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 […]
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 […]
Happy three weeks before Christmas! If you are anything like me, you should probably start your Christmas shopping 🙂 I’ve been traveling a ton recently and so came across a lot of great articles and even wrote and published a few of my own. So here are the best from this past week! Creating Marketplace […]
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? […]
I’m (unfortunately) pretty outspoken about politics this year, as any of my friends on Facebook will tell you and most of my Twitter followers know. I’ve avoided writing about politics here so far. And I’ll continue that with the brief mention that you should have a plan for voting tomorrow. With that out of the […]
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’m sick of SEO packages. You know the kind, where you get an email asking you to send them a proposal for what you would do for their company and what your packages and pricing are. I’m tired of companies that offer things like “10 blog posts for $150.”
Why?
This is old school small scale thinking. If you want 10 blog posts for $150 and your hourly rate is $30 per hour, write a blog post every 30 minutes for 5 hours. I bet the quality will be a lot higher than paying someone random to do it for you. Marketing “packages” don’t work. Marketing that works isn’t a product that is plug and play for every business. Depending on your business and who your customers are, and your current stage of company, different channels are going to work better or worse for you to actually get you results.
I’ll give a lot of businesses asking for packages the benefit of the doubt because they don’t know what else to call them, but the language underlying it signals to me that they view marketing consulting as transactional – I give you this and I get that. I’m sorry, but that’s not how marketing works. That’s not even how business works! If business were that easy, everyone would run their own business.
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 […]
Quick note: this post was written in 2013. It is now 2016 and I am indeed doing consulting. Contact me through my profile on GetCredo.com. During the fall of 2011 and the first half of 2012, I did a lot of freelance consulting. I did it because I was saving for trips abroad and knew […]