John Doherty

There are two competing camps on the internet: that companies charging money for things is bad; that the internet is still an amazing place to build a profitable company. I get hate for talking about how marketers can make more money (in completely legal and upstanding ways, no less) on the internet by doing what […]

Working for yourself is an incredible thing. You have freedom, you have flexibility, you can work from your favorite coffee shop or your pajamas or another country completely. Over the last three years I’ve worked from 20+ states in the US and 12 different countries. We’ve moved twice and I take most Friday afternoons off. […]

Apparently yesterday on SEO Twitter there was a back and forth between a Times journalist and a bunch of self-styled SEOs. I thankfully missed it somehow (I guess because I don’t follow the journalist and missed all the replies, and no one was subtweeting her), but upon looking back at it the flow went: Journalist […]

I spent the first week of October 2018 in Cabo San Lucas this year. This was my second year attending Chris Lema’s CaboPress, a mastermind-conference-retreat held at Chris’s favorite resort in Cabo. Here’s are some photos from my Instagram feed:   View this post on Instagram   Processing another incredible week in Cabo at #cabopress. […]

One of the most common questions I get emailed from consultants trying to build a sustainable consulting practice is around retainers, and how to sell ongoing projects where you keep working with the client long term. The question is usually something like “How do I sell a retainer? I mean, what will I do after […]

It happens to the best of us – we put time and effort into calls, proposals created and sent, and follow ups to discuss the project and move them towards a close. But then we hear that they’ve gone with someone else. It hurts. You wanted (maybe needed) that business and it didn’t close. So […]

I sent this to my list today while I’m out of the country at a conference in Mexico. I’m probably standing in a pool right now attending a talk when this publishes. Three years ago I wouldn’t have done that, or would’ve been in my room working on my computer instead of present. So I […]

There’s a dream that many of you might have, which is going freelance. The truth though is that going freelance is scary and hard. You probably have responsibilities in life. Maybe you’re the only breadwinner in a family, or maybe you just need to cover your bills each month on your own. But you’re tired […]

As I run my business Credo and speak with consultants and agency owner all the time, I get two answers to my question of “What’s your biggest challenge in your business?”: Don’t have enough qualified leads to turn into clients; Don’t have enough time/working way too much. I recently polled a group of agency owners […]

On August 29th I gave a webinar about SEO monitoring in partnership with DeepCrawl, which is a site auditing/crawling tool that I’ve used for years and gotten to know the team at over the last year or so. You can see the landing page here and their recap and voice recording here. Here’s the presentation I […]

Last month was my 34th birthday. It wasn’t a special birthday and not a particularly exciting year, but we celebrated it in Steamboat Springs Colorado. Steamboat Springs is one of our favorite places in Colorado. We got married here, we’ve had multiple friends get married here, and we love to escape the heat of Denver […]

Do you ever feel like you need a break, like things are moving a bit too fast right now? Social media is a firehose. Everything feels important though rarely is anything actually super important. I think one of the challenges of our day and age is knowing what actually matters and getting to the signal […]

I sent this email to my email list yesterday on my 34th birthday. I’ve received so many personal replies to it that I decided to post it here. Hey there, and welcome to another Tuesday. It’s mid July which means it’s hot in Denver. My wife and I just returned early this morning to Denver […]

Congratulations, you’re signing consulting clients! Whether you’re a full time solo consultant or doing some work on the side of your full time job, getting your first client is a legitimate milestone. Of course, this is only the beginning. Once you have a sustainable pipeline of work, you need to figure out how to manage […]

Are you building a company and wishing it was easier? This is me. I’m building my company, trying to grow it, trying to do better work. And I am trying to do it while working fewer hours, because this is my year of no hustle. I am trying to be less busy. In my day […]