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Categories vs. tags, Casper’s content marketing strategy, 10 fantastic email onboarding sequences, and other short stories

Yo.

Today I’m going to share one of the most confounding popovers I have ever seen. Like, stopped-me-in-my-tracks-and-made-me-slack-my-whole-team bad.

But griping is for dessert. First, some content strategy veggies.


***

Meow that’s content strategy
Quick blog question: What’s the difference between a category and a tag?

If you’re starting a new blog or reorganizing an existing one, you’ll want to have a quick answer. It’ll keep you (and your content architecture) sane.

As readers, we use both categories and tags to find similar content. But from a content architectural standpoint, they play different roles.

  • Categories deal with hierarchical groupings and are most useful for helping people and search engines understand what topics your content covers. You can nest subcategories within categories.
  • Tags, on the other hand, are non-hierarchical. Tags mark content that touches on a specific, non-nested topics—often topics that span the existing categories on your site.

It’s easy to get caught in the quicksand of sub-sub-subcategories. So I like to use an analogy to keep me grounded: thinking of a blog kind of like the animal kingdom.

For example, we know that tigers belong to the same general category of animal as house cats and jaguars. We know that zebras and donkeys and horses are equids. But when we think of animals with stripes, tigers and zebras immediately come to mind.

Now let’s pretend we’re running a blog about animals. “Cats” and “Equids” might make good categories—but we’d use “stripes,” “spots,” and “gills” as tags.



What’s your (new) domain rating?
Ahrefs just finished rolling out their new approach to Domain Ratings (which is analogous to Moz’s “Domain Authority”). It’s a sophisticated approach to thinking about how a site’s link profile stacks up against others.

If you’re an SEO, read the whole update. But for everyone else, here’s some important things to know:

  1. DR is NOT a measure of a website’s quality and legitimacy.
  2. Google doesn’t have a website authority score (says Google’s John Mueller)
  3. Ahrefs does NOT pass DR to “service root domains.” So if you’re writing at skunkyourself.wordpress.com, you’re not going to get in on WordPress’ epic DR.
  4. DR is relative to every other indexed site on the Web, which means your score can go down even if you don’t lose backlinks. Since it’s a ranking system, you can expect to move down when other sites move up, and vice versa.

Also, there’s this sweet graph on how internal links and search positions correlate.


Seriously, remember to interlink up your blog posts. A good way to do this is to begin each month by going through everything you published last month and checking for opportunities to interlink the new content with the old.


10 winning onboarding drips
When your email shows up in someone’s inbox, they need to know who you are and why you’re there. Context is the difference between a well-executed onboarding campaign and spam. Your welcome sequence sets the tone and expectations for your relationship.

While you’re bound to find people touting hard and fast onboarding rules, there are always going to be companies that break them and succeed anyways. So we put together a list of ten successful email drip case studies, with takeaways.

Good news: there’s a lot of ways to do this. Bad news: there’s no magic bullet. We found companies that:
  • Come out swinging and upsell brand-new customers within 30 minutes of their first purchase.
  • Can identify people’s personas 10 minutes after they start a free trial.
  • Slowly nurture their leads and don’t “make the ask” for weeks.

Check out Ryan Nelson’s write-up: I guarantee you’ll reference it in your next conversation about onboarding emails.


Casper’s content marketing moves
Casper’s revolutionary bed-in-a-box startup has made more than $300 million in their first three years. Content played an interesting role in their rapid growth.

We tore down Casper’s content marketing to find out what any marketer can take away from the hit direct-to-consumer company. If you want to become a household name, Casper’s a brand you can’t afford to ignore.

In this report, you’ll see how Casper:

Check out the monster report here.

* A dopetangle is a geometric shape that you learn in the raddest of preschools



Worst. Popover. Ever.
Can someone please explain to me how this possibly, possibly makes sense?!

“What’s the best way to let random visitors know we like improving user experiences?”

“How about we interrupt their user experience to tell them so?”

Brilliant.

That’s all for today, friends.

Thanks for being smart with me.

Jeffrey Kranz
Co-founder, Overthink Group
Jeffrey@OverthinkGroup.com

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