Articles by Ian Lurie

I’m speaking tomorrow at SEMPDX Searchfest. My topic: Building your search agency. I figure someone should learn from my pain. If you’re going to Searchfest tomorrow (and you should be), come up to me and say ‘hi’. I’ll even bribe you to do it: I’ll be giving out 30 copies of my book, Conversation Marketing, [...]

Update: Read to the end for a graph that Rishil sent me, courtesy of Sitemeter. The data is hard to ignore: Gawker is literally designing themselves out of existence. Gawker. Media. Need I say more? They launched a new design for all their sites—LifeHacker, Gizmodo, etc.—a few weeks back. In doing so, they reduced their [...]

So, you want to run your own company? Check this list first. If you fit more than 4 of these, you might want to wait a while. You still have some growing up to do: Your ego is bigger than you are. You just have to be the smartest person in the room. Uh-oh. That’s [...]

Yesterday I wrote about how discounts are addictive, and can kill your business. The addictive nature of discounts is why I think Groupon should’ve sold to Google. Most of the businesses that use Groupon have no idea how to handle discounts as a marketing tool. So they fling deals out left and right. That leads [...]

Discounts are the Vicodin of internet marketing I’m not a fan of discounts as a core marketing strategy. Use them once in a while? Sure, that’s fine. Use them too often, though, and they’ll kill your business. See, they’re an addictive substance. An aside: Vicodin, addictive stuff, and why this matters Four years ago I [...]

I’ve made a bet with myself that, by adding ‘instant’ and the number ’5′, I will get triple the normal traffic to this post. If I win, I have to buy myself a chocolate bar. No fun intro today, so I’ll just get to it—five utterly random but simple little things you can do to [...]

I had a discussion yesterday with Ed Lopit, one of the most insightful businessmen I know. That discussion led to this blog post. If you want to learn to master this stuff, talk to him I’ve been called a lotta things over the years. Most of them can’t be written on a PG blog. But [...]

I’m reading Writing with Style by John R. Trimble. If you want to learn to write with personality, this book’s a fantastic place to start. My favorite chapter so far is titled “Superstitions” and begins “This chapter concerns literary prudes.” In it, Trimble describes a few ‘rules’ for writing. I put rules in quotes because [...]

I’m guilty of these myself. But I’m starting to see them show up more and more, on big sites (you know who you are) that are supposed to know better. Inevitably, these phrases are followed by a stock photo and 250+ words that basically repeat the same phrase, again and again. Then the writer gets [...]

Yo, Larry. I know we go way back. So I’ve got a bit of business advice for ya: Keep your eye on the ball. Google’s been all over the damned map: Wave, for heaven’s sake? Focus on what you do well: Making tons of stuff findable. Keep spam in check. Right now, your rankings are [...]