are you really going for? Is there a glowing neon sign with the word “Exit” marking the path to your ultimate goal?

For the majority of businesses, the end goal is to eventually sell that business to another entrepreneur who wants to take the reins and simply enjoy the profits from the sale. Alas, most of us don’t even know what our business is worth, much less how to go about selling it — or if it's even sellable to begin with.

That's where Empire Flippers comes in. We've been brokering deals for years in the online business space, serving a quiet but hungry group of investors who are looking to acquire digital assets. The demand for profitable digital assets has been growing so much that our brokerage was able to get on the Inc. 5000 list two years in a row, both times under the 500 mark.

We can say with confidence that, yes, there is indeed an exit for your business.

By the end of this article you're going to know more about how online businesses are valued, what buyers are looking for, and how you can get the absolute top dollar for your content website, software as a service (SaaS), or e-commerce store.

(You might have noticed I didn’t include the word “agency” in the last paragraph. Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible. Even though having clients is great, other digital assets are far easier to sell.)

If you’ve built a digital asset you’re looking to exit from, the first question you likely have is, “This sounds fantastic, but how do I go about putting an actual price tag on what I’ve created?”

We’ll dive into those answers below, but first let’s talk about why you're already in a great position just by being a reader of the Moz Blog.

Why is SEO the most valuable traffic for a digital asset?

SEO is by far the most attractive traffic source for people looking at purchasing online businesses.

The beauty of SEO is that once you’ve put in the work to achieve the rankings, they can maintain and bring in traffic for sometimes months without significant upkeep. That's in stark contrast with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, such as Facebook ads, which require daily monitoring to make sure nothing strange is happening with your conversions or that you’re not overspending.

For someone who has no experience with traffic generation but wants to purchase a profitable online business, an SEO-fueled website just makes sense. They can earn while they learn. When they purchase the asset (typically a content website for people just starting out), they can play around with adding new high-quality pieces of content and learn about more complicated SEO techniques down the road.

Even someone who is a master at paid traffic loves SEO. They might buy an e-commerce store that has some real potential with Facebook ads that's currently driving the majority of its traffic through SEO, and treat the SEO as gravy on top of the paid traffic they plan to drive toward that e-commerce store.

Whether the buyer is a newbie or a veteran, SEO as a traffic method has one of the widest appeals of any other traffic strategy. While SEO itself does not increase the value of the business in most cases, it does attract more buyers than other forms of traffic.

Now, let’s get down to what your business is worth.

How are online businesses actually valued?

How businesses are valued is such a common question we get at our brokerage that we created an automated valuation tool that gives a free estimate of your business’s value, which our audience uses with all of their different projects.

At the heart of any valuation is a fairly basic formula:

You look at your rolling 12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible (something we’ll talk about later in this article).

You might see some brokers using a 2x or 3x EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.

When you see this formula, they’re using an annual multiple, whereas at Empire Flippers we use a monthly multiple. There's really not much of a difference between the two formulas; it mainly depends on your preference, but if you’re brand new to buying and selling online businesses, then it's helpful to know how different brokers price businesses.

We prefer the monthly multiple since it shows a more granular picture of the business and where it's trending.

Just like you can influence Google SERPs with SEO knowledge, so can you manipulate this formula to give you a better valuation as long as you know what you’re looking at.

How to move the multiple needle in your favor

There are various things you can do to get a higher multiple. A lot of it comes down to just common sense and really putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes.

A useful thing to ask: “Would I ever buy my business? Why? Why not?”

This exercise can lead you to change a lot of things about your business for the better.

The two areas that most affect the multiple come down to your actual average net profit and how long the business has been around making money.

Average net profit

The higher your average net profit, the higher your multiple will tend to be because it's a bigger cash-flowing asset. It makes sense then to look at various ways you can increase that net profit and decrease your total amount of expenses.

