Last week, I was invited to give the closing talk at Brighton SEO, one of the SEO field’s most well-attended events. The host, Kelvin Newman, was gracious, thoughtful, and personally still runs much of the event’s operations, giving it a truly special, authentic, non-corporate feel. My presentation centered on the shift in Google’s behavior over
SparkToro’s New Tool to Uncover Real vs. Fake Followers on Twitter
By On our journey to creating a great search tool for audience intelligence, we realized that the data we use to measure influence is fatally flawed in a number of ways. Our SparkScore tool was built to help measure true engagement+reach (as opposed to mere following). But the other big problem is fake followers — accounts
The Powerhouses of the Internet Are Turning Hostile to Websites
By Perhaps this was inevitable. In a system that encourages monopolies, and demands those monopolies increase growth rate and extract ever more revenue (sans caveats or exceptions), we probably shouldn’t be surprised. But, we should be prepared. Google is referring less outgoing traffic to websites for the first time in its 17 year history (at least
You’ve Got Product/Market Fit… What About Marketing/Market Fit?
By You’ve just been asked to take over the marketing strategy for a new company that makes innovative, high end restaurant equipment. They need their brand and message to reach chefs and owners of independent restaurants. What’s your process? If you’re a smart, responsible, thoughtful marketer, you’ll do something like this: Step One: Figure out what
My Presentation from INBOUND 2018 Might Make You a Better Entrepreneur
By Last week, I spoke at Hubspot’s INBOUND conference for the eighth year. For the first time, it was not under the auspices of my old company, Moz, nor was it centrally about web marketing. Instead, I focused on my experiences building a company and helping other entrepreneurs build their companies…. And I think, this was
The Future of SEO Has Never Been Clearer (nor more ignored)
By I can’t recall a time over the past fifteen years where the next five years in the world of search engines and SEO seemed as clear and obvious as they do today. Nor can I recall a time when so many experienced professionals and smart companies buried their heads in the sand about it… (maybe
A New, Free Tool to Determine the True Influence of a Twitter Account
By Number of followers is a crap metric. And yet, as I’ve been watching and learning from folks who do content marketing, PR-focused outreach, social media marketing, and influencer campaigns, I’ve found that more than 90% of the time… that’s *exactly* what people use. They’ll nod their heads and say “yeah, I know it can be
SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs
By The Short Version Our new company, SparkToro, LLC has just completed a $1.3mm angel financing. And, because we think our structure might be right for many other businesses, we’re making our documents open-source for anyone to use. The Story SparkToro is, obviously, a product of my and my cofounder, Casey‘s, experiences in the mostly venture-backed
Announcing SparkToro “Trending” — a Front Page for the Web Marketing World
By Over the last decade, there have been numerous attempts to create an news aggregation tool for web marketers — Threadwatch, Sphinn, Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Alltop — but none of them quite scratched the itch. Plus, almost all of them were susceptible to rampant spam and/or ugly drama+trolling in the comments. Casey (SparkToro’s cofounder) and I have
Pushing Back Against Shame and Failure (plus a story about D&D)
By Recently, I had a series of epiphanies about my experiences as a founder. Please forgive the length of the post, and stick with me, I’ll do my best to make the journey worthwhile. I was eleven years old, maybe twelve, and my family lived way out in the middle of nowhere, in unincorporated King County.