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10K followers
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Lars Lofgren posted thisI'm getting such similar vibes today as I was back in 2012 when I was trying to convince companies to invest in their blogs. Back then, no one wanted to build a blog. Except for a few marketers that were way ahead of the curve. Those folks (who I went and worked for), built massive businesses. Why didn't people want to build a blog? - "Our industry is boring" - "Where's the ROI?" - "Managing writers is hard" - "The audience is too small" Today, no one wants to: - Linkedin via personal accounts - Youtube - Branded subreddits For all the same dumb reasons. Yes, a few cracked folks are doing it. I'm doing it. But getting serious budget in B2B for this stuff is back to pulling teeth. Still easier for me to get blog budget right now which I find to be HILARIOUS. Could easily take what used to be a modest blog budget, hire some linkedin ghostwriters instead, and have at it for a year. Even if the quality is just decent, you'll clean up. Just like company blogging in 2015. By the time it's obvious, most of the upside will have already been captured.
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Lars Lofgren posted thisHow the finances play out for a typical high-end consultant/fractional: annual comp = $540K Math is pretty easy: 3 clients each at $15K/month Can do higher rates than that in the right circumstances. But this level is pretty common from what I'm seeing. Also, I probably wouldn't go higher than 3 clients at a time. Could squeeze in 4 clients but that's a gnarly workload. I also assume the goal is not to build an agency, totally different path. We gotta do some haircuts on the $540K. Most won't be fully loaded 100% of the time. Knock off 20% for downtime between clients. Takes us to $432K. Then lop off 30% for taxes and all the random business expenses that come up. Remember this is 1099 income so you get hit with the full tax burden. No bennies either. We're at about $300K take home, or $25K/month after tax. Pretty good. Now for the part that might rile some folks up: that $25K/month goes pretty fast. For someone at this stage of their career, they probably have a family and many will be living in a VHCOL area. Which means: - An easy $10K/month on standard living expenses - $5K/month on family - Should be doing at least $5K/month in savings/investing, if not more - A buffer of $5K/month Definitely a solid situation, not exactly rolling in dough though. Obviously, dual income changes the game, totally different level especially if the 2nd comp is comparable. The BIGGEST perk is on the lifestyle side. You get executive level comp without all the meetings and bullshit. Also much easier to rotate through companies until you find a few that are a really good fit for your work style. So you won't get trapped in toxic environments for 2 years at a time. Yes, there are levers to pull: a micro-agency, higher rates, non-service income, moving to MCOL, etc. But the above is a pretty straightforward path.
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Lars Lofgren shared thisPSA: The Ahrefs Ranking Tracker is completely borked atm. Had a fucking heart attack when I checked rankings over the weekend. Thought a client got hit by the spam update which didn't make any sense with how conservative we've been. Then I think Lily Ray mentioned seeing some issues yesterday. Saw some other chatter too. And after spot checking a TON of keywords, things look fine. Some stuff is up, some is down, and the report is clearly broken. Gonna have some fun client conversations this week. Related: also noticing some issues with international rankings having insane traffic estimates. Ahrefs is telling me that a client had their traffic triple in the last two weeks. I can assure you that it did not. If you're seeing massive spikes recently, filter down to just US search traffic. Or whatever country you focus on. That's a clearer picture.
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Lars Lofgren posted thisThere's another reason why organic marketing programs keep getting slashed: how most of the current marketing leaders (myself included) came of age. For the bulk of my marketing career, we operated in a direct response environment. On both paid and organic. Google Ads(words) would drive leads instantly. Organic SEO could absolutely have an impact within 6 months if the niche wasn't too competitive. Same with just about any other channel. You could get pretty far even if you cut any marketing program that didn't generate material pipeline within 6 months. Most importantly, there was tons of traffic to go around. And anyone worth their salt in marketing could turn traffic into money (I always chuckle when folks say traffic doesn't equal revenue. Yeah it does bub, build the rest of the funnel). So so so many CMOs, CEOs, founders, and marketing leads came up in that environment. We all got to ignore brand marketing. And social. I know some folks didn't but a lot of teams did. I was in plenty of boardrooms. I definitely ignored that stuff. With LLMs, that direct response era is ending imo. It's not over yet but it's on it's way out. Or at least will have a lot less influence. Especially for any content or organic marketing program. And leadership is very out of step with the new era. No judgement, I'm having to recalibrate all sorts of stuff myself. In the same boat. But I do disagree with this kneejerk reaction: - If no progress on pipeline in 6 months, cut the program. - Double down on Meta or Google Ads, even as ROAS keeps getting worse I find that reaction to be uninspiring and short sighted. I'm not the only one to say this. Lots of folks are talking about the wane of direct response and the rise of branding. But boy oh boy are a lot of leaders going to struggle with this transition. Leaves a lot of opportunity for folks that are willing to: - Invest over years instead of months - Cast aside any need for attribution - Focus on the emotional connection instead of the ROI - Willing to build a brand one fan at a time - Not get suckered into the siren song of AI content
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Lars Lofgren posted thisIf a CEO ever says this, I instantly know they're full of shit and have no idea what they're doing: "If 51% of our decisions are right, we'll win." That is not how business works. 90% of the outcome comes from like 6 decisions. Same thing with someone's personal life. Not hard to predict someone's day-to-day if you know: - The zip code they live in - Who they married - The industry they went into - Their personal savings rate Almost everything else is a detail. Get those 4 decisions right and the rest takes care of itself. Now for business: - The country/city you operate in - Your cofounders and leadership team - Industry - How you charge and to who - Aggressiveness on reinvestment - Funding Get those decisions right and you can basically fuck up every other decision in the entire business. Get any of them wrong, the rest won't save you. Speaking from experience on this one. When my last business went sideways, the core model was fucked. We made a few foundational decisions early on that locked us into a particular path. For awhile, it worked beautifully. Then the wheels came off. No amount of tweaking or hustling was going to pull us out of that. The only move was to clear the board and start over. Can the "just get 51% of the decisions right" work for all the other random shit that comes up? Sure. But for the critical decisions, you need 100%.
