E16: Get It Done #4

09/23/2024, duration: 19:53

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In this episode, I'll explain the name change from accountability to get it done, what I learned from SEO, and also what I will be doing in the next two weeks in terms of goals for getting done. And also, at the end, I'll ask a question about the contents, about the schedule. So, pick it out until the end, and hopefully, let me know what you think about live streaming for Debugging Dan, and the podcast frequency and topics. Let's get started.

Welcome to Debugging Dan, where I share weekly my journey, balancing life, a full-time job and side projects. I'm Dan, your host. Let's dive in.

Let's get right to it. You might have seen it in the title or in the thumbnail. You know, I'm renaming accountability. It's something I learned during the SEO, things that I investigated, and one of the tips that I got there was to use normal speaking language. So, I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm Dutch, and the Dutch comprehension of English is pretty okay. But I don't know if accountability is really a word I would use regularly. So, I figured I'd make it more actionable and change it more to speaking language. So, I'm renaming accountability to get it done. And that's also a motivator for me. So, get it done is, for me, a sentence that speaks and says, Yes, I need to do this. Let's go. While accountability is more fancy and, well, maybe there are other people that are keeping me accountable. But being realistic, and I also was realistic in the past, this podcast is mostly one way. I don't get a lot of feedback. So, I figured that also by naming it, get it done, I figured it's more actionable for me, and it resounds more with me. So, I'm renaming accountability to get it done, and I'm keeping the numbering. So, this is get it done number four. Let's get started.

So, before I really get into the accountability part for this week, I'd like to recap on the past week where I'm mostly focused on SEO. So, I created an account with HRFs. I added my pages. And I found out that I have, for all the different projects that I have, the Debugging Den website, ObserverLize, Datastore, I'm missing some founder tooling. I have one page that ranks for a keyword, and that's my podcast episode on the stair-step approach. So, that work that resounded or triggered something, it's like it's at position 22, something like that. Not very high. The page is also not optimized. It's just me talking about the stair-step approach. So, that's fun. I have an emoji next to my head. And these are the learnings that I got from the SEO. There are a lot more, but these are the things that resounded with me.

And if you're looking via YouTube, you see me, or via video, you can see it, but I'm also doing the voiceover. So, things that resound with me, that fit with me, are doing keyword research, writing content. I can do that. I'm comfortable doing that. I'm not the biggest fan of doing it, but it's something that works, that I can devote time to. That's okay. One of the tips is also to create free tools that will rank, and that will also bring people to your other websites. I can do that. I'm a big fan of that. So, that's also one for me, and I wanted to mention the stair-step approach, so I ranked organically. And that also triggered for me, maybe I need to find more topics like the stair-step approach that people might be more interested in and are less generic than the other episode titles that I did to get more visitors or more search results or better ranking on SEO.

The thing that doesn't fit for me, time-wise, but I guess also personality-wise, and a lot of technical, often people, don't really, are not really a fan of it, is doing cold outreach. So, there are different levels of that, but it's mostly about contacting other sites, other people, to get backlinks. So, writing content for other sites, just mentioning that you have an article on it that I could link to. For me, the thing against it is mostly time. I'm also not really a very outgoing person, but I can type emails. I'm good at communication, business-wise at my work, for example, but doing cold outreach, for me, I'm just leaving that kind of out right now to get a lot of backlinks. Mostly because of time, and I think the downside is that doing backlinks is the most effective way to get your website to rank better, and I'll probably revisit this in a couple of months, maybe when I have more time, maybe when I'm figuring out that what I'm doing currently isn't really working, but I'm leaving that out for now, the cold outreach part.

So, that's what I captured mostly in the past week. I'm using the free version of HRFs because the Pace version of HRFs started at like 120 euros a month, which is way out of my budget, because I don't have a budget. I'm looking to use free tools, but I also have a free version that was pretty okay for my requirements. I don't have a lot of high requirements for SEO right now. SEO is also not my main thing, but I need to use SEO to get better ranking research results and stuff. So, I'm going to do better keyword research, or I'm going to start doing keyword research, write more content, create more free tools, and, yeah, that's my learning.

