Posts I have written about online marketing. As I have matured as a marketer content has gone beyond SEO to holistic online marketing, involving email, social, and content especially. Once these powerful tools and disciplines are combined, the magic starts to happen.
Newsflash: a blog is not a content strategy. Brands in today and beyond are increasingly moving away from blogs to content on other parts of their website that will better drive conversions and traffic. In a phenomenal read over on Hubspot, the author talks about how marketers these days are increasingly buying into the age […]
I’ve been in search for a few years now. I just realized recently that I graduated high school and started university a decade ago. While this seems like forever in some ways, in the perspective of life it’s not. After all, I don’t think people really figure out who they are and what they want […]
Marketers produce content. We produce a metric ton of content every day, actually. We’re told to create great content and to keep producing great content.
*cue the parody “Great content is killing me”*
Not only do we produce content on our own sites, we also produce content and put it on other sites (which some deem pretty insane). Let me get this straight – We’re creating high-quality content, that takes up our own creative energy and time, so that someone else can put it on their site. And we’re doing it for a freaking link??
If you’re just doing content for the sake of a link, let me say that you’re doing it wrong. Yes, I’ve worked in SEO for a while now. Yes, I know the value of a link. Yes, I can put the monetary value on a link, and I have. Yes, I still think about links first when I scan a piece of content.
BUT. What if I told you that you can still get all of this and more? Read more about Leveraging Editorial, Self-Placed, and Owned Content for Marketing …
I don’t often write blog posts blasting Google, nor do I often reference local SEO, but I am going to do both in this post. In fact, I’ve been blogging a lot less this year (for many different reasons), but I felt compelled to write this post. In my work at Distilled, I am lucky […]
*Note from John: Today’s guest post comes from Ryan McLaughlin, who is the Director of Marketing at Clarity Ventures. He lives in Austin, TX and can be found on Twitter @recalibrate.
Back in the spring of 2011 I decided to step away from the boutique internet marketing agency that I co-founded, move to Austin, and join the core team of a growing software company named Clarity Ventures to lead its marketing initiatives. That time represented a lot of changes for me professionally, but one of the biggest adjustments I had to make was moving from a book of small business clients to one full of Fortune 500s, funded startups, and prominent mid-sized businesses.
I quickly realized that client relationships as I knew them were going to be much different, and I was playing an entirely different ballgame. Read more about Get Executive Management to Approve Anything …
*Update for 2016* – Now that I am a founder (of Credo) I more fully believe in this. Early stage companies who are able to leverage their founder’s popularity ose r background for their marketing should do so. It is a fantastic way to tell the brand story, associate a friendly face with the brand, and […]
I have interviewed a few well-regarded entrepreneurs in the past couple of months, and out of those have come the common vein of “Is the problem you are solving worth your life?”
Entrepreneurs are ideas people. We think a lot, we try to optimize our lives to find better ways of being. We are known for being eccentric, disciplined, and sometimes a bit unsatisfied with life. This way of being has very real challenges and benefits.
One challenge is that we can set out to build something that will potentially make us money, but at the end of the day we are not passionate about it and therefore are almost destined to fail from the beginning.
As David Haskell (interview coming next week) told me, “When you start a new venture, you are committed to it for at least 3 years usually. That can easily turn into a decade. We all have about four decades of work to our life. Is what you’re working on worth that?”
Read more about Validating Your Product Idea With Existential Questioning …
Tonight (March 20th) Distilled NYC is co-hosting a meetup in conjunction with iAcquire, another search agency here in New York City. The topic is Content Marketing vs Content Strategy. My talk is on data driven content marketing. We believe that in order to know what content to create, you need to first know: What content […]
I started doing SEO pretty hardcore back in the very beginning of 2010 when I was working as a book publisher from a small alpine town in Switzerland. When I discovered SEO, I had no clue where it would take me (literally and metaphorically), the people I would meet, or everything I would learn and what that would push me towards.
I started full time in Philadelphia, working with a couple of other awesome guys who mentored me, taught me the importance of hustle, and made me get insanely better at my job through data. We were a powerhouse team, and I still say that if I were to go back inhouse someday I would want both of them on the team with me.
