Ian Lurie (Founder of Portent)

Ian Lurie is the founder of Portent. He’s been a digital marketer since the days of AOL and Compuserve (that’s more than 25 years, if you’re counting). Ian’s recorded training for Lynda.com, writes regularly for the Portent Blog and has been published on AllThingsD, Smashing Magazine, and TechCrunch. Ian speaks at conferences around the world, including SearchLove, MozCon, Seattle Interactive Conference and ad:Tech.

“Learn to love the data and, for heaven’s sake, write well.”

“Outsourcing isn’t the answer to everything. Lots of internet marketing pundits will tell you to outsource, outsource, outsource. Having a trusted team that knows each other and enjoys working together is good, too.”

“Your customers are human beings, and they’re random. There are things that they like and things they don’t, and you have to push certain emotional buttons in non-manipulative ways to make it work.”

“There has to be this marriage of content and data-driven, technology-driven marketing. So if you’re building an e-commerce site, you still got to know how to produce really good creativity for it. If you’re looking at Google Analytics data, you still have to be able to draw conclusions and then come up with creative new directions for it.”

“Storytelling is very important. Translating data into a story for your clients. Great, we’ve got more links. Great, we’ve moved up in the rankings. What does that matter? And that’s the story part.”

“The big philosophical one is that if we are professional communicators, we are the ones who can most impact the level of discourse everywhere and by communicating messages more effectively, and I don’t care if you’re communicating it about briefs, or politics or whatever, you know, pretzels.”

“Don’t believe everything you read. If something doesn’t make sense, dig deeper and read other posts. Ask folks in the industry. Make sure you aren’t picking up bad advice.”

“The straight-up business reason is to look, we still communicate in a world of words, and you have to be able to write and communicate well in writing. Look, we still do emails, we still do all these other things you know, and then establishing a voice – it’s your personality.”

“Don’t become a single-tactic marketer. So for example, if you feel that your budget will only support link building, don’t put all your budget into link building, save that money, and put it into really good writing. If you depend on a single tactic, something’s going to happen that yanks the rug out from under you.”

“If you have a small budget, save it and put it into having the best product or the best whatever it is that you do.”

“If you follow these basic rules, you will see success. It may take a while, but you will see the success that can’t be taken away from you, which is a big theme for me. Future-proofing is important.”

“If you’ve got a garage full of collectables that you need to unload overnight, sure, spam away. But that’s not marketing, that’s aggressive selling.”

“Keep growing, and keep building a great leadership team. I don’t just mean executives, I mean people who lead the teams that do the work. And of course, keep teaching. “

“The best piece of advice I ever got is more generic: As a leader in your company, your first duty is to remain standing. Putting in 15 hours days until you collapse (and you will) doesn’t help anyone.”

“When Google says “Convert to SSL” or “site speed matters,” think for a second. There’s not a chance in Hell that those are major factors.”

“If you’re hired as an SEO, you’re hired to help a client get more out of their web presence. If a tactic (like speeding up a site) has a small impact on rankings but a huge impact on overall performance, explain it to the client and then do it. Don’t be narrow-minded.”

Geoff Breitling: If you want to build or scale a 7 figure SEO agency, you should watch this short video.

7 Figure SEO