1. The future for search
marketers
WILL CRITCHLOW

3. I obviously don’t hate all the great tips we’ve
seen here today
@philnottingham

4. Links are dead
I want to make it 100% clear that this is not what I am saying

5. Links are dead
If you tweet that I said this, I will hunt you down

6. It’s link building that is in trouble
I’ve been answering SEOmoz
Q&A since it looked like this

All the answers to “why don’t I
rank?” used to be “you need more
links”.
Now?

7. Dear GOD.
Not those links

8. You might have heard
that linklove is no more

9. I’m not here on a moral crusade
I just happen to prefer flywheels over explosive unsustainable growth

10. …and I’m not risk averse
I have invested in all kinds of risky things (defined as “things that might not work”)

11. The future for
search marketers

12. There’s a bigger problem

13. We broke directories
They used to be the best way of finding great things on the web

14. We broke comments
Now we all have to run akismet

15. We broke forums
Many legitimate forums and communities closed under the onslaught of forum spam

16. We took a 150-year-old form of communication
“Distribution of the slave population of the United States”, 1861

19. As practiced by respected newspapers
“The Ebb and Flow of Movies”, 2008

20. And ruined it
Thanks @ChrisLDyson

21. Try to make the design support the data
Please tell me this was a joke

22. Incidentally, a good use of Pinterest
Maybe the only one I’ve found yet - http://pinterest.com/scottcowley/ugly-infographics/

23. Guest columns have existed forever
Does your process look like this? Please tell me no. [Hat-tip Carson Ward]

24. We can’t even clean up after ourselves
Without hacking people off

25. information tied to verified online
profiles will be ranked higher than
content without such verification
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

26. You think:
“how can I game that”

28. Ad agencies are better than us
Honda Cog

29. Artists are better than us
OK Go

30. Celebrities are better than us
@ladygaga

31. Celebrities are better than us
@ladygaga

32. Brands are better than us
Red Bull has videos of pigeons doing backflips

33. Loss leaders are hard to compete with
Snow Fall

34. STOP

37. Stop worrying
about your hosting
IP address

38. Start worrying about CDNs, edge
nodes and site speed

39. Stop worrying
about linking
C-blocks

40. Start worrying about how many
journalists you have in your address
book

41. Stop worrying
about anchor text

42. Start worrying about being misquoted

43. Stop worrying
about nofollow

44. Start worrying whether anyone will
click

45. Stop calling it link
juice

46. For the love of
GOD
stop calling it
link juice

47. Link equity plays much better in the
board room

48. The future of
search marketers

53. Hire the right VP Marketing or you’ll
just end up with a bunch of blue pens
with your logo on them

54. Remember the things we’re
good at

55. Earn attention as well as shares

56. (Measure links based on engaged visitors)
I made you a custom report and advanced segments for non-bounces and >2 pages

57. Engage spidey sense

58. We can instantly tell Mom & Pop from Thin Affiliate

59. We know why no-one is linking to you
Your site is ugly, your content sucks, no-one knows who you are

60. We know how influential a person is
Haha. Just kidding.

61. Power searching
We can find out who people are, where they write, what they own

62. Homework time

63. Inspired by Entrepreneurial Design
Course here and blog post write-up here

64. Make yourself uncomfortable

65. = 1 hour or less
= an afternoon
= day or more
See
here

66. Not extrovert?

67. Get a journalist to run a story based on your tip
Call 3 journalists & tell them you thought they’d be interested in a story you found online

68. Present to a crowd of 200+ people
See Justin Briggs’ explanation of how

69. Present to a board
Bonus points for getting shouted at

70. Negotiate with a salesperson
Get more than 10% off retail price of something (doesn’t have to be a car!)

71. Record a screencast or webinar
Get it watched by more than 20 people. Camtasia / Google+ Hangouts on air

72. Reach out to
a hero
get an answer

73. Visit a newsroom

74. Debate a business case
With 3+ colleagues who you don’t normally work with. We have enjoyed 2078 & 4168

75. Sell something door to door
Don’t want to go outside? Make 10 cold calls

76. Run a live usability test
Offer to buy a stranger a coffee. Resist the urge to coach them

77. Answer 3 customer calls

78. and website instant chat
I highly recommend olark.com

79. Read to a child
In some ways, they’re an easy audience. In others…

80. Not technical?

81. Install a web server
I’d start with Apache. Send enough traffic that it breaks. Fix it.

82. Build a web crawler
Crawl 10,000 pages. Discover how little of the web is nicely-formatted HTML

83. Search through some log files
Find 3 crawlers on your site that aren’t googlebot, slurp or bingbot

84. Build a tool

85. Contribute to an open source project
Github makes some parts of this really easy. The hard part is working out git

86. Make something and sell a copy online

87. Work out who someone anonymous is

88. Run a conversion rate test end to end
I recommend Optimizely. Don’t worry if you don’t get significant results

89. Not creative?

90. Film and edit some video
Phone camera. iMovie / Premiere Elements. Lower third. Cut a scene. Improve audio.

91. Make a graphic
Get 20 shares

92. Make an interactive graphic

93. Build a wireframe
I like Balsamiq

94. Before After
Remove
someone
from a
photo

95. Write for a publication you’ve previously bought
Bonus points for calling yourself a “published author”

96. Rewrite / redesign a landing page
@cheripercy wrote about our own conversion rate trials and tribulations

97. I want you to be
tomorrow’s CMOs

99. Thanks.
Any questions?
WILL CRITCHLOW
will.critchlow@distilled.net
@willcritchlow