Erik Dietrich is a veteran of the software world and has occupied just about every position in it: developer, architect, manager, CIO, and eventually, independent management and strategy consultant. His breadth of experience allows him to speak to all industry personas, write several books in the development sphere, and countless blog posts for dozens of sites.
Recently, I wrote a post about changing Hit Subscribe’s positioning, which I intend to distribute to clients and prospects in appropriate situations. I shared it to DaedTech as well, assuming that an audience of (I think, still) largely engineers might find the positioning insight interesting. What I didn’t expect was the traction among developer marketing…
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Minimum viable product (MVP), as defined by Eric Ries in the Lean Startup, is a fascinating term. It has a specific meaning in the context that he defined it, but it also has a highly-inferable, slightly-wrong meaning if you simply happen to know what each of those three words mean. I imagine a whole lot…
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Since its founding, Hit Subscribe has had terrible positioning. And this has been entirely my fault. Now, before this self-flagellation descends into “awkward to watch,” I will offer two important mitigating considerations: Hit Subscribe’s new business has always been at least 95% pure inbound, so bad positioning has never been an acute pain. Almost all…
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Lately, I’ve found myself fielding client questions related to Google’s creatively named “Search Generative Experience (SGE)”. This is hardly surprising, given that it uses generative AI, and generative AI has forced Gartner to redraw its hype cycle curve with a peak of inflated expectations that now extends about 50 miles into space. (I cringe to…
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For my first blog entry on 2024’s ledger (BTW, happy new year!) I’m going to do a little double-duty. As you can see from a little slice of my Asana task list, I owe our account managers an updated SOP for identifying client refresh candidates. However, since it’s that time of year when everyone’s “best…
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Something we’re asked all the time is how to match a keyword to an interesting title for a blog post that someone has brainstormed. A client has an idea for an article title, such as “Why ChatGPT Will Actually Increase the Demand for Human Writers,” and then asks what keyword they should target, or, more…
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Today I rolled up my sleeves and made a spreadsheet. I know, I know, try to contain your jealousy. But in all seriousness, it was an interesting exercise. A client of ours was interested in assessing the relative cost of a few scenarios. Specifically, they wanted to know the cost of the following: Sustaining the…
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I just spent part of my morning writing up internal documentation to operationalize so-called SEO competitor analysis. If you don’t believe me and think this is just a rhetorical flourish, here’s a really boring screenshot. As I was doing this, my last step was to record a high-level explanation of the document, which included…
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This isn’t a clickbait title. I genuinely stand by the position that “SEO consulting” is a service that shouldn’t exist in the economy. But before I dive into specifics and my case, I do want to offer a couple of important caveats. I wouldn’t dispute that some SEO consultants offer some economic value and provide…
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I’ve been on a listening tour of late, talking to product marketers that own their business’s content production, among others. My aim has been to discover subtle pain points, identify patterns, and possibly develop productized services to help. A couple of weeks ago, I heard something interesting. “We have in-house engineers that want to contribute…
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Today I’m going to dive into a topic and a situation that comes up constantly among clients and prospects. It’s the “You say you want organic traffic, but do you really?” conversation. Historically, I’ve tended to have this conversation live. But it comes up so often that I’m going to immortalize it here, in written form,…
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Lately, within the account management function of Hit Subscribe, we’ve been swatting around a philosophical question. Rather than having disparate sales and account management departments, could a unified customer success group serve both functions for our business? We currently, tentatively believe that the answer is “yes,” and we’re proceeding accordingly. But to make this work,…
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I’m going to dive into something today that I consider nuanced but profound. And I’m going to attempt to do this with some modicum of decorum, since most of the (non-freelancer) content I create for Hit Subscribe I intend specifically for clients and prospects. It’s a risky “call your baby ugly but do it gently”…
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If the title here seems aggressive, my hope is that you’ll empathize with me by the time you’re done reading. Throughout this post, I’m going to post screenshots of link building outreach I’ve received over the years. They’re not going to be relevant to the flow of the post, per se. Instead, I’m going to…
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Editorial Note: this post is part of my SEO for Non-Scumbags series, which I began here and am syndicating to this site from daedtech.com, since there’s substantial audience overlap for these posts. It might seem a bit aggressive or presumptuous to write off an entire discipline as tactical. But, I guess, here we are. I’ve…
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