That’s right, I think I’ve worked out the secret to become successful at absolutely anything at all.

It’s worked for me when it comes to playing the guitar, writing music, music production, marketing, and even building a (small, I know) Medium audience. The more I think about it, the more I’m pretty sure it works for absolutely anything.

The thing is, it isn’t even very hard. It’s actually pretty easy. But it eludes people, and once I tell you what it is, you’ll immediately understand why. …

Many an SEO has gone astray by doing everything right.

Read all about search engine optimization, article after article on Medium or Moz or Hubspot, and you’ll likely come away thinking that you get it.

SEO is about identifying relatively high-volume and low-competition keywords, then building fast, robust pages all about them, you’ll tell your coworkers. You’ll bring up the skyscraper content marketing technique and how competitor research can give you the edge you need to achieve top 3 rankings, then wink and tell them that schema is the secret to achieving position zero. …

If we’re honest with ourselves as marketers, we’ll admit that what we do can border on unethical.

People sell their time and labor in return for money. Marketers convince consumers to select a particular product or service when spending their money. The better we convince consumers to part with their hard-earned coin, the more successful we are.

This means using what we know of human psychology to our favor. The colors we choose. The copy we write. The emails and websites we build. It’s all for consumers. …

I just got home from HighEdWeb 2019, which was an excellent conference on web technology in higher education. I learned a lot about the challenges facing colleges and universities, as well as the creative solutions they’re implementing to overcome them. But even more than that, I learned about what true, meaningful, and thoughtful inclusivity looks like.

I’m not really sure why inclusivity hasn’t come up in marketing channels that I participate in (much more regularly than higher ed ones). This idea of ensuring that everyone, regardless of race, sexuality, gender, disability, or any other attribute you can think of that might separate one person from another, can comfortably participate and engage with your content has no reason to be exclusive to higher education. …

You’ve probably heard it said that consumers only buy from those they trust.

It’s easier to understand what that means when you think of salespeople. Like, imagine you walk into a car dealership and one of their salesmen approaches you. He’s probably wearing a suit and tie. He’s probably friendly and gregarious. He probably shakes your hand, asks insightful questions about what you’re looking for, and then uses his expertise to suggest the right car.

You may decide you trust him. You may not — maybe there’s something in his mannerisms that seems shady, or he ignores your budget and offers expensive cars, indicating that he’s only thinking of his commission. …

In the SEO world, there’s nothing scarier than a big algorithm update.

It’s kind of like if you worked on cars for a living and all the manufacturers could snap their fingers and make it so that every car in the world suddenly ran on almond milk instead of gas. Sure, everything is mostly the same, but what might have changed? Is it possible that the fix you had in mind for that Camaro in the shop might now break it worse than before because of the almond milk thing?

Ok, maybe that’s not the best analogy, but you get the point. SEOs make their living by researching and understanding Google’s mysterious ranking algorithms as best they can, then improving their websites to get them to show up higher. When Google changes something, all that experience an SEO gathered might get called into question. …

When you think about top brands and the way in which they communicate with their customers, you probably don’t imagine a lot of cursing. Marketing communications tend to strive for a level of professionalism that doesn’t include or condone vulgarity. In order to maintain a standard of family-friendliness and widespread market appeal, brands believe they have to use pristine language.

One argument for the maintenance of this status quo is simply that curse words don’t add meaning and, particularly in an age of decreasing attention spans, good communicators use the fewest words necessary to get their message across. …

I used to make a game of replying to cold-call emails.

In my mind, cold-call emails were akin to spam. I didn’t want them. 99% of the time, I had no interest in the product or service the poor sales guy was schlepping.

So I had fun with it.

After a couple of emails, I’d write back in a passive-aggressive tone that clearly communicated my disinterest in the product while burning the sender just enough to ensure they wouldn’t bother responding.

Something like:

“Hey, Andrew — thanks for all the emails. I admire your persistence in the face of adversity; I’ve given no indication that I want your product/service, nor that I have any interest whatsoever in chatting with you, and yet you continue to send me emails, not unlike a dog that continues to beg for scraps under the table. …