I speak a lot. I make a lot of decks. Heck, I’m even on the board of presentation software startup, HaikuDeck. In the last 3 years, I’ve given nearly 80 unique presentations at 100+ events in the technology and marketing fields. A good percent of the time, I get scores back from the organizers telling me how the
Why I Believe in Intentional Efforts to Increase Diversity
By Wil Reynolds is one of my closest friends. When I reflect on people I love, respect, and want to spend time with (even when I’m in my introvert state), Wil is on the top of that list (along with his wife, Nora). But, that doesn’t mean we see eye to eye on everything. In an on-stage
The “Pester Your Potential Lead Until They Hate You” Approach to SaaS Sales Sucks
By I caught this tweet from Peep Laja (someone I admire greatly and whose advice I generally think is gold) today: This was one of the rare times I disagreed with Peep (or at least with my initial interpretation of this tip), and so I replied, wanting to provide some nuance but limited by Twitter’s short-format.
The Traffic Prediction Accuracy of 12 Metrics from Compete, Alexa, SimilarWeb, & More
By Services that claim to predict the traffic websites receive have been around for 15+ years, but I’ve long been skeptical of their accuracy (having seen how poorly some have predicted traffic on sites whose analytics I accessed). In 2012, I ran a project to test the veracity of the numbers reported by some of these
Google Suggest Has Wildcards?! KW Planner Hides Data?! Crazy.
By Google’s Search Suggest is a wonderous feature. Not only does it save humans beings around the planet millions of key entries each day, it’s also a phenomenal keyword research tool for marketers. For reasons that likely center around its commercial intent bias, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool often doesn’t show large swaths of data around keywords,
This Chart Does Not Show SEO Is Dying
By Sigh… Every few years, there’s a renewed effort in the worlds of shoddy journalism, clickbait, and cheap pageviews to claim the death of SEO. Recently, a few articles, a handful of folks on Twitter, and some presentations I’ve come across have been using this chart to PROVE that this time, SEO really is dying: Google Trends
The False Narratives We Tell Ourselves
By I carry a story around in my head. It’s not a true story. But it’s a story that’s hard to escape. It goes something like this: I started a company with my Mom when I was in my early twenties. We made lots of mistakes and went deeply into debt. We didn’t tell my Dad
On Being Wrong and Not Knowing the Answer
By There’s the naive view of expertise – the one that we all have as young people – where we think that Eddie Vedder must know absolutely everything there is to know about rock music and Peyton Manning must know more than anyone else about the game of American Football. And then, there’s the more nuanced
The 5 Best Things I [______] this Year
By It’s quiet out there on social media. I’m in San Diego with my wife’s family for the holidays, as per usual. And, as per usual, my email’s a little slower than normal, my Twitter feed a little more empty, my Google+ feed likewise. It’s nice. But then, I find myself with 30 minutes on my
Heresy: Google and SEO Don’t Actually Change that Much
By This post is going to sound like clickbait to some, irrational to others, and probably sane to only a handful of practitioners, but I think it’s a frequent and important enough topic to put out there anyway. Almost every time I’m interviewed about SEO or asked about the practice at a conference, I’m asked “how can I keep up