A Brilliant Hidden Feature Growing Justin Welsh's New Site

Last year, Justin Welsh did a full overhaul of his site with the goal of streamlining the visual brand and improving SEO on his library of work.

If you don’t know him yet, he’s a solo creator who does over $1.7 per year with zero employees.

A few interesting case studies have been written about the redesign – including ones from Justin, his developer, and the design team he partnered with.

But the other day I stumbled across a feature that I don’t think anyone’s talked about so far: His Glossary

You won’t find this listed in the nav menu; it’s designed to function behind the scenes. But he’s basically got an enormous dictionary of dozens of solopreneur industry terms, each of which links to a long-form article (~1k+ words) explaining the concept and how it applies to his audience.

It’s brilliant for two reasons:

1 . Authority: He can link to these from any article or newsletter he writes, and if readers click through, it subtly positions his brand as more of an authority in the space. He can also now use industry terms and jargon in his writing without immediately defining them in-line, which elevates the work without leaving newer readers behind. Smart.

2 . SEO: This is the big one – these terms will eventually soak up search traffic and backlinks. It looks like it’s already starting to work…

What Makes This Special: Bigger brands have been using glossaries to drive SEO for years. But this is the first time I’ve seen a solo creator do it, and I think he’s doing it better than most, because of the detail of each piece.

Take the term “Freemium” for instance. The glossary not only defines it, but unpacks its history (apparently it was coined by investor Fred Wilson in a 2006 blog post), cites famous companies that use the model, shares advantages and disadvantages from a growth perspective, and links to other pieces from Justin on related topics.

I work in tech. I know what freemium is. But I still learned a little something reading that page.

And I think that’s the big takeaway here – a few bland sentences won’t do anything for you. They might even detract from your authority. But if you invest in higher-quality breakdowns of industry terms, these can be really valuable.

This seems like the perfect application of AI…

I’m not sure if that’s how Justin did this, but it’s what I would do.

In fact, this is the first time I think I’ve seen written content that I’d be okay with AI drafting for me, since I don’t think readers expect the same thing from a glossary that they do from your blog or newsletter.

Every industry has its own dictionary of specialized terms, so I think there are still plenty of opportunities for people in other fields to experiment with something like this.

I think the process would look something like this:

1. Use Ahrefs, Semrush, or even ChatGPT to generate a list of keywords

2. Use a tool like Byword or Autoblogging to generate drafts

3. Manually fact-check, add links, and publish when happy

Taking It One Step Further: It’d be interesting to try integrating Twitter’s Grok into a process like this too.

You’d get more recent information and it would surface people you could quote in your articles to satisfy the new “Experience” component of Google’s search quality guidelines.

I might also think about variations. For example, instead of a glossary, what about a “Who’s Who” of well-known people in your industry, complete with bios, interviews you’ve done, and links to some of their most popular work?

There are probably a bunch of other creative ways to tackle this too.

Even with AI, I think this will be a pretty big undertaking. And it could turn out to be an anchor around your neck if someone like Google ever decides to penalize AI-gen content.

But for now, I think it’s a great example of how writers should be thinking about using new tools to try things that used to be out of reach for anyone but bigger companies. Hats off to Justin for testing this out.

A Few Great Links

Here’s a roundup of the best things I’m reading, watching, or listening to right now…

• Creator MBA: Speaking of Justin, this week, he quietly launched his newest course. I’ve taken his Content OS course and it was excellent.

• The Newsletter Growth System: Big week for courses – Matt McGarry launched a hands-on cohort focused on growth. Matt and I worked together at The Hustle and I’m not aware of anyone else in the world who’s been hands-on behind the scenes of more successful newsletters. This should be quite good.

• How Much Is Enough? Sam Parr launched a new podcast called MoneyWise where he sits down with rich people to ask the things no one ever asks about money. Definitely worth a listen.

• From Dentist to $600k Writer: Kieran Drew is a former dentist who now makes over half a million dollars a year writing. He recently published a great breakdown on the most important early lessons he learned.

• Hello, My Name Is Awesome: This is the best book ever written on how to name a product or company, and you can read it over lunch. It’s how I first came up with the name for my blog (The Write to Roam) and I’m revisiting as I work on my local newsletter concept.

That’s all for this week! Hit reply and tell me what you’re up to.

-Ethan