Articles by Ian Lurie

Every now and then, someone says something that passes cringe-worthy and goes straight to neural overload. At those times, I get a temporary case of Exploding Head Syndrome (it’s real). I’ll skip the political stuff like “Global warming isn’t real” and “Get your government hands off my Medicare” and stick to internet marketing: Quote 1: [...]

In the event of my horrible messy stinky death, please read this: Today, I may get flushed down a toilet, then plunge 30,000 feet to my death. I’m not crazy, I tell you. See, I suspect that the Brotherhood of Magical Tea Party Activists is after me. I know they’re annoyed that I’ve actually read [...]

Everyone thinks they have a great recipe for link bait. Make a list. Include pictures. Freak people out. Post it right at this specific time of day (different for every ‘expert’). Spam Digg. No, wait, spam Twitter! Ooops, try Stumbleupon! Or, my favorite, “Write really good stuff”. When you see hordes of experts all recommending [...]

I’ve neglected the development folks lately. Which is ironic, since I’ve spent the last six weeks buried in reverse proxies via nginx, Nutch and writing web spiders in Python. To make up for it, here’s a list of random learnings I’ve had when I put on my development hat: Learn the business case. Make sure [...]

I taught part of another Huzzah! training today. The topic: SEO and social media. I talked about how to build a real, natural audience in social media, and take advantage of that in your link building and content efforts. I recorded the whole thing. Huge sound problems again – I’m cursed, apparently, at Wappow’s offices. [...]

Last week I presented intermediate SEO training at the July 19 Huzzah! workshop. I recorded it, and Jenn Matthews has very kindly let me release the video. The sound is awful, for which I apologize. I’ll be bringing an external mic with a filter for this week’s advanced SEO training. But, there’s still some good [...]

I’ve been doing an unscientific study: Watching a random sampling of folks who retweet my blog posts, and then tracking the number of folks who respond to their retweets. As it turns out, on average you’ll get more visitors when someone with a moderate following retweets your post. I’m leaving out @GuyKawasaki, of course – [...]

Chief Marketing Officers have an average tenure of about 6 months. In corporate terms, that’s somewhere between the duration of gnat’s belch and the time it takes my son to eat a slice of pizza. So they live under a lot of stress, and they’re constantly pushed to turn around flagging campaigns in days or [...]

Last month, Google announced that they’re now accepting mixed-media XML sitemaps: You can put images, video and regular page URLs all into the same map. I saw this and rubbed my hands together while cackling maniacally. I could finally make sure that valuable images that clients paid for, or paid to have taken, would get [...]

This is a rant. Anyone reading this, understand that you’re not the target. No specific person has done any one thing that made me crazy. I was born that way. But for the sake of future generations, corporate America, get it through your goddamned thick heads that talking, planning and philosophizing is 100% worthless if [...]