Industry News

I am seeing some early signs of a possible major Google update currently underway. The chatter has definitely spiked in the early morning hours of today, September 4th.

This comes shortly after an unconfirmed August 21st update...

Something was missing, and I didn’t exactly know what it was. Around a year or so ago, I joined a big agency, and that gave me a chance to look at a lot of sites, provide in-depth consultation audits for a number of clients, perform monthly strategy...

I’ve been thinking about workflows for Responsive Web Design quite a bit, particularly since it’s now become our default approach on every new project (similar to Cloud Four’s recent change of heart). I’ve been especially influenced by two recent articles on the topic, namely Dennis Kardys’s A More Flexible Workflow, and Viljami Salminen’s Responsive workflow.

I struggled a bit to make their approaches fit into how we worked, so I decided to expand on what they’ve done and draw something...

This past month, we did not have any official update but something made the Google results rumble in late August...

There’s been a good amount of talk on the web about the “T-Shaped” marketer becoming a model for the future. Several articles will go into more depth than I can, but I did want to share my thoughts on the topic and an illustration I made for a recent presentation.

T-Shaped basically refers to having a light level of knowledge in a broad array of skills, and deep knowledge/ability in a single one (or a few). This model may not seem particularly remarkable or unique, but it carries qualities...

In The ‘Mood Graph’: How Our Emotions Are Taking Over the Web Evan Selinger writes about the rise if emoji and other emotional signals in social media:

But there are costs to a mood graph too. The more we rely on finishing ideas with the same limited words (feeling happy) and images (smiley face) available to everyone on a platform, the more those pre-fabricated symbols structure and limit the ideas we express. Such general symbols can also lead to even more confusion or misunderstanding...

Last night, Matt Cutts tweeted that he is working up several "ghost-related puns for a spam network."

I suspect they are working on targeting more and more link and spam networks and it is thus on his mind...

Kathy Sierra wrote a brilliant post about loyalty called Your customer won’t take a bullet for you. She makes the point that to understand loyalty, we have to realize that we aren’t loyal to products, we’re loyal to ourselves:

If you want to benefit from a customer’s loyalty to himself, you can’t bribe it, you must earn it. Deserve it. Focus not on upgrading your product but upgrading your user’s capabilities. If you can’t enhance your product, enhance the context in which your product is...

Hi Marketer – Let’s find out how good your marketing intuition is!

I’m going to show you two different variations of a landing page that I recently tested. One variation outperformed the other significantly in an A/B test. Can you guess which variant did best in the test?

Post a comment with your best guesstimate. I’ll post the test results next week, so you can find out how accurate your gut feeling was. Background info

I recently published a free ebook on conversion optimization...