Jeff Deutsch

This is not exactly correct: "because it was using people's address books to send invite emails"

From the article:

The issue is "LinkedIn’s sending repeated e-mails" and not making it clear in their disclosures that "their contacts will receive not just one invitation, but three."

The official case docket says the same thing:

http://www.linkedinclassaction.com/files/74631323.pdf

"The wrongful conduct by LinkedIn that is the subject ofthis

complaint arises from Linkedln's practice of breaking into its users' third party

email accounts, downloading email addresses that appear in the account, and then

sending out multiple reminder emails ostensibly on behalf of the user advertising

LinkedIn to non-members. Linkedln provides no functional way to stop multiple

subsequent advertising emails from being sent."

According to this article, and the court case, sending one invite is probably still OK.

Nice to see the humility and someone sharing their story of struggle as well as success. Keepin' it real.

@tommyismyname I feel like you could write a book on what you just posted here in response to my question. Just. Wow.

No, seriously, write a freaking book already Tommy.

I'm not qualified yet to even garner any kind of response other than... "5 MONITORS?!?" I'm going to go marinate on all this for the next week while I recover from the shock due to the awesomeness of this answer.

p.s. RIP Harris Wittels </humblebrag> :(

@prodport Thanks for the feedback, I'll make sure we get your site tracking. I freely admit our onboarding process is currently pretty nonexistent, it's something I'm working on.

@theRestOfInboardOrg: Re: onboarding, Asana and close.io are incredible at it and I'm planning on borrowing a lot from them.

@Mallikarjunan  Is there a section on this site for general requests/ideas? Because I have a few as well.

How do you choose content ideas for Shopify that will get massively shared? For example, this one: http://www.shopify.com/blog/16684812-the-real-secret-to-launching-a-successful-store-to-thousands-of-excited-customers

Would love to read your diary pages from the 7 days surrounding the concept, writing, and editing for "a killer piece of content that gets shared 724 times" like this one.

Of course both! That's the beauty of Inbound.org. We're learning a ton here while getting to know (and getting known by) the best inbound marketers in the industry. The opportunity here is insane. I've been on this site 1 month and already begun to develop great contacts with some very, very talented people. In communicating with them, they're getting to know me and our startup, which is a win for everyone involved.

My favorite marketing resource by far.

Hey inboundites, Ptengine is an all-in-one CRO tool for discovering where and why your site is losing conversions.

We just launched an insane 96% off deal on StackSocial for Ptengine--$49 lifetime. The deal expires next Wednesday. https://stacksocial.com/sales/ptengine-web-analytics-platform-lifetime-subscription

If you'd like to see what our product does in a fun way, I just finished this short teaser video: 

I never wanted to become one. But this tweet from Matt Cutts doomed our SEO SaaS: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/180392083427823616

This is a bit of a confessional. I was once a spammer. Well, a link building "SEO guy." HubSpot tried to hire me in April of 2011 but during the interview I totally failed to grasp the value of it. It was with a guy called Ken Leith. He kept talking about blogging, blogging, blogging. I was like, "But what about tools? I can rank a site in 48 hours just using ArticleMarketingRobot." We couldn't get on the same page.

My spamming made its biggest splash in the SEO world starting in July 2011. Together with a Dutch friend of mine, we built a service that posted links for people on AuthorityLinkNetwork called "ALN service." It was the first of its kind.

It was a very simple SaaS but it totally changed SEO. All you had to do was enter your keyword(s) and url(s), and we did the rest. At one point, we got a client to #2 on Google for "car insurance." We hit #1 for "electrician," just for fun, targeting my electrician friend's website in New Jersey. We could dominate any niche. Any. It was a crazy time. Our websites made up about 30% of the total network, which had tens of thousands of users.

Our service started with $1,400 in sales the first month. We were selling subscriptions for $64/mo, but our cost per subscription was about $1.50, $2.00 including VA labor to run our scripts and the unique niche content creation software I'd created (this was before KontentMachine etc.) That's a 96.8% profit margin :D

Our sales doubled in the second month, then doubled again, and again and again. By January 2012 my PayPal account was getting an average of $3,000 in sales per day--$150,000/mo. We had "slashed" our prices down to about $40/subscription, which meant our margins had dropped to only 95%.

It was around that time me and my partner went to Distilled's LinkLove in London. We met a ton of cool people, but the presentations were all about stuff I'd never heard of. I remember Michael King talking about how hard he worked (months I think?) to get Dharmesh Shah to follow him and thinking, "Where's the value in that? He doesn't make any money off that."

In the same regard, all the people I was meeting (little did I know they were called "inbound marketers") seemed uninteresting in what we were doing. At the time, I thought they were snobs. It turns out, they just saw the writing on the wall. They knew that what we were doing was an unsustainable relic from the past.

That tweet came out around the same time, and soon after, the deindexing. Sales dropped as fast as they had once risen: $100k in March, $50k in April. By July we still had $25,000/mo in PayPal subscriptions, but we felt bad that they were posting to blogs that were mostly deindexed and almost assuredly would do more harm than good to our clients.

I remember the day in July when I manually cancelled all those recurring subscriptions. With each one, I felt a little pang of regret in my heart. There was so much more we could have done. Not just that we didn't leverage our SEO superpowers more by making and monetizing our own money sites (though our clients probably made many tens of millions of dollars off the rankings we gave them for a comparative pittance), but because I hadn't built something more sustainable. Hadn't talked more to people at LinkLove or taken them seriously. Hadn't thought of a way to go legit while we were crushing it. Now we had nothing but some savings left from our brief time in the sun.

It still took another couple years of banging my head against SEO tools, trying to help customers rank with new methods after Panda/Penguin--always trying to be "more white hat."

Finally in January, I called it quits with the SEO game and took the marketing director position at Ptengine. And it's been a breath of fresh air, seriously! The creativity and fun that goes into inbound gives you new challenges every day. It's also a much more social world, discussions with cool people like @JoelKlettke, @NikkiElizDemere, @Mallikarjunan, and all of you awesome people.

It's fun being a n00b again too, and I try to forgive myself when I make stupid mistakes or ask annoying questions. But I feel like I'm starting to "get" it. You guys have been so supportive--loved your comments on my request for a landing page audit of our product last week (it was #1 on inbound for a while!): http://inbound.org/feedback/view/please-object-to-and-harshly-criticize-the-ptengine-com-homepage

Maybe one day I can get @dharmesh to follow me on Twitter ;)

Jeff D

@timsoulo Your landing page is pretty killer. It seems to hit all the answers to Joel Klettke's list of questions here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-questions-your-landing-page-must-answer-joel-klettke I also like that there are multiple conversions for different types of visitors (download, buy, learn more, email me). All of them get your visitors into your funnel.

Would you mind sharing roughly the conversion rate on your landing page?

@chriscuhsnick Thanks Chris! We're going to experiment with differentiating colors thanks in part to your suggestion. In particular the CTA button! If you wan to know the results, you can follow me so when I post it you get a notification.

Re: applause. My philosophy is that the product is not the most important thing, it's the only thing. IMO letting go of ego is really, really hard to do, but so important for success. I'm trying to impress this idea throughout our company (even harder in an East Asian culture set!)

@jeremyrieunier You really blew my mind with this. I saw a guy do something similar a few years back with AdWords, but this is next level ish.