Articles by Ian Lurie

I got to participate in the ‘Future of Search’ panel today at the Seattle Interactive Conference. Two subjects came up that I must expand on a bit: My car This is my car. It is a Buick Regal Turbo. It is awesome: OK, now that that’s done with. What scares me about the future of [...]

I love when someone tells me I should ‘manage growth’ at Portent. How, exactly, would I do that? Hire a psychic? Sometimes, the economy tanks, and you get 10 great new clients. Sometimes, the economy grows, and 3 clients leave to sell their toothpaste caps in Superbowl ads. I guess I could tell 5 great [...]

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. Going black hat. It’s so tempting. You put in all this time researching SEO. You know as much about the algorithms as anyone. You watch competitors zip past you and you just know they’re cheating. How else could they zip past you*? *I dunno… Maybe because [...]

Can I pay you based on performance? I hear that a lot. On its face, performance-based pay for internet marketing seems really fair: Clients pay their marketer a percentage of sales, or some dollars per lead, or something similar. If I help you sell more stuff, you pay me more. If I help you sell [...]

If you write for SEO, you write for online users, and vice-versa. I just put together this SEO copywriting cheat sheet to cover it all. It’s free – have a look. The SEO Copywriting Cheat Sheet – PDF The cost? Zero. Zip. Nada. If you want to make me smile, you can: Buy one of [...]

‘Engagement’. Shudder. It’s the latest beaten-to-death marketing term. Truth is, though, there’s a genuine need to ‘engage’ with your customer. I get it: You want to stand out. You want your customers to like you. You want them to remember you. But do you really have to over-complicate your web sites, and your marketing campaigns, [...]

I’ll be posting the rest of this tomorrow night, after I present it to SEMPDX. If you’re in Portland, stop by and say hi. [tooltip content="This is just a preview. When I put a presentation together, I find myself constantly dismantling/rebuilding it, right up to the last minute. So what I end up with tomorrow [...]

Just coined it myself. Creative Lockjaw: A syndrome where an individual has a great idea but can’t quite spit it out. It happens, most often, when you over-edit yourself. You’ve got that fantastic idea, but you refuse to write it down right away because you want to describe it just so. Creative lockjaw often leads [...]

Oh god, you groan, I have to write on the blog again?! I just wrote a post last month!!! It’s a pain, I know. You’ve got a business to run, or a game to watch, or kids to feed. Spending 2 hours grinding out 300 words just isn’t a high priority. It can be worth [...]

Anyone who publishes anything on the web is part of Google. Well, anyone who lets Google crawl their content, anyway. Which is just about everyone. I told ya so Lots of bloggers are saying that Google’s a publisher. To which I can only say, “Well, DUH!” I’ve been writing about Google-as-aggregator for a few years [...]