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Lars Lofgren shared thisBOOM. Just hit 10,000 followers. 5X'd in 2 years and 2 months. Why this one means so much to me: 1. I'm bad at celebrating. Usually just move on to the next milestone which isn't healthy. So here I am trying to celebrate. Whoopty doo. 2. I've worked on some massive channels and sites. Sites that do over 10M search visits per month. Top 100 domains. Grew an email list from 300K to over 700K. B2B blogs doing 700K visitors per month. But none of that stuff was mine. Hitting five figures on one of my own accounts is a major milestone for me. Feels far more meaningful than any of that other stuff.
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Lars Lofgren posted thisA review of the Shenzhen SEO Conference. It is brutally difficult to get an event right. A few things I look for: - Big enough for plenty of connections, not too big that it becomes a mass of people. Should be able to easily run into the same folks multiple times so genuine connections start to develop. - Good variety of speakers, not just major headliners doing the same talk they've been doing for the past 5 years. - A high hit rate on talks. If at least 50% are decent, the event is above average imo. So many events can't even hit that bar. - Variety in pacing through the agenda to keep it fresh. - Smooth logistics. - A vibe of good people that genuinely care, both from event management and the attendees. - Avoiding that transactional/salesy vibe that can kill and event. - A cool venue/location. Shenzhen SEO Conference hits on all notes. Speakers were great, location was awesome, enjoyed most of the talks I attended. I was legitimately impressed. JP Zhang and his team have hit on something really special with this event. Oddly, I'm most impressed with the logistics of the event. The team took on a massive agenda: multiple locations, workshops, 2 days of talks, tons of speakers, side events, multiple talk formats, VIP events, after parties, city tours, factory tours, shuttles back and forth all over the place, my god it was endless. And not a single hiccup that I saw. Flawless. The only real downside for me is the travel time. But in the end, that helps. If you're based in the US or EU and you end up at this event, it's because you genuinely want to be there. Keeps the audience level higher for that side of the community. Lastly, you could easily tell that JP and his entire team deeply cared about the community they're building. It comes across in every detail. Highly recommend making the trip if you're considering it.
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Lars Lofgren shared this404media reported that Matt Mullenweg was put on a leave of absence, and replaced as CEO of Automattic. I 100% think this was the right call. First, some context: - Automattic was a client of mine. They are not currently a client. - I REALLY liked the marketing folks that I worked with. Top-notch team. - I have a lot of respect for what Matt built. Whatever your (and mine) current opinions, WordPress achieved crazy levels of success. Now that's out of the way, here are my personal opinions on the current situation. - While I agree that ousting a founder/CEO from a role is usually a death knell, sometimes the alternative is worse. I believe this is one of those times. - After my engagement with Automattic ended, my respect for the team had grown. My respect for Matt went the other direction. - I believe the recent drama around WordPress has been self-inflicted, primarily by one person. btw, for anyone that doesn't know, the corporate structure at Automattic is super messy. Wordpress.org and the foundation vs Automattic and WordPress.com. This doesn't mean that Matt's fully out of the picture. Link below.
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Lars Lofgren shared thisThis site is a direct competitor to one of my clients, they've been making me look like an idiot. I told my CEO "give it time, it'll crash." Well, here we are. This is a new company, similar age as my client. They went SUPER aggressive on their programmatic SEO. Used AI to target hundreds of bottom-feeder, low-value keywords. One look at their keywords/pages and it was completely obvious. THEN they rotated that SERP momentum into informational blog posts, all AI generated. Again, very aggressive and very obvious. My CEO kept asking me to look at what they're doing. I told him "look, if I do that, I'll look like a genius for about 9 months. Then it'll blow up." He kept bringing up the site. He didn't pester me too hard but I was a little annoyed. But I think more of my annoyance was aimed at the competitor. I never like losing over stupid shit. Looks like the site took a sizable hit. No idea if it'll collapse entirely but if I was on their team, I'd be freaking out right now (I've been there, not fun). At the very least, they gave me exactly what I needed to keep advocating for a different approach. All rolled up into a single screenshot. Much obliged.
