Articles by Ian Lurie

Unless you live under a rock, or have a life outside the internet, you’ve heard about Kenneth Cole’s now-infamous Tweet-fuffle: Tasteless? Yes. And ill-advised. Tactically it looks brilliant: Surf on a trending hashtag (#Cairo). By tweeting and including that hashtag in his post, Kenneth Cole ensured his tweet would be seen by the millions of [...]

I’m warning everyone: I’m blogging angry. I waited 24 hours. I’m still angry. So here it is. I am @#$)(* sick and tired of people telling me they’re “advanced” SEO’s, sitting on “advanced” SEO panels and speaking at “advanced” SEO conferences after three years of screwing up people’s web sites with a nofollow tag. Here [...]

I gave a talk today at Emerging Media Conference about marketing and Dungeons & Dragons. I’m hoping to have it as a video pretty soon, but for now, I took a big chunk of it and turned it into a blog post. This is basically a transcript, so it may not make total sense at [...]

My latest Search Engine Land column just went live. I listed out 6 ideas for stuff to write when you’ve got no idea what to write: 6 content tips: How to write when you have nothing to write about

My wife has me trying to eat gluten-free for a few weeks. That means no bread, cookies, pizza, pasta. It’s like I’ve been told, “Ian, from now on, food will suck”. But I’m doing it. Voluntarily. If Dawn had simply told me, “Eat less starch, eat more veggies, and reduce caloric intake,” I’d totally fail. [...]

I’m not a big ‘exit strategy’ kind of guy. I prefer to build a cool business that’s going to last, and keep at it. Hence my 16-year stint (thus far) at Portent. But there’s always someone asking me what my strategy is for getting out. So, here you go—created by the Portent-ites—4 exit strategies for [...]

I once got fired for improving sales 300%. I showed a client a report. It was awesome and I was dang proud of the results. The report read like this: Sales from organic search last year were $50,000. Sales from organic search this year were $150,000. Sales from PPC last year were $60,000, against a [...]

Kevin Hillstrom is my analytical idol. So, when I bought a copy of his e-book, Twitter Hashtag Analysis a few weeks back, I was mostly looking for hashtag analysis techniques. But I got a huge bonus: This great e-book is a blueprint for Twitter community building. Hillstrom based his e-book on analysis of activity in [...]

Everyone wants marketing ‘tricks’. The best marketing trick? Write an e-book. Write a title that guarantees cool marketing tricks inside. Sell the e-book for $2000. If you sell 2 copies, you make $4000. That’s a cool trick. OK, seriously now… There are no marketing ‘tricks’. The best marketing, internet or otherwise, springs out of some [...]

At least once every day I consider replacing myself with a ‘real’ CEO. Then I could just be the nerd in the cave, writing and programming and SERPing and such. But Portent’s my baby, so it’s hard to let go. Here are the big 5 rules I’ve increasingly tried to work and live by. I [...]