First Try: What can you tell about this community?
Notes
What did I notice about this watering hole?
- Most important related sub is forhire (getting work is important)
- subreddit serves many different professions (writers, designers, developers)
- many posters seem to be new to freelancing
- sales/marketing is a common struggle
- Freelancing relationships can get complicated. Communication is hard.
- No one seems to know what to charge
- Some people here are targeting this audience (like the person asking what they would want in a book)
How to gather keywords as clues
- We have been zoomed in to individual threads
- Zoom out to the bigger picture
- Want to know what’s true of the broader audience
- Which way is the wind blowing?
- Collect keywords from thread titles
- Tally repetitions of the same words
- Combine synonyms (different tenses, singular/plural)
- Group keywords
- Looking for patterns
- Tells you which threads to zoom in on
Exercise: Practice getting keywords and themes from topic titles
| renderers | 1 |
| Word | Repetitions |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| respond | 1 |
| cold-calling | 1 |
| Word | Repetitions |
|---|---|
| marketing | 1 |
| Word | Repetitions |
|---|---|
| wrong client | 1 |
Virtual Hot Seat: Understanding Keywords & Themes
30x500 Understanding Keywords Virtual Hot Seat Workbook and Cheatsheet.pdf
Notes
- Sales safari is about collecting emotions
- Categorize into groups based on the meaning to the audience, not on raw meaning of words detached from the audience
Analysis of my list
Which subtle nuances and context did we get that a tool or automated keyword scraper would have missed?
synonyms, context, emotion
Did you get that in your notes, too? Compare the level of detail and context in your keywords to Sarah’s, David’s, and our teacher examples? What did you miss? What did you get that we didn’t?
I got less of the emotion. I did a bad job picking out the pain.
What are your theme groupings based on? Did you group more like David – keywords by “kind”? Or did you organize more like the teacher example – keywords by related meaning to the audience?
Something of a hybrid, I think.
How to use Keywords to choose new threads, and find new watering holes
- Perform a search in your watering holes with the most specific keywords you found
- Search titles only if possible, then bodies if the titles don’t bear much fruit
- Note views, replies, engagement
- Don’t filter based on this exclusively, but it can be an indicator
- Sometimes the opposite is also interesting (pain that is hard to get help with)
- Save the threads you find
- Repeat this on other watering holes
- Stay consistent in repeating the process
Action Challenge! Use keywords to gather threads for your audience
Challenge Part 1 - Gather & Count Keywords
keyword research on CSCareerQuestions subreddit watering hole project
Challenge Part 2 - Plug keywords into search, see what comes back
new and aspiring web developer painstorming sales safari thread research project- Created this note previously just to start collecting threads I wanted to safari. Adding to it with this research. I will separate these threads since they may be of higher quality than those I found intuitively.
How do you keep all your Sales Safari data organized?
30x500 Guide to Pattern-Finding Using a Detective Board.pdf
- Don’t worry about finding the perfect way to store safari data
- Be consistent
- Note the url of the source thread
- Create groups of the pains found during safari
- by feeling
- fear/anxiety
- uncertainty
- frustration
- avoidance
- boredom
- fatigue
- loss
- confusion
- disappointment
- by cause
- lack of skill
- lack of knowledge
- lack of focus
- lack of support
- lack of experience
- lack of access
- poor tools
- poor materials
- other people
- by topic category
- layout/flow
- style
- colors
- upholstery
- storage
- lighting
- rugs
- accessories
- styling
- by stage
- research
- brainstorming
- choosing
- marketing
- creating
- finishing
- pricing
- launching
- momentum
- by feeling
- This looks like a good use case for Obsidian app plus lots of linking plus local graph view