When I'm going back to the get it done, or the accountability, but get it done. So, my two goals were about SEO, learning about SEO, applying it. So, I did that. I looked up some issues in Google Search Console. So, I had some canonical URL issues, and I watched the beginner course for HRFs, and I also watched the series of YouTube videos from Roberto Digital, which, an Indie hacker, which I was already following, and I knew he is talking about SEO. So, I figured he's a self-made expert, and he's more accessible than a big company, or I don't know how big they are, but something like HRFs. So, and I also had a very helpful videos from him. So, that's good.

What I did was I downloaded the videos from YouTube, I extracted the audio, and then I was able to listen to it while on a walk. So, that was an effective way for me to assimilate the information while I was doing something else, instead of having to focus on the video. And the content was good enough so that I only could use the audio. And the other topic I had in the Get It Done for the past two weeks was preparing for live streaming. So, I've been doing that. I've set up a green screen behind me. I'm streaming now, or recording now with my phone camera instead of my laptop camera, which the quality is better. I have a ring light here, so I hope that the lighting is better than last week. So, yeah, those things are going great.

The only thing that's missing for live streaming is really having time or a time slot during the week to be able to do something regular in terms of streaming. And I also need to find a way to set up my desk here so that the threshold to start streaming is as low as possible. So, now I, of course, I cannot have this green screen set up here permanently, but I want to be able to sit down and record and stream as fast as possible. And so, I also need to find, I probably need to clean my desk because it's pretty cluttered and create a better setup. And I'm also looking into a better microphone because that's the next step. The phone camera is okay-ish or okay for now. And so, I'm doing a, I'm looking for a podcast microphone for better audio because the podcast is currently my focus. So, I want it to have proper audio.

So, what I'm going to do for the next two weeks. So, if you haven't seen the earlier videos, accountability or get it done for me is about setting goals for the next two weeks and achieving those in two weeks. And if you, that's basically it. And if you want to see updates from me, they are on debuggingden.com slash accountability or get it done. Probably I need to set up that link and see how my progress goes. And for the next two weeks, I'm looking into four different topics. So, what I also learned from SEO is that you need to find out what works. And to find out what works, you need to register what you're doing.

So, I also saw a tweet earlier this week of somebody who just loaded their entire commit history for two years and was able to pinpoint several times of when their website analytics changed or their customer base. So, they were trying to relate those two different things. So, I pick up in customers regarding to what has changed in the code base, what did we develop. And I figured that's something that I should also be doing. So, I, for the past week, I could be writing down, fixing the canonical URLs, for example, or fixing that some pages are not indexed. And if I see in the next months that my search results are better or my ranking in search, I could look back and say, hey, what did I change in that when the search was getting better and look back?

So, I'm updating my watch on numbers tool that I use internally to track numbers to also track events so that I can correlate when I'm charting a graph, for example, of website visits that I can overlay also the events that took place for that specific period to see if, for example, there's a peak there that it could be that I posted a tweet there that got more than normal views or something like that. So, that's what I'm going to add to watch our numbers. And I'm going to make it really easy to add events. So, I Telegram bought a bookmarklet so that I can just click, add a link, add some tags, for example, what it's related to, what product or what thing, SEO or SaaS, and just make it very easy to change that.

That's the first thing. So, the second thing is I'm going to look into my socials. So, I now also registered an Instagram and a Threads account, debugger underscore Dan because the debugging Dan without the underscore was already taken. And I need to figure out what I'm going to post there and what, so I need to, and when. So, for each social network, I guess, I need to figure out what my audience is there and what I should be sending there because that could be different for Instagram than for Twitter than for Reddit. And what I should send. So, on Instagram, I could add reels, maybe short snippets of the podcast recording. I could just add pictures like the get it done updates. That stuff I need to figure out.

And after that, I'm going to look into automating all that stuff to make it easier for me with limited time to hopefully get a better reach on social. So, still, me posting, not some kind of strategy trying to get the most followers of the most likes, but me posting about what I'm doing, but more relevant and more focused to the audience, that's there. So, that's the second thing, my socials. I need to create content. So, in order to be able to rank on search, I need to create content. And I set a limit for me to write five posts and could be for debugging Dan, could be for ObserveLash, could be for anything of my websites. I just need to write more posts. So, what I need to do, I need to do some keyword research, I need to do some topic research. What can I write about? What should I write about? And what do we want to rank for? And I set it to five right now. Let's see if that's doable.

And I'll use the HRS tool also to see if I start ranking for something. I'll use my Umami's analytics to see if I get visitors on the blog page. But in order to get visitors, I need to share it, but I also need to rank on search results, so the chicken and the egg. And I'll try to advance that by sharing to the right people depending on the topic. Hopefully get some backlinks. I need to look at that and that's what I'm going to do in the next two weeks. Also, the fourth issue is more, or not really an issue, the fourth item is about building. So, I have an idea that was triggered by reading something on Slashdot is that there's a really wild growth. I don't know if that's really English, but there's a real growth on different crawlers on the internet, mostly in the AI space.

So, Perplexity now has a crawler and OpenAI has several crawlers. And if you don't want those crawlers to index your information, so you want Google to do it for search ranking and Bing and Brave and all the other search engines, but you don't want AI companies to do that, you need to register the different user agents for those crawlers and create your robots.txt to block the AI ones, if they respect that, of course, but robots.txt is the industry standard for blocking crawlers on your website and hoping that they will respect your robots.txt. So, I'm building a tool that allows you to click and create which crawlers you'd like to allow and which you don't and easily update that. So, I'll be managing that and when new crawlers come in, I'll be adding it to specific categories so you can choose to block an entire category and your robots.txt, if you regularly get it from the deep leak that you have, is that automatically updated for new crawlers instead of you having to do all that work.

And it's not really something that applies to me or my work because I don't really care if AI crawlers crawl my content but I figured there are sites for which it's really relevant to or people that just don't want their information to be indexed and I figured it would be a cool tool to also maybe do a launch on product hunt or post it on other places. It's not a SaaS. It's not something I want to profit from but it's a tool and perhaps I can use that to link to other tools that I've built where I do allow for account creation and getting information or paying for information and using it. So, it's my first step in the SEO strategy to build free tools and some of this tool I'll build on a separate domain that I bought but I might also be building tools that I'll just have as a path on debuggingden.com for example to drive also more traffic there.

Roberto mentioned that some tools are on a separate website but it might be wiser to have the tool on the website itself that you're trying to rank else it will be ranked by association because there's a different site linking to the target site but he wasn't really clear or explaining why, so I'm not really sure on that, but I figured I'd make a combination, some tooling type add to debuggingden.com and other ones I'll just have a separate domain like this one, and I hope to finish it in two weeks, and, yeah, those are my four items. So, I'm looking into events, into socials, into the writing content, and building something.

So, before I really finish up the podcast, I'd like to mention that I've been thinking about the schedule and thinking about finding a place to do live streaming and in terms of schedule I might even change it to once a week of the get it done update a week of a separate topic and then maybe a past week without doing a podcast but doing live streaming and then on Sunday morning European time since I'm in European time that I'd also record so it could be watched back later on YouTube or on Twitch because that would have some benefits for me in that I'll have more time to build something because I find that with all the things that I'm doing for the podcast and for content and creating which I really like, I really like it but I don't have a lot of time left for really deep concentrated building which I'm missing and which is the most important part of what I'm trying to do, building site projects, getting some income stream from that so that would allow me to create content and also make progress on concentrating on some concentrated work at least that's what I hope and on Sunday morning normally I record my podcast but now it would I wouldn't do it so that would give me more time so I also don't need to do the editing on Sunday I don't need to do the recording I can just sit for two maybe three hours and just record something.

So, if you got this far into the recording let me know what you think, send me a message on X, leave a comment at the video if you like this if you want to get more like and subscribe following your favorite podcast and feedback is always welcome. Have a good one.

Thanks for tuning in to Debugging Dan. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. Stay curious and see you next week.

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