Hi, I’m Craig Bailey and this is my personal blog where I write about technology, web strategy, and general musings. You can read my posts here. (If you are looking for the Content is King post by Bill Gates it is here)

I run two digital agencies in Sydney:

The first is XEN Systems. We help government departments and mid-large B2B technology companies with their online strategy, including content marketing, SEO, SEM and Social. You can find out more about what we do here.

The second is XEN Solar, where we help high quality solar companies (dealers, installers) with their digital marketing.

Craig Bailey presenting

Latest stories

Opting out of NPS Surveys

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On another topic entirely… This one’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine… it seems every company I interact with these days sends me a survey of some type (usually NPS) after the most minor of contact (eg rate our service after a 30 second web chat bot interaction). I used to ignore most of them, but then they got annoying and I started marking some of them as spam. Which probably isn’t...

Suggestibility and Twitter

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I realised a few years ago just how suggestible I was. Possibly quite gullible as well (at least that’s what people tell me lol). This is one of the reasons I’m not on social much – a simple ad or post in my timeline often drives behaviours that I don’t really want (eg buying things, eating things). For the last year I’ve been running an experiment on Twitter where I mute every...

HubSpot Workflows versus Sequences

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This is a comparison that often confuses users – when to use Workflows versus using Sequences. We’ve discussed this in previous shows (listen to episode 110 for a good overview) but it’s worth revisiting. BTW shoutout to Sera at HubSpot who reminded me about this when we caught up recently. As she noted, we’re all busy, and thus automating (appropriately) where possible is a path to...

Bogus engagement emails

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Sadly bogus outreach/engagement emails are picking up again – here’s a recent example: If purports to be a forwarded-on email from the CEO to an assistant, who forwards it on to me… with the goal of locking in a call. Summary: apart from the giveaway that it is sent from ActiveCampaign and has a mass email unsubscribe link it has no timestamp on the supposed initial emailsimply...

Overkill and Colin Hay and Choir!

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Thank you to Ewen and Patton Oswalt for highlighting this – it’s Colin Hay singing Overkill with Choir!.

The first 1:27 are ok, and at 1:28 you kind of smile and think ‘well that guy on the right is getting into it…’ and then… and then… something incredible happens. Trust me on this.

Scout Suggest – Free keyword tool

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Useful keyword research tool – and it’s free. Scout Suggest is a free keyword research tool. It’s quite handy for putting in a seed term and then getting a list of suggested search terms – it’s based on Google Autocomplete searches. Note that it is only a list of terms (it’s free after all) there’s no indication of competitiveness, search volume of the value of the terms...

Save to Archive.org tips

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Save pages to Archive.org (ie Way Back Machine) via David Sottimano: Here's a neat trick. Simply add [email protected] the next time you send an email with URLs in it, and the @waybackmachine will automatically archive those URLs, they send an email back with the archive URLs and tell you if errors occurred.— David Sottimano (@dsottimano) February 18, 2020 “Here’s a neat...

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