The NYTimes Bits Blog has a worthwhile read from last week entitled “What Do You Do With the Brilliant Jerks?” I’d encourage startup founders and team members to take 8 minutes and read it thoroughly.
On its face, the article didn’t strike me as especially controversial, but the comments(and some of the responses on social media) tell a different story.…
For the first few years that I spoke at conferences in the search marketing field, I consistently wore a single pair of yellow shoes. Initially, it was so I could be recognized by the many people I’d formed friendships with on the forums and blog comments of the SEO world. In time, it grew to become a personal branding piece,…
Somehow, the company we started has become somewhat successful and reached some really interesting milestones. Honestly, what SEOmoz has achieved in the past 5 years is beyond what I could have hoped for. It’s exciting and it’s humbling, but it’s also a little bit scary. There are 94 incredible people at the company devoting their professional lives (and often a…
The resiliency of the human mind is an absolutely astounding phenomenon. Evolution has given us the power to suffer massive, lifelong injuries, lose the things most precious to us in the world, have our hopes & dreams dashed, move from environments or geographies we say we love to others we find detestable and, over time, achieve the same happiness levels…
A tremendous amount gets written about technical debt (definition) in the startup ecosystem. As you scale your product and engineering, you inevitably make sacrifices for the sake of speed that lead to pain down the road. What startups (and people who interact with them) don’t often realize is that this same problem happens across nearly every team and every form…
I really enjoyed this article from Layered Thoughts: “Growth Hacking is BS. It’s All Just Marketing.” But, it did make me reflect on my adoption of other terminology over the years.
In the early 2000s, I liked the term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) over “Search Engine Placement” (which some people still use) or “Search Engine Marketing” (which now means SEO+PPC…
If things go well at your startup, there will inevitably be a point where the business is growing ahead of the team’s abilities. Engineers will find themselves facing architectural, scaling, and complexity issues they’ve never dealt with before. Marketers will discover their historical strengths dwarfed by the quantity and complexity of different customer acquisition channels and the huge challenges of…
I’m on the road ~100 days each year. When I’m in Seattle, I have at least 30% of my days filled with coffees, calls, and communication to folks outside the company from whom I’m seeking absolutely nothing and where my goal is merely to be helpful. I do most of this in the name of a process I now call…
You’ve likely seen the news today that Moz made its first major acquisition. It was an exciting, rewarding day at the office and an invigorating one for our team, particularly the Followerwonk folks. We’re still a very young company and so this is a bit of a test for us across the board. Acquisitions are notorious for having challenges around…
I have high expectations from Google, particularly on very popular searches in niches where information is easy to come by, reliable, and factual. Yet in the area of weather, probably one of highest demand keyword sectors they’ve got, the results just plain suck.
Have a look: …
