September has come and gone. Autumn is in full swing now and everyone is prepping for the winter. September was a busy month for me, both personally and professionally. I started traveling more again and wrote up a storm on my Medium account. I finally hit a nerve over there and have been experiencing viral follower growth as well as decent earnings. These earnings aren’t big enough to replace my day job earnings, more like extra money for beer.

I shut Neural Market Trends down on the last day of August thinking it was going to be for good. Things have changed on my end and I’m thinking of restarting this site. I’m thinking of moving back to my roots and building a community. Why? Because of something I saw a few days ago. I was on a work call the other day and a prospect was sharing his screen.

Work from home (WFH) is here to stay if you’re lucky and fight for it. I keep hearing from my customers that more and more companies are starting to reopen and call back employees to the office, except many are not coming back! That’s music to my ears! After dealing with the sudden pandemic shutdowns, juggling work-home duties, and dealing with the isolation, the majority of American workers powered through this hell.

In April 2020 my blog was barely alive. I had moved to Hugo from Pelican and ignored any kind of SEO optimization for it. I thought it was stupid and that the best content would win. Little did I know that my content wasn’t even being found! So after thinking about it for a few short minutes, I decided to dive back into SEO and figure out how to bring my blog back from the dead.

This tutorial is not about porting Hugo posts to the Ghost format but instead it’s about how I got a custom domain, CDN, and removed the :80 port from a new Ghost install. First off, setting up the machine on AWS Lightsail is pretty easy. It was as simple as selecting the Ghost install and taking the cheapest instance possible. I think the cost is like $3.50 a month, which is pretty sweet IMHO.

There was a short time when at a previous Startup I moved out of Sales and into Marketing. I had to produce a lot targeted content in a niche market and that’s how I earned my living. A lot of the content I created ended up on the company’s blog, video library, or community boards so I considered myself a Professional Blogger back then. Now that I’m back in Sales and I Blog here for fun, I consider myself a writer and a Semi-Professional Blogger now.

I’m going to start this post with a big helping of gratitude. I’m so grateful to the 1000’s of readers that helped me get into the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I was a part-time blogger that turned my passion into a full-time gig in the AI Startup world. This post is my way of paying it forward to you. Read below if you want to learn how to make money blogging.

I was on Twitter one day and I came across an announcement that HackerNoon had joined the micropayment world and gotten an infusion of cash from Coil.com. That’s a cool $1 million to implement a new method of web monetization. Breaking: We Raised $1M From @Coil, Will Stream Micropayments from Readers to Writers via the Browserhttps://t.co/iquXY9j2Pm pic.twitter.com/bHRfhaenna — HackerNoon | Learn Any Technology (@hackernoon) June 10, 2020 I think the current web monetizaztion model is broken and power is concentrated into too many corporate silos.

As software continues to eat the world, we’re slowly becoming slaves to subscriptions. I don’t remember when I started thinking about this but it must’ve come up when I looked at our family budget. I realized that we as a family and I, are paying so much on monthly or yearly subscriptions that it just gives me great pause. What am I paying? On the surface, it doesn’t look like much but then you dig deeper and you realize you are hooked!

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’d know that I like to try different CMS’s. I made some mistakes over the years and I transferred my posts between different CMS. This ended up killing a lot of my backlinks, but that’s ok. I ended up settling on using Markdown to write my posts (love it) and a static CMS generator. Originally I used Pelican and it was pretty good.

4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. That’s on top of the 22 million from the past 4 weeks. All the job gains for the last decade have been wiped out. Poof, gone in 5 weeks. The chart below is lagged by one week, so it’ll be much worse when a new chart is generated. States in the South and the MidWest States East of the Mississippi River are getting slammed.

I don’t remember how I found it but I learned about the Indie web from this blog post. The Indie Web is a movement to reclaim your authorship and blog from the clutches of corporations. It’s not a move back to the ‘good ol’ days’ rather a way of putting your data back into your hands. In other words, don’t be the product. As a Data Scientist, I process lots of data every day.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging now for over 12 years. I’ve written 100’s of posts, some short and some long. I’ve had my shares of ups and downs here but in the end I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s made me realize that blogging has led to my personal growth. Blogging has become a career! What’s happened is that I’ve been reposting and repopulating old posts from my archive.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Please forgive me for my evergreen content creation and management sins. Yes, I admit I have mismanaged good content for the sake of expediency. The takeaway from this long post is this, always think about your reader first. Often I have ignored how my readers consume my evergreen content. For that, I beg for your absolution. I promise, on my CMS’s grave, not to stray from the path of good content creation and management again.

Recently I imported some custom reports in Google Analytics that I found online. They have been eye opening indeed! My most favorite ones are the Profit Index and Time of Day custom reports. Google Analytics assigns a page value to each and every page you have, provided you use Goals. Without using Goals, this won’t work! In my previous post, I wrote about how I started using Goals to see how readers interacted with my site.

This is my first stab at trying to figure out how to optimize the SEO here. A doodle/sketch just seems the fastest in this case. Update I have since given a lot of thought to SEO on this blog as I migrated it from one CMS to another. Each CMS handles SEO in a completely different manner and over time the migrations have had, in some way, a damaging effect here.

I’ve been going through a massive blog post purge and deciding which posts to keep or trash. Why? I have so many posts that were like Tweets, short and meaningless. They just bogged down my performance and really provided my readers with zero information. This blog started dying at the beginning of 2020, Google made some Search Engine Results Page (SERP) changes and my blog started dropping like a rock. There were 100’s of similar blogs that were ranking better because they knew how to play the SEO game and I didn’t.

I have news. I’ve been mulling around the idea for this post for the last two years, ever since I joined RapidMiner. The journey at RapidMiner has been and continues to be fantastic. In those short two years I’ve worn many hats there, I started as a Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant, then moved to a Sales Engineer role, and now I’m Marketing Data Scientist. I’ve made the move from Sales to Marketing and my chips remain all in.

Long time readers know that I’ve struggled with blogging platforms for a long time. I finally opted for a static post approach because it’s safer than the PHP code injections that Wordpress suffers (suffered?) from. The bonus side of platforms like Wordpress is that they have 1000’s of great plugins to download and turbo charge your blog. I really liked this but I got tired of having my PHP templates “code injected” with spam attacks.

I think it was back in 2010 when I met up with an old high school classmate. Let’s call her “T,” and she was in between marketing jobs. I reached out to her because we had an opening for a CMO at my old engineering firm and thought she would be great for it. She had recently worked on some really cool NGO campaigns and I liked her forward thinking. I eventually convinced her to throw her hat in the ring for the CMO gig but that’s not the most important thing I learned from our get together.

Trends come and go in the blink of an eye these days. Usually some market disrupter comes along and changes the game with a shiny new thing. Sometimes it’s a service or product that gets shutdown. That’s exactly what happened here. This is the story of Google Reader and the rise of Social Sharing. Before Social Sharing was the “thing”, RSS was the life blood of blogging. Many bloggers (myself included) reached thousands of RSS feed readers daily.

Long time readers know that I’ve wrestled with different CMS engines on this site. I started with Wordpress, then switched to Expression Engine, and then back to Wordpress. Along the way I tried Text Pattern and even Posterous. Expression Engine and Text Pattern are just plain terrible and I wouldn’t recommend them. Wordpress is a great entry level CMS and it’s great for non-technical people. In minutes you can have yourdomain.