John Doherty's Blog

11 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 28 comments

Do The Work, or Quit Blogging

You just read a click-bait title. I apologize for that.

Before you run away, dear valued reader (see what I did there?), here’s my thesis:

A person should not blog or publish on the Internet (not all publishers are bloggers) if they are blogging to fulfill a perceived “need”. If they are doing it for reputation, links, or anything else, blogging is a wasted effort. Blogging or publishing works when you do it because you cannot help but write and publish.

Barry Adams recently wrote a post on State of Search entitled Can The SEO Industry Embrace Longform Content? Read more about Do The Work, or Quit Blogging …

04 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 19 comments

SEO is not about quick wins. I get asked all the time to “give us something that we can do now that will have a noticeable effect”. People, everyone, wants to get the most bang for their buck, and this especially happens in business where there is direct pressure to produce ROI. After all, no one brings in a consultant until they are unable to solve their own problems. At this point, your problems become mine.

If you’ve been seeking quick wins and they’re not working, what the heck makes you think that me giving you quick wins is going to fix your problems? Quick wins have not been solving your issues until now, so why do you think anything is going to be different with my quick wins? Read more about Do The Work …

27 Nov

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 60 comments

SEOs are Growth Hackers

Growth hacking has become a buzzterm in the past 6 months, ever since this post written back in April by Andrew Chen. There’s even a growth hacking agency in New York City (linked at the bottom of the post) and startups are starting to hire growth hackers to help them scale up their user base faster.

I’ve heard the growth hacker term thrown around a lot, and have experienced both positive and negative reactions to it from people I know.

The goal of this post is to define down what a growth hacker is, how this integrates well into online marketing, and then to give a few examples of some growth hacks I’ve either seen or heard about that have helped tech startups grow. Read more about SEOs are Growth Hackers …

16 Nov

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 25 comments

The Future of The Visual Web and The Future of SEO

I swore at my computer the other day (sorry Mom). You see, I had just seen a tweet that led me to this page:

That, of course, is the current Airbnb homepage, where they announced that they have built out neighborhood pages, such as my neighborhood of Boerum Hill.

I didn’t swear because they launched something that I wanted one of my clients to launch. I swore because they did it so damn well. These pages are beautiful. They have local knowledge, large photos (which is rare for travel, but makes so much sense), and they don’t talk about themselves – rather, they let people see the area and qualify themselves, with only a call to action at the end.

This marks, in my mind, the final step in a move towards the visual web – these pages are going to rank because they are so useful and beautiful (though they do need to work on SEO on these pages) and they will naturally attract links.

The web is becoming visual; SEOs need to get on board. Read more about The Future of The Visual Web and The Future of SEO …

12 Nov

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 4 comments

Prioritizing “Yes”

Alternatively – “When Saying Yes Hurts”

I see a lot of bloggers writing about the importance of saying “no”, and then I often see responses to these such as “Good for you!” and “Alright, way to get your priorities in order!” The interesting thing to me is that when someone says that they are learning to say no, it means they are already really good at saying “Yes.”

You don’t have to learn how to do something if you already know how to do it.

I can’t help but think, though, if sometimes we have to say “Yes!”. I want to talk about the types of people and priority in which saying “yes” is. Hopefully this speaks to the values through which I live my life. I started thinking about this post because I’m currently at TechStars’ Foundercon in Boston, just 5 days after I got back to NYC from Boston, because a respected industry peer asked me to speak in their stead. I wanted to and I needed to. Read more about Prioritizing “Yes” …

15 Oct

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 78 comments

A Blog Is Not A Content Strategy

Content marketing has been around for years, but until recently Google was not making good on their word to rank content that deserves to rank. Instead, we could all easily find examples where sites were ranking off of low quality directories, link wheels, blog networks, and many other tactics. But since Penguin, Panda, and the myriad of other algorithm changes this year, SEOs have started to finally embrace content as a viable means, but we’re still running into old mindsets from clients, and honestly a lot of SEOs are not good at creating linkworthy content. Read more about A Blog Is Not A Content Strategy …