Blog Articles
How Content Teams Can Protect Themselves from ChatGPT
This is a cross-posting of my article from The Drum “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clark ChatGPT feels like magic, and I am under its spell. But magic can be used for good or ill, depending on the application. With the launch of ChatGPT, writers, content managers and content
How to Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
This is cross-posting of my article for AdWeek Finding a performance marketing partner is the modern shortcut Sales and marketing teams both serve critical functions for their organizations, and in a perfect world, they’d work together to maximize results. As CMOs and other executives push for higher revenue accountability from their teams, aligning these integral
How Can Performance Marketing Help You?
This is a cross-posting of my article for AdWeek. Businesses across the globe are seeking affordable solutions to expand their sales in a fast paced, extremely competitive environment. Because of this, marketers are increasingly being pressured to prove their value. Executive marketers are expected to drive growth: 64% of CMOs say that proving the financial
The SEO Framework Part 1: Indexation, Ranking, Traffic, Actions
Here’s the most common complaint I’ve heard from SEOs over the last 20 years: “I’ve made so many great SEO recommendations, but I can’t get any resources dedicated to implement them!” – every young SEO One of the big challenges in building an effective SEO program is getting buy-in from executives. They’ve got the resources
Biological vs Chronological Age & Epigenetic Tests
The primary driver of aging is reduced damage repair capacity within your body. It’s weird to think that all the things we associate with aging – white hair, wrinkles, bad eyesight, disease – are just accumulated damage within your body. What’s even weirder is the idea that you can effectively become “younger” at the cellular
Google and the Tip of the AI Iceberg
I was surprised by the amount of surprise in the technology community when Google recently announced that its RankBrain artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to help understand natural language queries and serve results. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Google has always been an AI company. This statement from Larry Page is about as clear as it
Mobile Apps vs the Mobile Web for B2B
TL;DR – Mobile apps are used for entertainment purposes. If you’re a business, you should make the mobile version of your website your #1 priority. Your mobile app can wait. Mobile apps are getting a lot of press and buzz, and as a B2B marketer, you see lots of large corporations grumbling and making noises
Your Mobile Website Experience is Frustrating Your Users
Mobile users don’t like to be frustrated by user experiences and websites that aren’t optimized for mobile. After creating a responsive version of their website, many companies sit back in satisfaction, considering their work done. They shouldn’t, and neither should you. A “mobile-friendly” responsive website is table stakes. Mobile-friendly will only get you so far.
Building a Business Case for Online Communities
B2B companies frequently look at online communities with mixed emotions. On the one hand, they see the obvious success of sites like the Amex OPENForum, and they aspire to reap similar benefits. On the other hand, there are the standard fears that many companies have: Fear that community will devolve into a quagmire of complaints
Technical SEO in a Semantic Search World
This is the deck I presented at a recent session “Advanced SEO” for the Digital Summit conference in Denver, called “Technical SEO in a Semantic Search World”. This presentation was actually a really fun opportunity for me to talk about something that’s been on my mind – the changing role of SEO in the world
Make Your Own Gl1tch Art
You know that really cool thing that the Internet does where, out of nowhere, you find something that you didn’t previously know existed, and you now become absolutely insane about? Yeah, that thing. It just happened to me, again, and it is making your own glitch art. Glitch art is the process of taking an
Get Your Selfie On
SelfieCity is a data visualization tool analyzing 3200 selfies taken by people in 5 cities across the globe, then grouped by the city they were taken in (New York, Berlin, Moscow, Sao Paolo, Bankok). The analyzed lots of different aspects, like age, facial expressions, glasses / no glasses, head tilt, etc: They started the project
What the Healthcare.gov Disaster Means for Your Website
Putting politics aside, the launch of the Healthcare.gov website has been a train wreck. I’ve been building and marketing websites for a dozen years, and I have never seen a launch go so spectacularly, publicly wrong. This is partly due to the highly visible and contentious nature of the Affordable Care Act. But more interestingly,
What Google’s Changes Mean for Your Content Marketing Efforts
91% of B2B marketers use content marketing as a tactic, spending $118 billion in 2013 on content marketing, social media, and video. If you don’t understand some key aspects of Google’s new search algorithm, you may be flushing your content marketing dollars down the drain. True, talking about search algorithms tends to make eyes glaze
Social Media Week Panel Discussion
This is a panel discussion that I participated on during Social Media Week in New York, hosted at Forbes headquarters. It was called “Loud & Clear: How B2B Marketers Can Turn Up the Signal-to-Noise Ratio”.
Measuring Success in Social Media
This presentation is a companion to my post on the most common question in B2B social media. My goal with this presentation is to introduce a conceptual framework that takes helps sort social media metrics into meaningful bundles that are strategically aligned with key business outcomes. This presentation also includes: High-level recommendations to keep in
The Most Common Question in B2B Social Media, Answered
The most common question B2B marketers ask me is: “How do I use social media to get more leads?” And the answer is: Treat it just like any other sales process, with the key exception that you have to earn every lead through demonstrating value, never with hard selling. People care about solutions to their
Best Practices : Integrating SEO Into Your Business
One of the most common problems that I’ve encountered in my 11 years in organic search marketing is around the operational integration of SEO into web projects. Many organizations have an SEO resource, agency, or department, but still ship websites, redesigns, and products that are not well-optimized. How does this happen so frequently? Organizations frequently
SEO 101 Overview Presentation
This presentation is a companion to my SEO Framework: IRTA post. It’s intended as an introduction to some of the key concepts in SEO, especially around how to set goals and measure success. SEO 101 Overview from Ethan Hays
The SEO Health Check
The metrics that a large number of businesses track related to SEO are, frequently, the wrong ones. If your SEO team tracks metrics that skew too macro, or too micro, you can end up with a skewed view of your progress in organic search: The 10,000 Foot View If your metrics are too high-level, the