In my formative years as a tech entrepreneur, Paul Graham (cofounder of YCombinator), wrote a seminal essay entitled: Be Good. Most tech folks have forgotten the essay itself, but almost everyone has heard the viral piece of advice that came out of that post: “Make something people want.” It’s pithy. Short. Timeless. And a great
The Best Damn Visitors’ Guide to Seattle 2025
By Psst! There’s a marketing conference in Seattle in a few weeks. I’m sure you bought your ticket already, but if you haven’t, let’s fix that right here. Good? Good. Seattle is one of my favorite places to go, and it’s not just because my colleagues are based here. I love the cool weather, the kind
New Research: 20% of Americans use AI tools 10X+/month, but growth is slowing and traditional search hasn’t dipped
By The media hype may be overblown, but the data doesn’t lie: over 20% of Americans are now heavy users of AI Tools (employing them 10X or more each month), and nearly 40% use one AI tools 1X+/month. Despite this massive growth, traditional search engines aren’t going anywhere: 95% of Americans continue to use them each
How to Find Hyper-Specific Audiences with SparkToro’s New AI Features
By It’s time we pulled back the curtain on one of SparkToro’s newest superpowers: Conversational Queries (a.k.a. audience descriptions), powered by AI. Instead of analyzing specified-parameter audiences like “Wix.com visitors” or “people with architect in their bio,” you can now zero in on groups as broad or specific as you like — small law firms seeking
The One Question I Ask to Know If an Agency Will Be Worth It
By Every now and then a career “L” seeps its way into my subconscious, usually at about 11:05pm when I’m about to fall asleep. One of those recurring thoughts is when I had an awful time working with a marketing agency. I can blame them all I want. But for whatever faults they had, I have
Care to Comment? Why, Yes, I Do: How to Get Quoted in the Press
By It’s always, “How do we get mentioned by ChatGPT?!” and not, “How can we be worth mentioning by ChatGPT?” Fortunately, this blog post is your guide to bridging that gap. Journalism is now the most cited source in AI-generated responses to current event queries, according to a new report by Muck Rack. And well more
The Case for Zero-Click Content in a Zero-Trust Ecosystem
By There’s a reason zero-click content has taken over your feed, your marketing strategy, and increasingly, your job description. It’s not just because it performs better (although yeah, that is part of it). It’s because it’s the only reliable path forward in a digital ecosystem that’s hoarding traffic and eroding trust. Welcome to the Zero-Trust Internet
SparkToro’s New Graph Visualizations Make Copy/Paste/Present Easy as Pie
By Starting today, there are customizable graph visuals in almost every section of SparkToro’s reports. Because why the heck should you have to be an Excel visualization expert on top of the 500 other things your boss/team/client expects of you? Friends, we’ve got your back. When you need to make the case for an investment in
Exactly What to Measure with Lift Based Marketing Investments
By How do you earn budget if attribution is dead and traffic is vanity metric? Lift-based experimentation. That’s when, rather than try to assign a weight to every potential channel or tactic you (or an algorithm) think contributed to a particular conversion, you measure the lift in conversions that happen after a particular tactic or channel
In a Zero-Click World, Traffic is a Terrible Goal
By 60% of marketers say their top goal for the next 12 months is “increasing traffic.” And 59% say their primary KPI is… also traffic. To all those folks, I say: you’re about to have a terrible, horrible, no-good year. The Internet is sending less traffic. Period. That’s a provable fact, and it’s true for every