Every digital asset is a little different in where their expenses are coming from. For content sites, content creation costs are typically the lion’s share of expenses. As you approach the time of sale, you might want to scale back your content. In other cases, you may want to move to an agency solution where you can scale or minimize your content expenses at will rather than having in-house writers on the payroll.

There are also expenses that you might be applying to the business but aren’t really “needed” in operating the business, known as add-backs.

Add-backs

Add-backs are where you add certain expenses BACK into the net profit. These are items that you might’ve charged on the business account but aren’t really relevant to running the business.

These could be drinks, meals, or vacations put on the business account, and sometimes even business conferences. For example, going to a conference about email marketing might not be considered a “required” expense to running a health content site, whereas going to a sourcing conference like the Canton Fair would be a harder add-back to justify when it comes to running an e-commerce store.

Other things, such as SEO tools you’re using on a monthly basis, can likely be added back to the business. Most people won’t need them constantly to run and grow their business. They might subscribe for a month, get all the keyword data they need for a while, cancel, and then come back when they’re ready to do more keyword research.

Most of your expenses won’t be add-backs, but it is good to keep these in mind as they can definitely increase the ultimate sales price of your business.

When not to cut expenses

While there's usually a lot of fat you can cut from your business, you need to be reasonable about it. Cutting some things might improve your overall net profit, but vastly decrease the attractability of your business.

One common thing we see in the e-commerce space is solopreneurs starting to package and ship all of the items themselves to their customers. The thinking goes that they’re saving money by doing it themselves. While this may be true, it's not an attractive solution to a potential buyer.

It's far more attractive to spend money on a third-party solution that can store and ship the product for you as orders come in. After all, many buyers are busy traveling the world while having an online business. Forcing them to settle down just so they can ship products versus hanging out on the beaches of Bali for a few months during winter is a tough ask.

When selling a business, you don’t want to worry only about expenses, but also how easy it is to plug into and start running that business for a buyer.

Even if the systems you create to do that add extra expenses, like using a third party to handle fulfillment, they’re often more than worth keeping around because they make the business look more attractive to buyers.

Length of history

The more history you can show, the more attractive your business will be, as long as it's holding at a steady profit level or showing an upward trend.

The more your business is trending upward, the higher multiple you're going to get.

While you can’t do much in terms of lengthening the business’s history, you can prepare yourself for the eventual sale by investing in needed items early on in your business. For example, if you know your website needs a big makeover and you’re 24 months out from selling, it's better to do that big website redesign now instead of during the 12-month average your business will be priced on.

Showing year-over-year growth is also beneficial in getting a better multiple, because it shows your business can weather growing pains. This ability to weather business challenges is especially true in a business whose primary traffic is Google-organic. It shows that the site has done quality SEO by surviving several big updates over the course of a few years.

On the flipside, a trending downward business is going to get a much worse multiple, likely in the 12–18x range. A business in decline can still be sold, though. There are specific buyers that only want distressed assets because they can get them at deep discounts and often have the skill sets needed to fix the site.

You just have to be willing to take a lower sales price due to the decline, and since a buyer pool on distressed assets is smaller, you’ll likely have a longer sales cycle before you find someone willing to acquire the asset.

Other factors that lead to a higher multiple

While profit and length of history are the two main factors, there are a bunch of smaller factors that can add up to a significant increase in your multiple and ultimate valuation price.

You’ll have a fair amount of control with a lot of these, so they’re worth maximizing as much as possible in the 12–24 month window where you are preparing your online business for sale.

1. Minimize critical points of failure

Critical points of failure are anything in your business that has the power to be a total deal breaker. It's not rare to sell a business that has one or two critical points, but even so you want to try to minimize this as much as possible.

An example of a critical point of failure could be where all of your website traffic is purely Google-organic. If the site gets penalized by a Google algorithm update, it could kill all of your traffic and revenue overnight.

Likewise, if you’re an Amazon affiliate and Amazon suddenly changes their Terms of Service, you could get banned for reasons you don’t understand or even have time to react to, ending up with a highly trafficked site that makes zero money.

