Try a quick thought exercise: Grab a piece of paper and a pen and jot down at least 3 or 4 ideas of the best possible way you could help your business and/or your career with $500. I want to compare those ideas against a process that costs me ~$500 and has, historically, produced incredible returns for
My Fall Speaking Schedule: 13 events in 9 weeks
By It’s September, which means the two month season I traditionally spend mostly in Seattle (we call it “summer” even though it rarely gets to 80°) is over and my insane travel schedule’s starting up again. If you’d like to keep track of me or catch me in a particular city, I’ve created a list of
Google Search Quality is Smart to Be Messing with Link Spammers
By In case you’ve not yet read about Google’s patent on rank modifying for spamming techniques, check out SEO by the Sea and SEOptimise. It’s a clever system from the Google folks designed to dissuade spammers (particularly link spammers) from being confident of their results. The basic premise is simple – after observing rank improving behavior
Prioritizing Features & Product/Engineering Investments
By Probably the hardest job the executive team has at SEOmoz (beyond improving culture) is managing the prioritization roadmap for features. Right now, the vast majority of the Moz engineering and product teams are working on a large release that will likely be 12+ months from start to finish (which is actually something we hate –
The Uncomfortable Challenge of Topgrading Your Startup’s Team
By If things go well at your startup, there will inevitably be a point where the business is growing ahead of the team’s abilities. Engineers will find themselves facing architectural, scaling, and complexity issues they’ve never dealt with before. Marketers will discover their historical strengths dwarfed by the quantity and complexity of different customer acquisition channels
Manufacturing Serendipity
By I’m on the road ~100 days each year. When I’m in Seattle, I have at least 30% of my days filled with coffees, calls, and communication to folks outside the company from whom I’m seeking absolutely nothing and where my goal is merely to be helpful. I do most of this in the name of
Cynical Optimism
By Geraldine sometimes tries to describe my outlook on life as cynical optimism. I think that’s a fair assessment. I generally believe that humans will do a lot of stupid, selfish, hurtful, tragic things to each other and themselves. I see this as exacerbated by behavioral and evolutionary psychology, which is poorly understood and even more
Mozcon Feedback & Erica’s Letter to Speakers
By I’ve written before on this blog about how we’ve been working to make Mozcon a remarkable outlier in the field of marketing conferences. Today, I received my feedback scores from Erica McGillivray, who (along with Charlene & Jen) did most of the organization and speaker wrangling for the event. I wanted so share that letter
The First 500 Links
By Most of the time, when I write about SEO, I like to present facts, data, or lessons learned from numerous experiences. This post doesn’t have those (well, maybe a little on the experential side, but not nearly enough to make it a rock solid assumption). Instead, I’m going out on a limb with a suspicion
My Performance Review for the First Half of 2012
By As I mentioned yesterday on the blog, it’s performance review season here at SEOmoz, and since transparency is a core value for us, I’d like to share my personal performance review and the grades/feedback given by Sarah (at least, most of it) publicly here on the blog. I’ll start with the scale we use: