I’m an artist, writer and content specialist. For my day job I can be found fixing marketing and content problems. This site is a sandbox to experiment with the web and to also journal my thoughts and ideas.
- Blog
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Increasing the sales of a niche product
This is the first experiment of a bigger experiment I’m running titled “Turning a Hobby into a Business”. In the bigger experiment I plan on turning the Worldbuilding School into a profitable business with a team of writers. You’re blogging in a niche? Awesome. But what happens when you have a product that is a…
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Campaign tracking: Is email a utm_source or a utm_medium?
The simple answer is no. Email is not a utm_source. It’s a medium. Here’s why. In Google Analytics a utm_source identifies the source, or origin, of where the traffic has come from. An origin such as Facebook, Twitter, a referring website or your email newsletter. But not email itself. Email is the collective term for…
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Case Study: Finding your homepage audience when you target multiple verticals.
When your business targets multiple types of customers it can be difficult to know what to do with your homepage. Do you pick your most profitable customer group and aim the homepage at them or do you try and target the homepage at every customer? This was always the problem faced by Retail Computer Solutions…
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Hyperlocal websites and the information architecture of large media websites
Update March 2018: This article was written back in July 2016 when WordPress was the only content management system I had used and the biggest site I’d worked on was a couple of hundred pages. About 3 months later I moved from my corporate job to working in higher education. I’ve since worked on a…
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What or who is Vancano?
Quite simply it’s the gamer tag I’ve used for many years. For those of you who are thinking “what is a gamer tag?” It’s the username used by a person while playing multiplayer video games. As my name is very common (Nathan Smith) I’ve decided to use my gamer tag for my personal website/brand which…
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How a simple content hub revived a dead blog from 181 visitors to 4,242 visitors and more…
Today I’m going to show you how I relaunched the Worldbuilding School from a dead and dying blog into a popular worldbuilding website. And, how I increased it’s traffic… in one weekend. Without spending a penny on marketing. The Worldbuilding School is a website dedicated to helping authors, artists and games masters build their own…
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The Power of introverts. “I think you’re a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush!”
I’m currently hiding in a little used room off the downstairs hallway hoping my family don’t discover the location of my writing spot. They won’t expect me home for at least another hour and it’s liberating to be quiet. However, not everyone can understand this. Our world is dominated by busy extroverts who enjoy speaking…
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Murder mystery script: There’s been a murder!
My first attempt at script writing was performed over the bank holiday weekend (May 6th and 7th 2012). Every piece of creative writing I’ve written up until now has been short stories, poems and marketing material – I’d never written a script before. However, I’ve had the great pleasure of being apart of the script…
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6 Years Of University Are Finally Over!
Update 2019: How things change. It’s 6 years since I finished University and wrote this article. A lot has changed. The dreams and ideas you have while at University don’t always come to be, but that isn’t a bad thing. I’m keeping this article published as a reminder for myself. I’ve finally finished Universtiy!!! My…