In the e-commerce space, we see situations where the entrepreneur only has one supplier that can make their product. What happens if that supplier wants to jack up the prices or suddenly goes out of business completely?

It's worth your while to diversify your traffic sources, have multiple monetization strategies for a content site, or investigate having backup or even competing suppliers for your e-commerce products.

Every business has some kind of weakness; your job is to minimize those weaknesses as much as possible to get the most value out of your business from a potential buyer.

2. High amounts of traffic

Higher traffic tends to correlate with higher revenue, which ultimately should increase your net profit. That all goes without saying; however, high traffic also can be an added bonus to your multiple on top of helping create a solid net profit.

Many buyers look for businesses they can optimize to the extreme at every point of the marketing funnel. When you have a high amount of traffic, you give them a lot of room to play with different conversion rate optimization factors like increasing email options, creating or crafting a better abandoned cart sequence, and changing the various calls to action on the site.

While many sellers might be fantastic at driving traffic, they might not exactly be the biggest pro at copywriting or CRO in general; this is where a big opportunity lies for the right buyer who might be able to increase conversions with their own copywriting or CRO skill.

3. Email subscribers

It's almost a cliche in the Internet marketing space to say “the money is in the list.” Email has often been one of the biggest drivers of revenue for companies, but there's a weird paradigm we’ve discovered after selling hundreds of online businesses.

Telling someone they should use an email list is pretty similar to telling someone to go to the gym: they agree it’s useful and they should do it, but often they do nothing about it. Then there are those who do build an email list because they understand its power, but then never do anything useful with it.

This results in email lists being a hit-or-miss on whether they actually add any value to your business’s final valuation.

If you can prove the email list is adding value to your business, then your email list CAN improve your overall multiple. If you use good email automation sequences to up-sell your traffic and routinely email the list with new offers and pieces of high-quality content, then your email list has real value associated with it, which will reflect on your final valuation.

4. Social media following

Social media has become more and more important as time goes on, but it can also be an incredibly fickle beast.

It's best to think of your social media following as a “soft” email list. The reach of your social media following compared to your email list will tend to be lower, especially as social organic reach keeps declining on bigger social platforms like Facebook. In addition, you don’t own the platform that following is built off of, meaning it can be taken away from you anytime for reasons outside of your control.

Plus, it's just too easy to fake followers and likes.

However, if you can wade through all that and prove that your social following and social media promotion are driving real traffic and sales to your business, it will definitely help in increasing your multiple.

5. How many product offerings you have

Earning everything from a single product is somewhat risky.

What happens if that product goes out of style? Or gets discontinued?

Whether you’re running an e-commerce store or a content site monetizing through affiliate links, you want to have several different product offerings.

When you have several products earning good money through your website, then a buyer will find the business ultimately more attractive and value it more because you won’t be hurt in a big way if one of the “flavors of the month” disappears on you.

6. Hours required

Remember, the majority of buyers are not looking at acquiring a job. They want a leveraged cash-flowing investment they can ideally scale up.

While there's nothing wrong with working 40–50+ hours per week on a business that is really special, it will narrow your overall buyer pool and make the business less attractive. The truth is, most of the digital assets we’re creating don’t really require this amount of work from the owner.

What we typically see is that there are a lot of areas for improvement that the seller can use to minimize their weekly hour allotment to the business. We recommend that everyone looking to sell their business first consider how they can minimize their actual involvement.

The three most effective ways to cut down on your time spent are:

  • Systemization: Automating as much of your business as possible
  • Developing a team: The biggest wins we see here tend to be in content creation, customer service, general operations, and hiring a marketing agency to do the majority of the heavy lifting for you. While these add costs that drive down the average net profit, they also make your business far more attractive.
  • Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs): SOPs should outline the entire process of a specific function of the business and should be good enough that if you handed them off to someone, they could do the job 80 percent as well as you.

You should always be in a position where you’re working ON your business and not IN.

