Howdy, You
In this issue of our newsletter, we're getting pretty technical (which should come as a surprise to no one). It feels like there are two camps in digital marketing these days: one that believes you can get by without being very "technical" and another that believes you need to have at least a basic understanding of web technology to be truly successful. At UpBuild, we're part of the latter group.
I personally believe that anyone in digital marketing should make a continued effort to learn a little more about technical topics as time goes by. After all, we spend most of our professional lives driving traffic to web properties; seems that we should have a handle on what makes those properties tick. There's a high probability that this investment will allow us to do our jobs better.
At UpBuild, we've already spent a good chunk of time this quarter taking courses at CodeSchool. We also keep an eye out for interesting posts on web tech and try to push our geeky limits as often as we can. Sometimes, we even find technical inspiration when we're not expecting it (see the first post shared below).
Technical yet accessible blog content is the theme of this week's newsletter. Even if that pair of adjectives doesn't get you excited, the concepts in the posts below are still going to be digestible and are worth thinking about. And if you want to ask questions about any of it, we're here and happy to help. Just hit "reply."
Thanks for reading, You.
Mike Arnesen
Founder & CEO at UpBuild
P.S. We also have an episode of CNN's Mostly Human that we wanted to share this week. Check that out near the bottom.
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How One Client Helped Us Level-Up Our Technical Semantic SEO Game
In our most recent blog post, "How to Combine Multiple Schema.org Itemtype Declarations in a Single Script," our own Will Hattman shares how we learned to use @graph to improve our JSON-LD scripts. This is going to change how we execute on semantic SEO strategies for the better, and it was prompted by a back-and-forth with one of our amazing clients. Will tells the story better than I could, so head to our site to read the full post. It's exciting stuff. |
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Top Post on LinkedIn
"UpBuild made an offer to an impressive candidate yesterday. They accepted and signed in less than an hour. The person was 2,000+ miles away from UpBuild's on-paper home base, so all paperwork was handled digitally. I only spoke to the candidate once during the entire process; all other interviewing was done via email, chat, and Trello. Didn't know he had an accent. ;-) Welcome to the future."
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5 Reasons to try JAMstack
In a move that's antithetical to how you're supposed to market your agency, we're going to recommend that you read a post from one of our competitors. We don't mind; there's plenty of opportunity for all of us to do great work for clients we're proud to partner with.
Anyhow, this BuiltVisible post got us thinking about when it is and isn't appropriate or ideal to use a CMS. If terms like "JAMstack" and "Headless CMS" are Latin to you, make a mental note now; we're predicting that we'll all be hearing a lot more about these tools in the future. The general idea that the author puts forth is that communicating with a database and dynamically generating page content using server-side inputs on every page load might often be overkill. What if you could use a different toolset to pre-generate those dynamic pages and then serve static files when users access your site? Enter JAMstack!
Interest piqued? The post might be a little dense, but it's certainly worth taking the time to read! Go static: 5 reasons to try JAMstack on your next project
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Silicon Valley's Secret [Video]
The final thing we wanted to share today isn't about SEO, optimization, or anything marketing-related; you could say it's a bit meta.
We wanted to share an episode of CNN's Mostly Human series, titled “Silicon Valley’s Secret”. It's about depression — particularly in, and as fueled by, startup culture — and while it might not be a video you want to put on to unwind at the end of your day, it's one that's well worth watching.
While the episode focuses on Silicon Valley, depression in startups happens everywhere. In fact, it’s a little disappointing that the scope of the title (“Silicon Valley”) is so narrow. It would be a shame if anyone came away with the feeling that depression is a problem exclusive to Silicon Valley or entrepreneurs who take VC money.
This is a good reminder that we're humans first (and often fragile ones at that); we're top performers, CEOs, gurus, and SEO rockstars second. If you'd like to learn more and explore this important topic further, consider checking out:
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Until next time. Thanks for reading!
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