John Doherty's Blog

05 Jul

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 8 comments

4 Ways to Build An Online Audience

What if I told you that you don’t need a ton of followers to be successful online? And what if I told you that you should not even think about having an audience? What if I told you that thinking you need a lot of followers is the wrong way to go to actually gain a lot of followers?

You Don’t Need 10,000 Followers

If you get nothing else from this post, you don’t need 10,000 followers. What you need is 10 engaged followers who will share you stuff to their engaged followers. We talked about reach a few weeks ago in my personal branding post. This is how you gain a larger audience that keeps giving back to you – finding people who have reach that you can make friends with.

02 Jul

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 2 comments

Content Marketing for Startups

On Wednesday June 27th, Distilled NYC held a meetup entitled “Marketing Your Startup”. We had around 100 people in attendance, some regulars and many first-time attendees, at Zocdoc headquarters in Soho. I spoke alongside Tom Critchlow and Dan Shure, both of whom gave great talks on “A Startup Content Marketing Plan” and “Thought Leadership Marketing […]

27 Jun

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 17 comments

Announcing My New Project

I’ve been a writer all my life (I wrote my first short novel when I was eleven years old) and a blogger since 2001. I had the most awesome neon green and royal blue Xanga site you have ever seen!

My love affair with the blogosphere has waned in recent years though. Since I started in marketing professionally a few years ago, either the amount of crap writing and production has increased, or I have become pickier and pickier with less patience for content that adds to the noise instead of the signal.

I have also noticed that it is easier to complain about things that annoy you than to change them.

Today I put that to an end. Read more about Announcing My New Project …

22 Jun

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 20 comments

Stealing Authorship for Fun and Profit

What if I told you that it was possible to hijack pages on websites with your Google authorship? What if I also told you that sometimes Google does it for you?

Let me tell you a story. The other day, I logged into our private Distilled G+ network and saw this from my coworker Phil Nottingham –

We all had a laugh as Phil thought that I was trolling him (which admittedly would have been amazing). But I was not. In fact, I did some more searches on the Distilled site and saw these – Read more about Stealing Authorship for Fun and Profit …

19 Jun

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 7 comments

Be The Expert

I recently read this article on SearchEngineLand, asking if SEO/online marketing companies might need to protect their company from clients who essentially “go rogue” and start building links in ways that are against Google’s guidelines, and are not necessarily links that you would build for them. The whole article is built around the premise of iAcquire being deindexed (though we should note that this was because of iAcquire’s actions, not their clients’).

I respect Tony Wright and what he has done for the SEO and online marketing community, and this article brings up the important point about SEOs/consultants overall and their clients.

Intro to Personal Branding

I just published my longest post yet, The Personal Branding Post That Seth Godin Should Have Written. I was inspired by this post over on ViperChill about productivity. In an effort to do the man himself justice, I’ve written this teaser Godin-style. Now, go read the full post. We’re all brands. Regardless of our job or location, […]