Lars Lofgren replied to a comment
1h
So so so many opportunities
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7h
Larger companies are typically the last to move
Lars Lofgren replied to a comment
7h
All of these are solvable imo
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Lars Lofgren liked thisLars Lofgren liked thisFull-circle: Harvard's CS109 course launched my AI career in 2013/2014 & is the reason I got to guest lecture at Harvard Business School last week. Recordings were uploaded every Tues & Thurs (on GitHub) and I was HOOKED! That one class changed the trajectory of my career & I'm trying to similarly upskill professionals via guest lectures like this + Orange Labs + my Actionable AI for Marketers course (5 weeks, project-based, interactive, small cohort, starts next Tuesday!). Huge thanks to Professor Jake Cook, the brilliant students (who were so engaged, thoughtful, and sharp) & the wider HBS crew for having me!! Watching Jake teach was a masterclass on its own; took many notes. Stay curious! You never know where it'll take you.
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Lars Lofgren liked thisLars Lofgren liked thisThere was something different about the second main conference day at Shenzhen SEO Conference. The first day gave me a lot to think about. The second made me question how we define SEO in the first place. AEO, AI citations, brand perception, ecommerce, localization, Reddit, enterprise SEO, automation and trust all came into the conversation. The morning started with 🎤 Eli Schwartz and “The 3 Pillars of AEO.” Then 🎤 Josh Blyskal explored “The New Citation Economy” and how ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Claude pick sources. 🎤 Jonathan Kiekbusch followed with “Perception Engineering” and how AI talks about your brand. The ecommerce sessions were equally interesting. 🎤 Andy W. discussed using AI to find gaps in ecommerce product catalogs. 🎤 Tupa Lee shared how product led content and community backlinks can support growth. 🎤 Sasha Gusain from Canva spoke about “Radical Localisation” and global growth. For anyone working in international SEO, this was a great reminder that localization is much more than translation. 🎤 Nick Drewe shared lessons from gaining and losing 80 million visitors. 🎤 Max Hobbs talked about how a cartoon lion changed his brand. 🎤 Gabriele Kahlout, MSc explored detecting Google updates without third party tools. 🎤 Mayi shared “How to Earn Your Way into Reddit Conversation.” After lunch, we moved into enterprise SEO and business growth. 🎤 Sebastien Edgar discussed connecting organic, paid, campaigns and CRO. 🎤 Victor Huynh challenged the idea that every B2B problem is an SEO problem. 🎤 @Roger Yin shared how his team responded to a traffic drop and tripled revenue. 🎤 Henry Dalziel focused on protecting pages that actually drive business. A good reminder that rankings and traffic are not the whole story. Business impact matters too. Then came AI and automation. 🎤 Owain Lloyd-Williams Williams talked about SEO inside large organisations. 🎤 Maximilian Kuch Kuch shared his journey from affiliate SEO to AI solopreneur. 🎤 Johann Sathianathen presented “AI Agents for SEO” covering backlinks, content and automation. This one was especially relevant to me because link building and SEO workflows are a big part of my work. 🎤 @Ben Fang explored how embedded video can strengthen B2B trust. The day ended with 🎤 Lars Lofgren discussing narrative manipulation across Google, Reddit and LLMs. 🎤 JP Zhang closed with “From Courage to Freedom: What 16 Years in SEO Really Taught Me.” Walking out of the second main conference day, one thought stayed with me: SEO is becoming much harder to define as one discipline. It touches search, AI, content, links, PR, brand, product and increasingly, the actual business. I did not leave with just SEO tactics. I left with new perspectives, more questions and plenty to explore. And honestly, those are often the most valuable takeaways from a conference.
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Lars Lofgren liked thisLars Lofgren liked thisDay 4 at Shenzhen SEO Conference, the final day 🎤 The line I keep thinking about: SEO brings someone to your door, but the website has to open that door. Ranking and converting are two completely different jobs, and most businesses only ever work on the first one. Then there was the branding talk. People don't engage with your logo, but they'll follow a character. They share characters. They remember them. One school built their whole brand around a mascot and sent him to every campus 🦁 And the panel got refreshingly blunt about money. One agency charges from $30,000 USD a year, billed annually rather than monthly, because they'd rather build a reputation than sell cheap work with no results. Their words for the first six months of SEO: the mental massage period 😂 Thank you to everyone who made these four days what they were 🙏 Four days, a factory visit, a talk of my own, and a notebook I can barely close. Shenzhen, you were something else 🇨🇳 Gary Illyes Nik Ranger Sam Penny ZIJING (Jine) WU Lily Ray Doug Pierce JP Zhang Kun Tang Jiyoung Lee Polina Kogan Mao Kawana Xinyuan (Loki) Y. Helen Han Nick Drewe Max Hobbs Gabriele Kahlout, MSc Yiwanning ma Victor Huynh Maximilian Kuch Lars Lofgren Tanya Van Gastel Tom So Kiana Shen #TheSEOChef #ShenzhenSEOConference #SEO #Branding #DigitalMarketing #AISearch #Shenzhen
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