How to Race 33% Faster

Patrick crossing the finish line for a triathalon

Two weeks ago I raced in my first-ever triathlon. 🏊🚴🏃‍♂️

Miraculously, I did not drown, crash, or collapse. I actually finished. 😅

I practiced the bike portion four times:

  • Sep 2 → 10.2 mph
  • Sep 4 → 10.5 mph
  • Sep 11 → 12.2 mph
  • Sep 17 → 12.4 mph
  • Sep 21 → 16.5 mph (race day)

My fastest practice time was 12.4 mph. On race day, I zoomed at 16.5 mph! That's 33% faster! ⚡

Not because I suddenly got stronger. Not because I learned a new technique or was drafting the bike in front of me.

I raced faster because there were no blockers:

  • We had our own lane on the road.
  • Police waved us through intersections
  • Volunteers held signs showing the way.

I was able to accelerate and keep moving at my top speed for ~45 minutes. The only thing I had to do was push with my legs and steer.

My practice route has 2 stop lights. It doesn't sound like much. But you lose all forward momentum and spend a lot of energy to ramp back up.

If you want to move fast you need to accelerate to max speed and then stay there as long as possible. Anything that slows you down wastes momentum.

To move quickly in business, tech, and life remove blockers before you start moving. It's a marvel how fast you can actually move.

How to Make the WooCommerce Sale Price Accessible

How to Make WooCommerce Sale Price Accessible

I recently joined Xero Shoes. They're one of the largest WooCommerce stores in the world. And as luck would have it we received the results of an accessibility (a11y) audit right after I started. That meant my first project is to dive deep into accessibility with WordPress & WooCommerce.

And the first item I looked into was making sure our sale prices were accessible. 👇

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Seek Opportunities to Cut Your To-do List

Seek Opportunities to Cut Your To-Do List

We live in a world where there's always incentive to do more.

  • Write more blog posts for organic SEO
  • Tweet daily
  • Create Tiktoks to promote your products
  • Write unique content for your premium email list

And after a while it just adds up and you're paralyzed with an unending to-do list. I've found that the more on my todo list the less I actually get done. The more I can focus my attention with a clear priority for the day the more productive I am.

Recently I've been looking for ways to cut down my to-do list. Not by evaluating each individual task, that takes a ton of time, but by preventing tasks from getting on my list in the first place. I want to create rules so I know where I should spend my time.

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Top Down SEO Research

Top Down SEO Research

 Hello internet friends. Today I want to share some of the awesome SEO work that I've been doing at eCommerceFuel. 🤓

If you're familiar with SEO research, a lot of writers come up with a list of topics they want to write about and then they will search for keywords related to that topic. They'll find a keyword somewhat related to their topic, they'll write about it, and hope that it ranks. 🤞 I call this bottom-up SEO research.

Then there's what I'm calling top-down research. And the hard part is you start the process ignoring what we want to speak about at first, doing all of the SEO keyword research, grouping everything, looking at the volumes (number of searches), and then from that list deciding which keywords we want to write about.

The benefit to doing keyword research this way is you know if you rank well you'll see decent traffic. And it prevents common problems like keyword cannibalization which can happen when you don't make an SEO plan.

Let me show you how I follow this process and how it drives traffic for eCommerceFuel:

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Content Is Never Going to Zero

Content will Never Cost Zero Dollars

Ever since Chat GPT came out at the end of 2022 I’ve seen predictions about content. Some good and some bad. But the general idea is that ‘the cost of content is going to $0”. This is hot-take based on the hype-cycle around a new technology. This prediction doesn’t follow any historical cases, and it assumes that creating content is primarily writing – which it isn’t.

There are some highly relevant historical examples, creating content is more than just writing, and there are fundamental flaws in Chat GPT that humans need to compensate.

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From Ideas to Execution: Crafting a Bespoke Content Creation Process

Content Creation Process

I recently developed a content creation process for eCommerceFuel. In my first three months, I built a process that satisfies two primary responsibilities:

  1. Synthesize the most useful content for our existing members from the internal eCommerceFuel Forum
  2. Publish blog content that will attract 7- and 8-figure eCommerce businesses and encourage them to join the forum

There are a surplus of moving pieces involved in research, strategy, and content production, so I devised a process to help me juggle multiple projects at the same time — without compromising quality.

That's because our target persona (7- and 8-figure business owners) demands very high quality content. If we expect to continue attracting the best and brightest to our community we have to hold our site up to a high standard. And, to ensure it remains consistently relevant, we still need to publish at least once a week.

Here, I'll share how we've created eCommerceFuel's new content creation process from scratch.

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