7. Dig a deeper moat

At Empire Flippers, we’re always asking people if they built a deep enough moat around their business. A deep moat means your business is harder to copy. A copycat can’t just go buy a domain and some hosting and copy your business in an afternoon.

A drop-shipping store that can be copied in a single day is not going to be nearly as attractive as one that has built up a real following and a community around their brand, even if they sell the same products.

This fact becomes more and more important as your business valuation goes into the multiple six-figure and seven-figure valuation ranges because buyers are looking to buy a real brand at this point, not just a niche site.

Here are a few actions you can take to deepen this moat:

  • Niche down and own the market with your brand (a woodworking website might focus specifically on benches, for example, where you’re hiring expert artisans to write content on the subject).
  • Source your products and make them unique, rather than another “me too” product.
  • Negotiate special terms with your affiliate managers or suppliers. If you’ve been sending profitable traffic to an affiliate offer, often you can just email the affiliate manager asking for a pay bump and they’ll gladly give it. Likewise, if you’re doing good business for a drop-shipping supplier, they might be open to doing an exclusivity agreement with you. Make sure all of these special terms are transferable to the buyer, though.

The harder it is to copy what you’ve built, the higher the multiple you’ll get.

But why would you EVER sell your online business in the first place?

You’re now well-equipped with knowledge on how to increase your business’s ultimate value, but why would you actually sell it?

The reasons are vast and numerous — too many to list in this post. However, there are a few common reasons you might resonate with.

Here are a few business reasons why people sell their businesses:

  • Starting a new business or wanting to focus on other current projects
  • Seeking to use the capital to leverage themselves into a more competitive (and lucrative) space
  • Having lost any interest in running the business and want to sell the asset off before it starts reflecting their lack of interest through declining revenue
  • Wanting to cash out of the business to invest in offline investments like real estate, stocks, bonds, etc.

Just as there are a ton of business reasons to sell, there are also a ton of personal reasons why people sell their business:

  • Getting a divorce
  • Purchasing a home for their family (selling one digital asset can be a hefty down payment for a home, or even cover the entirety of the home)
  • Having medical issues
  • Other reasons: We had one seller on our marketplace whose reason for selling his business was to get enough money to adopt a child.

When you can collect 20–50 months of your net profit upfront, you can do a lot of things that just weren’t options before.

When you have a multiple six-figure or even seven-figure war chest, you can often outspend the competition, invest in infrastructure and teams you couldn’t before, and in general jumpstart your next project or business idea far faster without ever having to worry about if a Google update is going tank your earnings or some other unforeseen market change.

That begs the question...

When should you sell?

Honestly, it depends.

The answer to this question is more of an art than a science.

As a rule of thumb, you should ask yourself if you’re excited by the kind of money you’ll get from the successful sale of your online business.

You can use our valuation tool to get a ballpark estimate or do some back-of-the-napkin math of what you’re likely to receive for the business using the basic multiple formula I outlined. I prefer to always be on the conservative side with my estimations, so your napkin math might be taking your 12-month average net profit with a multiple of 25x.

Does that number raise your eyebrows? Is it even interesting?

If it is, then you might want to start asking yourself if you really are ready to part with your business to focus on other things. Remember, you should always set a MINIMUM sales price that you’d be willing to walk away from the business with, something that would still make you happy if you went through with it.

Most of us Internet marketers are always working on multiple projects at once. Sadly, some projects just don’t get the love they deserve or used to get from us.

Instead of letting those projects just die off in the background, consider selling your online business instead to a very hungry market of investors starting to flood our digital realm.

Selling a business, even if it's a side project that you’re winding down, is always going to be an intimate process. When you're ready to pull the trigger, we’ll be there to help you every step of the way.

Have you thought about selling your online business, or gone through a sale in the past? Let us know your advice, questions, or anecdotes in the comments.


