Issue No. 06 - July 14, 2026 A few months ago I started documenting what it actually looks like to build an AEO strategy with no technical background, no agency, and no clear roadmap. Just a business problem, a lot of questions, and a willingness to figure it out one step at a time. That's been the whole point of this newsletter. Not the finished version. The muddy middle of it. This week I'm sharing something that came out of all of that work. Over the past several months, I've been deep in...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 05 - July 7, 2026 Last week I was telling a friend about the GA4 (Google Analytics) setup I'd been working on. The containers, the custom channel groups, the UTMs. I wasn't showing off. I was just recapping what I'd done. She stopped me and said she never would have guessed I'd been scared to touch any of it. That stopped me for a second. Because I had been. For years, I'd heard about Google Analytics the way you hear about something that's clearly not for you. Developers used it....
15 days ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 04 - June 30, 2026 Last week I started a project I should have started months ago: setting up a real way to measure whether our AEO work is actually doing anything. That meant finally sitting down with GA4, which stands for Google Analytics 4, and which I'll now explain the way I wish someone had explained it to me. Think of it as the thing that tells you where your website visitors came from. Did they click a link from Google search, from LinkedIn, from an email, from typing your...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Issue No. 03 - June 23, 2026 Last week I went back to a landing page I'd rewritten for AEO about a month ago. I was checking it against something I'd just read on Neil Patel's NPDigital site, which is where I go most often for AEO guidance, and within five minutes I found two things I'd written with confidence that were already outdated. Not wrong when I wrote them. Outdated. The guidance had moved. That stopped me for a minute, because it's such a different experience than the rest of my...
29 days ago • 2 min read
Issue No. 02 - June 16, 2026 Sometimes the answer is to stop tryng to connect everything. I spent the better part of last week trying to solve a problem that turned out not to be the problem I thought it was. Here's what happened. At JB Sales, we run two separate platforms that both touch our members. UScreen is our membership portal where our pre-recorded sales training content lives and where members access it. Kit is where our newsletter and subscriber base live. When someone becomes a...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Issue No. 01 - June 9, 2026 Welcome to The Muddy Middle. If you're here, you probably found your way through a social post, a LinkedIn update, or someone who thought this might be relevant to what you're working through. However you got here, I'm glad you did. Let me tell you how I got here. I run operations at JB Sales, a B2B sales training company. I've been in financial management and operations for 20 years. I'm not technical. I didn't grow up wanting to understand how software works....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read