This document discusses digital marketing strategies focused on establishing authority through valuable, timeless content. It recommends creating content such as articles, videos, and academic papers on topics that will remain relevant for years to establish expertise. Creating a steady stream of high-quality content over time builds an online presence and credibility without major risks of losses, and may lead to job offers, clients, or other opportunities. It provides examples of interactive dashboards and open-source software that gained popularity and users by continuously publishing improvements and documentation without needing to rely on things like resumes or company profiles.

1. Elias Dabbas
Antifragility and Convexity
Guidelines for/from digital marketing

2. Convexity – Asymmetry
• …at Empirica, every day brings:
• A small but real possibility that they’ll make a
huge amount of money in a day
• No chance that they’ll blow up
• A very large possibility that they’ll lose a small
amount of money... the steady drip of losses
takes a toll.
The NewYorker
Image: @dhavalpanchal

3. Digital Marketing 101

4. Digital Marketing – One Strategy
• Establish yourself as an authority on a topic
• Do it so well that people* approach you to work with you
• You choose! (Optionality)
*customers, collaborators, suppliers, investors, etc

5. Digital Marketing - One Tool
*articles, tweets, videos, podcasts, academic papers, webinars, books, courses,
infographics, presentations, reports, data… anything that establishes you as the
authority
Valuable Content*

6. A typical day for the Digital Marketer
• …when creating content, every day brings:
• A small but real possibility that you’ll be offered
the job of your dreams, land a great
client/investment, etc.
• No chance that you’ll blow up*
• Gradually building a large content portfolio
across many publications (+ your blog/site),
strongly establishes your online presence… the
steady drip of losses takes a toll
*though there is a chance you might get cancelled, blocked, or Twitter-mobbed

7. Timeless topics > timely topics

8. Timeless(ish) Topics
No expiry date
• General, useful, guidelines/tools/explanations that help people
• “Would this content still be valid in five years? Will it age well?”
• Unlimited use and reuse your content as needed
• People can consume and share your content while you sleep
• Soon enough, someone will get in touch

9. Timely topics
• Super interesting today
• Absolutely useless tomorrow
• Invest in great content that
doesn’t expire

10. Timeless topics
Traffic grows over time (always valid, no expiry date)
Financial Mathematics
MINI LECTURES IN PROBABILITY

11. “Old” content, but still valid
Raphael Douady - Google Scholar
KeplerianFinance
The older a (good) academic paper the better (it gathers more citations)
Good content also ages well as it gathers hyper-links (citations) on the web

12. You will be googled
If there is nothing but a negative
article about you up there,
you’re finished
No valuable content
produced by you?
Super fragile

13. If you need a CV* you are fragile
*unless as an administrative formality

14. If your company needs a company
profile/slide deck* you are fragile
*unless as an administrative formality

15. Real World examples (with skin in the game) please!

16. Example 1 – Interactive Dashboards

17. Get involved in a forum about interactive
dashboards, answer questions, solve problems
Build my own portfolio of dashboards
• Every additional answer in the
forum adds negligible value
• Every new dashboard created…
• But collectively they establish
credibility

18. • Get asked by company’s founders
to do paid work
• Get a book proposal
Results

19. Example 2 – advertools
(open-source free digital marketing
software)

20. • Publish new releases
• Write articles
• Write documentation and
examples
• Repeat
• Get people to download/use it

22. “If you’re going through hell…
Keep going!”
–Winston Churchill

23. ~0.5 million installs

24. Example 3 – This Presentation

25. Thank you