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Quick Reminder that Details/Summary is the Easiest Way Ever to Make an Accordion

React’s New Context API Explained

In this video tutorial, Wes Bos looks into the new context API and the problem that it’s trying to solve:

React 16.3 has a new Context API which makes accessing data and functions anywhere in your application a snap. If you ever find yourself passing data down via props 4-5 levels deep, context might be what you are looking for.

Don’t forget about Neal Fennimore’s recent post on putting things into context. It covers the concept in great detail and provides some workarounds for the quirks you might encounter when using it.

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On Paid Newsletters: An Interview With Adam Roberts of SitePoint’s Versioning

You don’t often think of email as something you pay to get. If anything, most people would pay to get less of it. Of course, there are always emails you like to get and opt into on purpose. We have a newsletter right here on CSS-Tricks that we really try to make worth reading. It’s free, like the vast majority of email newsletters. We hope it helps a bit with engagement and we make it worth doing financially by showing the occasional advertisement. It’s certainly not a full-time job.

I spoke with Adam Roberts who is trying to make it a full-time job by running SitePoint’s Versioning newsletter as a paid subscription. I don’t know much about this world, so I find it all pretty fascinating. I know Ann Friedman has a paid newsletter with a free variant. I know theSkimm is a free newsletter but has a paid membership that powers their app. I was told Bill Bishop made six figures on his first day going paid, which is wild. In the tech space, Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is a paid newsletter.

Let’s hear from Adam on how it’s doing it. I’ll ask questions as headers and the paragraph text is Adam.


So you're doing it! Making the transition from a free, advertising-supported newsletter to a paid, subscriber-based newsletter. There is a lot to dig into here. Is the motivation a more direct and honest relationship with your readers?

Yep, it's crazy! Versioning provides devs, designers and web people curated links aimed at making them more productive and up-to-date with the bleeding edge of their industry. I've done the newsletter for nearly four years and, up until now, it's been a thing I squeeze in for an hour or two during my day, as a break from my actual job (most recently, head of content for the site). Now, it's no longer being squeezed, and is my actual job! I can now focus entirely on making it something people find valuable. They'll know that everything I include is there because I think it'll make their lives, skills or knowledge better. I've always set a high standard for myself when it comes to what I include—never something I'm 50/50 on (unless it's an emerging tech) and I never include something because we have a deal or something. Now, this is an actual formal thing. Ads were always a means to an end, now we have a better means, and hopefully a better end!

Is it a straight cut? Anyone who doesn't subscribe for a fee will stop getting it and have no way to read it?

If you sign up as a paid member, you'll get the daily newsletter. It’s also viewable on the site, so what you are paying for is really the convenience of email. You’ll also get periodic members-only updates, like deep dives on an emerging subject, always-updated posts on important subjects, and media guides. If you sign up to receive free updates, you'll get a weekly update plus other periodic free updates.

I'm sure there are financial concerns. Anyone in this position would be nervous that paid subscribers won't match what was coming in from advertisers before. Is that a concern here? How in-depth did you get trying to figure out the economics of it? Is there potential that it's even better business?

Given this is a SitePoint venture and not my own thing, we had to make sure it was worthwhile for subscribers and that the numbers were friendly! There's definitely potential this will work better in a financial sense, while also be being better for subscribers—we wouldn't be doing it otherwise!

Do you have a good sense of what your readers want from you? It seems to me Versioning is largely a link-dump, but with your hand-curation and light commentary. Did you come to that over time?

I have always had a fairly active reader base, with people dropping me a line via email or Twitter to thank me for something they liked. We also have the requisite creepy email analytics (e.g. opens and clicks), which help to spot trends and subjects to focus on or avoid. It's a challenge to cover a few different subject areas well (like front-end and back-end development, design, etc.) but I think most readers working in a particular niche in our industry find it helpful to know what everyone else is up to. The world also evolves quickly—the first edition covered a jQuery library, for example. That's not an area that's stayed in the forefront of the news since! Mind you, the first edition also had a Star Wars link, so maybe some things do stay the same.

