Poaching Employees

8 Ways to Stop Big Agencies from Poaching Your Employees

Before being acquired, one of the biggest challenges I faced while running my boutique digital marketing agency was watching my employees get poached by bigger agencies who offered more money and more benefits. Being a boutique, I hired a lot of entry and junior level people. I prided myself on being able to spot potential and great personalities when I couldn’t afford a senior level person. However, entry and junior level people with lots of potential and great personalities eventually want and deserve more money and better benefits. So, over the years I learned eight simple ways to keep my employees super happy, and how to use my agency’s size to my advantage. If one of my rockstars was thinking about leaving, they’d be giving up a lot more than money and “better” benefits. Read more

Rand Fishkin's Question You ALWAYS Ask Before Creating Content

The Big Question You ALWAYS Ask Before Creating Content

I just listened to an awesome podcast by Daniel Faggella, of TechEmergence, where he interviewed Rand Fishkin, The Wizard of Moz. As always, Rand had a lot of great things to say, but one particular thing stood out to me more than anything else. He was so adamant about this point. In fact, he repeated it over and over. He strongly urged that every single digital marketer ask this one question before creating any piece of content. Read more

5 Steps You Never Skip When Launching a New Blog

5 Steps You Never Skip When Launching a New Blog

Launching a blog can be like going to the gym. You go for about 2 weeks, and you never go again because you’re unorganized, and you don’t have a strategy.  Before my agency was acquired, I personally witnessed this happen to different companies and agencies for over a decade. That’s why I’m sharing my insight on how to launch a blog. Read more

What makes your content go viral

10 Proven Ways to Make Your Content Go Viral

There’s no doubt about it. Content marketing is the future of SEO and digital marketing. But what makes content go viral? More specifically, what do the top shared articles have in common? Well, the folks at Buzzsumo analyzed over 100 million articles so they could find the answers to those questions. They looked for commonalities and trends that the most shared articles had in common, and here’s what they came up with. Read more

URL Optimization SEO

Top 10 Most Important SEO Tips for URL Optimization

For some, a URL is just a unique finger print that holds the unique location of a web page on the internet. To an SEO expert, it holds much more information than a web page’s location. It provides informative signals that help search engines understand the content of a page, it’s purpose, and it’s target market. Like all signals, some can be weak, some can be strong, and some signals can even be missing. Below are the 10 most important signals that major search engines detect from URLs when determining the page’s content, who the target market is, and how high to rank the page in the search results. Read more

How to make professional web videos

How to Make Professional Videos on a $500 or $1,000 Budget

I would like to share everything I’ve learned in the last couple of years about shooting web videos. Let me start by saying that I am not an expert in video production in any way; however, being a successful digital marketer requires basic to advanced knowledge of video production. After teaching myself about video production, and testing out various types of equipment, I am happy to say that my skills are good enough that I no longer have to go to an expensive studio, nor do I have to hire an expensive video production team. I can do everything on my own, and I’m doing it all for less than a $1,000 investment. Read more

How to hire someone on elance

How Agencies Should Properly Vet Freelancers on Upwork

For 10 years my agency has hired 100’s of people around the world, in 20+ different languages and 20+ different countries. We started using Upwork a few years back, and it’s literally changed my core business methods. I can also graciously say Upwork has saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it wasn’t great at first. We almost stopped using Upwork many times, until we realized the problems we had were not the fault of the freelancers we found on Upwork; we were the problem. Read more

Website Navigation Menu Tips and Mistakes

17 Major Main Menu Mistakes

Did you know that your main menu is a part of your marketing? It’s true. What your menu says gives your visitors a small indication of what your website is about and whether or not they are in the right place. Main menu mistakes can lead to high bounce rate, low length of time on site, and low rankings in search engines. Worst of all, main menu mistakes directly impact the amount of leads and sales from your website. Read more

Top SEO Blogs

Top 40 SEO Blogs to Read in 2014

These are the top 40 SEO blogs you should read in 2014. I spent over 10 hours researching, reading, and interviewing people in the SEO industry to narrow down the best SEO blogs. I was actually a little surprised to see that quality SEO blogs are very rare. Much of what I came across was pure crap that contained overly optimized articles that were written for the quantity of content, rather than the quality. Read more

Page 4 of 5
1 2 3 4 5