The short, short version: After stepping down as CEO in 2014 and leaving the company in 2018, as of a signature earlier today, I’m officially off Moz’s board of directors. The incredibly impressive CEO & founder of DemandMaven, Asia (Matos) Orangio accepted my offer to fill the chairperson seat. Simultaneously, I nominated Apps Without Code‘s
Product-Market Fit is a Broken Concept. There’s a Better Way.
By The startup ecosystem loves to hype the concept of product-market fit. Does your company have it? How far away from it are you? If you have it, how are you scaling? If you don’t have it, why would you ever try to do marketing? All of these questions assume a binary truth, universally applicable to
Six Ways SparkToro’s Early Customers Use Our Product
By Tl;DR: SparkToro’s early customers include a mix of agencies, independent consultants, and in-house marketers whose work involves Digital PR, Social Media+Content Marketing, Market Research, Digital Advertising, Audience Building, and/or Creative/Brand Marketing. Clicking those will take you to the accompanying section of this post with use-cases and examples. This has been a hard year for everyone.
New Feature Alert: Email + Contact Info Are Now In SparkToro
By Since launch in April, showing emails and contact information inside the SparkToro app has been our most requested feature. Today, it’s here. Billions of email addresses and social contact URLs now pull directly into the Lists feature. If you’ve used SparkToro Lists in the past (and have a Standard or higher tier account), your Lists
We’ve Gotta Stop Using “Lifestyle Business” as a Pejorative
By For a long while, American business culture has worshiped at the altar of big. Entrepreneurs want to build “big” companies, because they believe that’s how they prove their worth. The media tells us that’s true when they report on every move made by big companies, but barely cover small ones. Speakers on stages and webinars
Outreach Tips (better than anything you’ll find searching Google)
By It’s 2020, so your inboxes probably look like mine. Bloated with requests from people you don’t know, overrun by low-quality spammers, a bubbling morass of bandwidth-consuming time vampires mixed in with people and sources you actually *want* to hear from, forcing you to pan for gold amidst the sans serif grays and post-modern white of
Where Should You Start Marketing a New Business or Product?
By There’s no question I get more when presenting on startup marketing than this: “I feel so overwhelmed… Where do I even start?” It’s a fair response, one for which I have great empathy. If you start consuming information about marketing a business online, the rabbit hole can quickly lead to some very overwhelming and, in
How to Find Those Hard-to-Reach Audiences in SparkToro… Fast
By Updated: April 5th, 2024 (for SparkToro V2) Every day, I help folks in fascinating, unique niches uncover key information about the audiences for their marketing efforts. It’s a fun problem! For a few minutes, I get to feel like a digital Sherlock Holmes, digging into their products and services, trying to understand their customers, and
Too Much Creative Marketing is Stifled by Attribution
By You’re listening to a podcast. The guest describes a product that sounds compelling, alluring, something you’ve been looking for… What happens next? Yup. You search Google. And then what? Google shows you the website for that alluring product, and you click. Maybe you explore the site a bit, perhaps give them your email address or
Content Marketing Superpower: Small, Invite-Only, Amplifier Groups
By Every month or so, I get an email via BCC. It’s short and to the point, containing a blog post or research paper from the marketing field. More than half the time I click the link, I end up sharing their content on Twitter and LinkedIn. ~10% of the time, I end up linking to