I struggle with even knowing what I want from a newsletter. Most days, give me some personality. I want news but I want to know why I should care and I want an expert to tell me. Then other days, I hate to say it, but I want less talk and more links. Cool story about a goat, but I'm here for the performance links (or whatever). Are you a newsletter connoisseur yourself? Are you writing a newsletter you wanna read?

I think if I ran into Versioning in the wild, I'd want to subscribe to it. I'm working to try to get the content balance right—providing the right stuff for people, plus commentary that's enjoyable. The other day I had links to an article on understanding state in React (I think it was on some site called CCS-Tricks, am I spelling that right? 😉), an article on fake science gurus on Facebook, one on an Australian cyborg who tried to pay for a train with a chip in his hand, and the video for Warren G’s Regulate (an allusion to the likely response to the various Facebook crises).

I subscribe to so many newsletters, and they're all different. I think consistency in each newsletter helps. If I was to drop the format and post a long, detailed screed about one subject, that would not go over well. My aim is to include one link that every reader wants to click. Often, that's all you can handle as a reader, especially on mobile where the interface doesn't make collecting tabs easy. That's also why I include the destination domain in brackets next to every link—I don't want people to end up somewhere they're not expecting. Also, some sites (like the The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Wired) have limits on the number of free articles people can view. I don't want people to accidentally run out of freebies because of me—I want them to realize how much they value a site and support it.

Do paid newsletters replace the traditional blog or do you see them complementing one another? We’ve obviously been using our newsletter to support the blog and vice versa, but I’m curious if adding a paid layer changes that relationship.

The formats have different, complementary strengths, and so I don’t think the paid layer necessarily changes this. Newsletters are good at highlighting particularly important things, putting them in context, and maybe taking a long view of a certain issue. Sites (or blogs) are good at adding interactive elements and keeping content up-to-date and accurate as things change.

In our case, one of the things our email platform, Substack, allows us to do is send a particular edition out as both a newsletter and a post. This means a member can access it wherever is best for them. It also means I can do things like send out an initial newsletter outlining a particular topic, then update the online version with new content. I will use this to produce updated, canonical posts for a particular subject or technology. And these formats can be either free to all, or only available to paid members. There’s a lot you can do with this level of flexibility, I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface. The key is to produce something worthwhile for an audience and the format is secondary.

What is it about newsletters that seems to be clicking with people lately? If someone asked you, hey, I have a ton to say about this general topic, and so I'm thinking of either starting a blog or a newsletter, would you say newsletter? Any SEO concerns there?

There is a backlash against the algorithmic tide. Instead of opening a feed and hoping for good content, why not find someone you trust, and whose opinion and taste you find interesting and useful, and sign up to consistently receive content from them. You'll still get the "something new and cool" dopamine hit you would in a feed, but it'll be more consistent and reliable. And they're all separate entities; there's no "if you followed this publication, maybe you should follow this other one" thing. And if you stop enjoying them, you can just unsubscribe.

Newsletters are intimate. Your inbox is your personal space, where you step back from the tumult and take stock of the stuff that you've decided matters most to you. That's why spam and relentless, poorly-conceived marketing emails always feel like such a violation.

I think newsletters and podcasts are both growing in prominence for the same reasons. Both mediums reward consistency and reliability in format and topic, are built on personality, and have an intimate feel. Someone's either talking into your ears for hours every week, or writing to you in your private space.

Speaking of concerns, SEO is a tricky one. Algorithms are part of the discussion here again. SitePoint has a pretty decent search footprint, but new and niche publications aren't so lucky. I suspect there will be a mini-industry of newsletter curation services start to develop. I would actually love to be in that space.

Filter bubbles are another concern. Newsletters are another opportunity for people to only read the stuff they agree with. But it turns out algorithms and social networks aren't so good at stopping that either!

