Internet Marketing

Dear CEO/VP of operations or whatever you are: Information technology departments don’t kill businesses. CEO’s using IT departments kill businesses. I’m reading a great book by John Hughes: Haunting the CEO (affiliate link). He’s a CIO-for-hire, and he’s seen it all. I’d started writing this post before I started the book, but the book really… Read More

Someone at Portent asked me to put together an explanation of why I behave the way I do. They meant it in a nice way. So this is it: The Field Guide to Ian Lurie, written for “Portent” employees and anyone else I might encounter in the working world. Feel free to laugh at me,… Read More

Design & Development

AKA: The Responsinator Lee Odden, Todd Malicoat, Jonathan Allen and I did a site clinic/lab at SES San Francisco last week. Of 5 sites we reviewed, 4 delivered the wrong response codes if I: Visited a broken link on the site. A server should respond with a ‘404’ error code. Most of these servers instead… Read More

Steady, smart content curation can grow your audience on lots of social media outlets. It’s list building, social media-style: You help folks find and filter other people’s good stuff. In exchange, they start paying more attention to your good stuff. Just the facts, folks: This is a step-by-step look at how I do my daily… Read More

I’d love to say I’m about to draw a spectacular parallel between cycling and internet marketing. But internet marketing isn’t anything like cycling. I’ve never barfed after a hard day of internet marketing. Nor have I gotten road rash because of a badly-behaved poodle. And I never won a bicycle race because of my brain… Read More

Analytics

Since I ranted about internet marketing training yesterday, I thought I’d post a video I just did for the team. This one’s a really quick look at Google Analytics, and how to do a fast analysis of lost organic search traffic: Quickly find and diagnose lost keyword-specific traffic in Google Analytics. I never build these… Read More

How the hell do I teach my team internet marketing? Why do we all suck at it? I spend a lot of time on this puzzle. My company’s survival depends on it. I have to find ways to teach, and to teach teachers, while working it around everyone’s busy schedule. And I have to find… Read More

Internet Marketing

There’s one concept in Atlas Shrugged that’s always stuck with me: Select, don’t accumulate. Ayn Rand was referring to stuff, of course: Everything from throw rugs to chairs to books. I love the idea in ‘real life.’ But it works awfully well in internet marketing, too. Accumulation marketing: We all do it Accumulation marketing is… Read More

Random

It’s Friday. I’m tired. Here are some quotes. All of which are true, but edited to protect the utterers: “We don’t need marketing. Our product is great.” I’d punch you, but I’m paralyzed by the stupid. “We need to test that, first.” No, you don’t. You don’t have to test whether having a ‘buy now’… Read More

Internet Marketing

In internet marketing, your top priorities are, in this order: Appeal. A desirable product. Quality. A product that doesn’t suck once people have it. Visibility. People have to find you when they need you. Stability. Your web site has to work. Ease of use. Make your site so easy to use, a brain-dead zombie could… Read More

Lord knows I’m no fan of Newt Gingrich. His politics are so far to the right of mine he disappears over the horizon. However, he’s not the kind of guy to go hunting for fake self-esteem boosters. So when the nerdoverse exploded over ‘Followergate’ (term coined by PeekYou) and sprayed it’s way to CNN and… Read More

In customer service, ‘being nice’ and ‘trying hard’ isn’t always enough. Sometimes, you have to be competent, too. Capable, even. Act 1: Undeath (of a monitor) At work, I have a 30” Apple Cinema HD. It is a fantastic monitor. Alas, 2 weeks ago when I plugged it into my laptop, it went all cattywampus,… Read More

Random

OK, first off, I have to make something clear: I am not an SEOMOZ fan. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with building fantastic tools, having a great conference, gathering all the SEO geniuses and best developers and generally smartest people in one place. I have no problem with a company so famous my… Read More

This blog post is based on yesterday’s content strategies session at MozCon. If you missed it, or wanted a refresher, give this a read: A quick preview This post is huge. So, here’s a quick preview: The problem. In content creation, you can’t do the minimum required work any more. There is no ‘minimum’. Changes… Read More

Announcing a new tool: The Gramanator During my MozCon content creation session today, I announced a new tool: The Gramanator. It is mighty. It is the Gramanator: Bow down before it. What it does The Gramanator will take any public Google Reader Shared Feed and: Clean it up, removing stop words. Assemble all of the… Read More