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
Negative Self Talk and Self Deprecation
By I’m not sure if I can short form blog effectively (like two of my blogging heroes – Brad & Fred), but I’m going to try a little more of that since my time to blog is so limited. While browsing my social streams today, this headline/article caught my attention: via Can You Hack Your Self
Some Non-Obvious Advice on Thought Leadership
By I don’t particularly like the phrase “thought leader” or “thought leadership” for two reasons: 1) just *thinking* about something doesn’t make you a leader, nor does being a leader enable you to simply think about things AND 2) the term has pretentious and sometimes negative associations. When I hear people describe me that way, I have a viscerally
A Long, Ugly Year of Depression That’s Finally Fading
By Yesterday morning I woke up early to speak at the Business of Software conference in Boston. It was my first time there, and it’s an exceptional group. Then, after some meetings, I spoke in the afternoon at Hubspot’s Inbound conference (thankfully just across a long skybridge that connects Boston’s World Trade Center from its Convention
A Video About Independent Games Provides Surprising Insights into Marketing & the Web
By Yesterday, a Mozzer shared this video with the company over an allstaff thread. I started watching, as I usually do, thinking that 1-2 minutes into the video I’d give up and get back to my email. Wrong. For 19 minutes and 5 seconds, I was captivated. The video isn’t lovely or beautifully done, but it
If Negative SEO is Possible, We Need an Irrefutable, Public Example
By There are a tremendous number of claims from across the search marketing world that negative SEO (the practice of knocking someone else’s website/page(s) out of search results by pointing spam links at them) is not only possible, but has been done. One of the most recent and, IMO, most credible came via this SERoundtable post
Making Agency Numbers More Transparent
By Benchmarks are an incredible tool for business owners and operators. They tell us where we sit on the spectrum and make our strengths and weaknesses transparent. Without them, we’re often left to wonder – am I any good at this? (Kitchen pie chart via Jotun Türkiye) Here’s a conversation I recently had with the founder of a marketing agency: