It’s becoming common wisdom in the SEO, startup, and marketing worlds that so-called vanity metrics are accursed trolls of numbers, sent from the fiery deep to confuse, mislead, and prey on the weak-minded marketer. E.g: In a lot of ways, I agree with posts like those Eric Ries has written on the topic. Pivoting based…
Google’s Updated SEO Advice is Almost Correct
Here’s what Google used to say about how to improve rankings in their search engine results: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.” Here’s what they say today: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites…
I’m Swapping CEO Roles with Wil Reynolds of SEER
For the last 6.5 years, I’ve had a fairly singular role as CEO of a venture-backed, software startup in Seattle. While that job has brought massive amounts of growth and learning and challenges with it, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to step into someone else’s shoes and live their life for a…
Vision-Based Framework
Some companies exist primarily (or exclusively) to make money. Others exist for a variety of non-financial (or pseudo-financial) reasons. But in much of the research about companies that have gone from startup to scale to world-changing status, observers found a common architecture. This architecture is vision-based, and mission driven. It starts with a core purpose…
The Growth of Web Marketing Fields
I’m always interested to see how the field of web marketing is changing over time and what skills, tactics, and practices are receiving particular attention. One of the ways I track this is to look at results from several sites on a semi-annual basis, including: LinkedIn’s bio searches SimplyHired’s Job Trends Indeed’s Job Trends Google’s Keyword Trends…
Generosity & Entitlement
I’ve been trying something new at Moz. I schedule 90 minutes every week or two for “office hours,” and invite anyone from any team at the company to come visit and chat about whatever’s on their mind. So far, attendance has been sparse (only 1 person the first week, ~10 the 2nd week, and 4…
It Just Depends What You Want to Consider
I know that I am among the luckiest, most blessed human beings to have ever existed on the planet since the dawn of time. I’m not in the 1% or the 0.1%, I’m in the 0.0000000000-well-you-get-the-point-001. That’s not exclusively because of finances (no debt and $26,961.98 in the bank as of tonight) or the era…
Well, He’s Not Going to Get Very Far
Company culture is incredibly fragile. It’s hard for founders/CEOs/execs to understand how little faith and trust people have in us when we stand up at a meeting and say “we believe in our culture” or “we put values first.” That skepticisim has often been built up over years or decades of being let down. People…
If Management is the Only Way Up, We’re All F’d
Geraldine used to love her job at Cranium (the board game startup in Seattle, prior to the Hasbro acquisition & layoffs). She wrote questions for the board games, and copy for the boxes and marketing materials. She was good at it. But, something weird happened – they tried to promote her. I remember her coming…
We’ll Work for Peanuts. But We Won’t Work Without Meaning.
For the first 6 years of my career, I made less than $20,000/year. For 18 months, I made more, but then I made less for another year after that, so it averaged out. It was a tough time (and I’ve written about it before so won’t rehash here), but I never stopped learning, stopped growing,…