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.
I’m sick right now. I caught some sort of cough thing (not Covid) when I was in Virginia for the holidays, and it’s miserable. I’m throwing everything I can at it – Mucinex, Sudafed, zinc, vitamin C, water, tea, rest. And yet I’m still coughing hard. It is, as I said, miserable. Of course, this […]
As the internet as taken over more and more of our lives, businesses have increasingly realized that they need to have an online presence in order to continue staying in business. Even if your business requires being in person (which, by the way, way fewer do than we thought prior to March 2020 when the […]
My business specialty is marketplaces. I’ve worked with close to a dozen marketplaces over the last few years, including founding my own and building and running marketing/growth teams for two. The others I have worked with specifically on acquiring more customers on the demand (buying) side through SEO, content marketing, and outreach. One of my […]
Are you an entrepreneur looking to grow your business fast? Or maybe you are a Director/VP of Marketing and struggling to get to that next level of growth, as you’ve reached a current plateau (that we all hit, by the way). I contributed to a roundup post on E-Myth blog all about this: My tip? […]
Last week, I had the immense privilege to be a guest of Jason Calacanis‘s on This Week in Startups. For those of you who don’t know, Jason is the founder of LAUNCH, which helps startups grow through education and financing. Jason is an angel investor, and LAUNCH hosts a few conferences throughout the year as […]
Dollar Shave Club, the disruptive direct-to-consumer shaving blades and products company, just sold to Unilever for 1 billion dollars cash. One billion dollars for a four year old company that sells razors! I am a happy Dollar Shave Club user myself. I was previously a Gillette Mach 3 user but was tired of the exorbitant […]
I’ve worked with a lot of companies helping out with marketing and growth over the last years. I’ve seen some do it very well. I’ve seen others fail to resource it and therefore they’ve failed to execute.
Here is what executives can do to empower growth teams to do just that – grow the company. Read more about What I Would Tell All Executives About Growth …
Recently Paul Graham, a VC and entrepreneur whom I very much respect, wrote a post called Change Your Name in which he argued that a startup should seriously think about changing their name if they are not able to get the “.com” TLD for their brand name. Graham also stated some statistics that are meant to make us think that his position is mostly irrefutable. He said:
100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another.
I’d argue that having the .com domain is not the most important thing (and I don’t think that’s what Graham was saying). What’s more important, in my opinion, is consistency. In fact, I’d even argue that not having the .com is missing the forest for the trees. Let’s dig in. Read more about Does A Startup Really Need The .Com Of Their Brand Name? …
A little over a year ago, I joined HotPads.com as their online marketing manager. I was the first marketer at HotPads in a while, hence the team was me and I was doing everything (though nothing super well). One year later, I have a team of eight marketers (including myself) spanning SEO, email, and content. We’re […]
Last October, as many of you know, I made the move from search marketing agency Distilled to become the Online Marketing Manager at hotpads.com, the nationwide rentals brand of the Zillow Rental Network. I’ve been at the job for four months now, and a recent conversation with Jonathon Colman (another Bay Area transplant) has made […]
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 …
*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 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.
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 …
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 …
Growth hacking has become a buzzterm in the past 6 months, ever since this post written back in April by Andrew Chen. There’s even a growth hacking agency in New York City (linked at the bottom of the post) and startups are starting to hire growth hackers to help them scale up their user base faster.
I’ve heard the growth hacker term thrown around a lot, and have experienced both positive and negative reactions to it from people I know.
The goal of this post is to define down what a growth hacker is, how this integrates well into online marketing, and then to give a few examples of some growth hacks I’ve either seen or heard about that have helped tech startups grow. Read more about SEOs are Growth Hackers …
Content marketing has been around for years, but until recently Google was not making good on their word to rank content that deserves to rank. Instead, we could all easily find examples where sites were ranking off of low quality directories, link wheels, blog networks, and many other tactics. But since Penguin, Panda, and the myriad of other algorithm changes this year, SEOs have started to finally embrace content as a viable means, but we’re still running into old mindsets from clients, and honestly a lot of SEOs are not good at creating linkworthy content. Read more about A Blog Is Not A Content Strategy …