I was very, very, very sad to see the end of the Awl (and the Hairpin). That was a site that was chock-full of amazing content that was not targeted to appeal to Facebook and such, and as a result, it ultimately wasn't sustainable. It kind of feels like such cases—plus the re-tooling of Facebook's feed away from publications and towards people, and the rise of newsletters—are all related. It's reductive to say "newsletters are the new blogs," but it's probably not far off. I would 100% be telling someone to start a newsletter. Actually, I'd tell them to use Substack, but I would have to declare my bias!

Tech-wise, what tooling are you using to curate, create, and send here?

I love talking about this stuff! Uses This is one of my favorite sites. Honestly, it's pretty low-tech at the moment, just busy. I have a Pocket account with a #versioning tag, so that often gives me a dozen or so links at the start of the day, sourced from my internet meanderings through the evening. I subscribe to a million newsletters, both in my work and personal accounts, on a hopefully both diverse and relevant range of topics.

I subscribe to quite a few RSS feeds using Feedly, too. Nuzzel, which sends you a daily/weekly digest of the most-shared links among people you're following in Twitter and Facebook, is very useful here too. I have a personal Twitter/Nuzzel feed, plus one I've specifically set up for this purpose. Refind is another service trying to solve this problem. Its breadth and depth kind of give me a headache though. They've got a Nuzzel-like daily/weekly digest, a service for creating your own newsletters, a cryptocurrency—there's a lot.

I also have the requisite very big Tweetdeck set-up to grab other links that catch my eye. Oh, and Initab is a new Chrome tab extension you can populate with feeds from certain subreddits and other place. I've been playing around with psuedo-Tweetdeck-for-Reddit services too. And Spectrum is a new community service thing I found last week, looks like it could be a winner too. And I need to be more active in Facebook groups. Also, Slack!

So yeah, there's a lot. A bit of a combo of algorithms and people, hopefully I have the balance right. I also change newsletters, feeds, and other sources regularly, trying to find a better balance.

As for collecting and writing, it's actually fairly simple—I find something I like, copy the URL into a Markdown doc, then write a description. I deliberately use a web-based Markdown editor (currently Stackedit, though I have used Dillinger and Classeur in the past). Something web-based is good because I can easily tab to it without having to switch to a new app. Stackedit is good because you can paste the generated preview directly into Campaign Monitor and (now) Substack and have formatting and links sorted. I then have a Google Doc to collect links I've already shared, and to gauge the reception in the audience—I want to spot trends like a rising interest in micro-services.

Building emails is something we all sort of love and loathe as front-end developers. How did you approach your email design and did you learn anything from building it?

Yes, email design is hard! Fortunately for me, the content and approach I’ve adopted lends itself to a stripped-back design with very little going on. Versioning is just text and a few images, so it required practically zero design. Our use of Campaign Monitor and now Substack meant we could sidestep some of the template work. In general terms though, my advice would be:

  • Focus on the purpose and content of the newsletter, produce a template based on that. It’s more important to produce something compelling, promote it in the right places, gain an audience, and then keep it (and grow it) by making sure you’re consistent in your production.
  • If you can (via a survey or through whatever data your email platform offers) work out what devices and platforms your audience uses to access email. People read email in all sorts of obscure ways, but you can likely cover the main ones for your audience with relatively little effort.
  • Don’t forget the plaintext user! Make sure your URLs are short, your images have alt tags, you’re generally nice to those in your audience who are in this boat. Versioning, given the niche, has a high proportion of these.
  • If all else fails, work with an expert or use one of a plethora of tools and services to do the work for you. Substack has a stripped-back CMS, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp have built-in template builders, and there are plenty of other services you could use. The compatibility issues with email are legendary. You could instead spend your time on things like a distinctive logo and branding or a landing page that communicates your newsletter’s value.

Ultimately people will enjoy a simple newsletter full of content they love presented in a way they can absorb. The design shouldn’t tie you in knots!

Let’s open this up to readers. Are you into the idea of paid newsletters?

The post On Paid Newsletters: An Interview With Adam Roberts of SitePoint’s Versioning appeared first on CSS-Tricks.



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