Bottlenecks and Funnels 🍾 - Issue #3
Hey ho, les' go!
Before we get going, here a question I asked myself this week:
Is life better today or was it better 10 years ago?
I'd love to hear your opinion via email.
🍾 Bottlenecks Are Weak Links in Any System
The Traffic-jam-of-the-week Award goes to Ever Given
This vessel is stuck in the Suez Canal. The situation is so bad, that it even made it into the wikipedia entry about the Suez Canal.
Why is the situation so bad?
Because in this case the Suez Canal is a bottleneck.
If it is stuck, nothing moves.
In this case it means we have no movement between one side (North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea) and the other side (North Indian Sea).
Trade between US/EU to Asia is on halt until the bottleneck is resolved and vessels can move freely.
This twitter thread has the best coverage on the incident:
So, the #SuezCanal is blocked...
— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) March 23, 2021
Massive container ship EVER GIVEN stuck in the most awkward way possible.
Ongoing for hours. Every tug Egypt could spare appear to be trying to pull it free.
Vessel tracker: https://t.co/MsTUgVgyTH pic.twitter.com/08w4qpPqln
The operational repercussions are huge:
- Delays: Shipments will arrive late. This is particularly critical if shipments include system-relevant freight (medical equipment; crude oil; etc.)
- Costs: Shipment contracts include insurances for late-arrival. These premiums could most likely be triggered for all vessels that are stuck in the Suez Canal. You can be sure that lawyers are trying to argue that this case falls under a "force majeure" clause.
Bottomline: Bottlenecks are weak links in any system. Address them before they get clogged up 🍾
🔧 Fixing My Funnel Problem
My online course is live but instead of hearing the sound of money, I hear 🦗
There is a problem: People don't know about the course
To put it in marketing terms: I have a top-of-funnel issue.
What is a funnel?
A funnel shows how users behave during the customer journey.
It's called 'funnel' because it looks like one 👇
Tackling the Problem: Increasing Awareness
To reach more people I'm creating additional touchpoints for my content.
I'm re-purposing the content from my online course and am turning it into 400-word blog posts.
I create and distribute one post each day.
- Write and publish on my blog
- Distribute on Twitter
- Distribute on LinkedIn
So far I have 7 posts 👇
Here's my first attempt to create more touchpoints with the content.
— Art Lapinsch 🔋 🌳 🛡 (@artlapinsch) March 24, 2021
1. Break the online course into short blog posts
2. Distribute blog posts
3. Create hub&spoke content model for SEO lift
Here's the collection of blog posts👇https://t.co/jm3wkjiQtV
Hypothetical benefits of this approach:
- Bite-Sized Content: 400-page posts are snackable and theoretically it should give insight into which topics are most interesting. For example, if I see that the post about positioning gets 10x more traffic than the rest I can turn this into a mini-course.
- Cross-Links: This technique is called Hub and Spoke model. It means creating one 'master' page and many sub-pages pointing back to the master. 🔗
- SEO Lift: After a while this content should index on Google and help me with organic search traffic.
I will report on the results in the coming weeks.
Fingers crossed 🤞
Closing Remarks
There are 58 readers so far. I'm blown away. Thank you!
One reader has asked about the topic of 'managing procrastination' and I will address it in the coming weeks.
I'd love to hear from all the others as well :)
So long, stay happy and healthy 🙌