That’s not the point of this post, though. You see, this past Friday (March 15th) was the final Linklove that Distilled plans to put on. We don’t believe that linkbuilding is dead or dying, but it has definitely changed and many of the old tactics and tricks that worked so well for so long (crap directories, aggressive anchor text, spun content, sidebar widgets en masse) have gone out the window and even become toxic. I wish I could tell you all about my adventures in the past months with link removal and the insanity of the cost both in terms of effort and impact to the business being affected.
But that’s also not the point of this point.
You see, two years ago today Linklove changed my life. Read more about It All Started At Linklove …
It’s unfortunate that Google’s ranking system (quality/quantity of links) forces SEOs to try to scale everything. Reciprocating cycle.
— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) January 21, 2013
I tweeted this about a month ago when I was frustrated at Google for still allowing sites in some verticals to rank off of bad content or links simply because they are a brand and “belong” in that search result. In fact, one could argue that users expect these companies to be there. After all, it makes sense for a company like John Deere to rank for [tractors], no?
Is this fair of me, though? Is it Google’s fault that SEOs have to scale their efforts of content creation and linkbuilding to become competitive in competitive verticals?
I’ve stewed on these thoughts for a bit of time and come to a few conclusions. Many of these might not come as a shock to you, but I think they’re worth stating.
A fundamental shift has occurred over the past two years in the way people consume content on the Internet. Not quite six years ago, Google bought the RSS service Feedburner for $100M and integrated it with their blogging platform, Blogger, as well as allowing bloggers on other platforms like WordPress to syndicate their content through it.
According to Compete, Feedburner is on a downward trend in terms of traffic:
BuiltWith seems to corroborate this:
In fact, Google seems to think that RSS is dying because they have deprecated the Feedburner API and are even talking about shutting it down completely in 2013. That should signal something to marketers if Google does not think the product worth keeping alive, even if simply because Google is the big player on the Internet and holds the ability to shift mindsets and kill verticals if they wish.
Read more about What The Shift From RSS to Social Media Means for Marketers …
On January 15th I had the great pleasure to get to do a video hangout with Leo Widrich, one of the main guys behind the well-loved social media tool Buffer. I reached out to Leo because I’ve been following him for a while on social media and reading his blog. I’ve been seeing Buffer’s awesome growth over the past year (I even became a paying member recently), so I was interested to get Leo’s take on marketing, especially content marketing.
Leo is a smart young marketer, and I was quite intrigued to hear that Buffer’s content strategy was heavily influenced last year by Rand Fishkin’s Content Marketing Manifesto talk from last year’s SearchChurch meetup in Philadelphia. Leo said that since they took Rand’s advice to heart, their traffic to their content has quadrupled and they have seen a lot of success. I was also intrigued at the end of the video how Leo talked about their strategy going forward in regards to content, but you’ll just have to listen to the whole thing to find that out 🙂
Also, if you like this sort of format, my company is running Fireside Chats with Marketers in NYC as meetups this year. Sign up if you’re interested.
Read more about Talking Marketing with Leo Widrich of Buffer …
I recently read a post about cross-platform publishing that absolutely blew my mind and changed my paradigm about how I am thinking about content and publishing moving forward. It’s called Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content, written by Karen McGrane who has led content strategy and information architecture engagements for sites like The Atlantic and Fast Company. The time is now, I believe, for thinking about content as a separate entity unto itself, not beholden to one platform but rather extendable across platforms. Read more about The Future of Cross Platform Publishing …
You just read a click-bait title. I apologize for that.
Before you run away, dear valued reader (see what I did there?), here’s my thesis:
A person should not blog or publish on the Internet (not all publishers are bloggers) if they are blogging to fulfill a perceived “need”. If they are doing it for reputation, links, or anything else, blogging is a wasted effort. Blogging or publishing works when you do it because you cannot help but write and publish.
Barry Adams recently wrote a post on State of Search entitled Can The SEO Industry Embrace Longform Content? Read more about Do The Work, or Quit Blogging …
SEO is not about quick wins. I get asked all the time to “give us something that we can do now that will have a noticeable effect”. People, everyone, wants to get the most bang for their buck, and this especially happens in business where there is direct pressure to produce ROI. After all, no one brings in a consultant until they are unable to solve their own problems. At this point, your problems become mine.
If you’ve been seeking quick wins and they’re not working, what the heck makes you think that me giving you quick wins is going to fix your problems? Quick wins have not been solving your issues until now, so why do you think anything is going to be different with my quick wins? Read more about Do The Work …
