Next month marks the second anniversary of the release of my book The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! If it were a baby, I’d be dealing with the terrible two’s. Wow, I’m glad it’s just a book!
Well, as they say, time flies when you’re having fun (insert the obligatory Ferris Bueller “Life moves pretty fast,” quote here). The book that felt like would never be finished has now been available for two years. Which makes me think back to what life was like way back in 2014:
- If someone mentioned “Mobilegeddon,” you probably would have thought is was a bad Armageddon sequel.
- Periscope was something on a submarine, Meerkat was an animal (and pretty much is once again), and Facebook Live was when you had, like, an actual, face-to-face conversation with someone.
- Speaking of Facebook, if you wanted to respond to a post without actually commenting, your only option was the like button. #thestrugglewasreal
- If you asked someone about RankBrain, you’d get a blank look.
- Pokemon was something you used to play in middle school. Or that your parents did. Wait, that was just two months ago!
- Trump was still mainly just an overbearing reality star.
Ah, the good ol’ days.
But though much has changed and continues to change in digital marketing, The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! is still, well, pretty damn relevant. If we were to do a new edition today, we wouldn’t have to change much at all.
Part of that was intentional. When I wrote the book, I purposefully left out the “how to’s” and focused on the “what to do’s” because the former changes much more quickly than the latter. But still, I’m a little surprised at how little of the “what to do’s” have changed.
I guess if there is a lesson here (besides buy the book, buy it now!) it’s that the ultimate “best practice” in digital marketing is to do what is best for the visitor, not the search engines. While there are some technical recommendations in the book that directly relate to pleasing search engines, the bulk of it contains advice for making your site and entire web presence is valuable and easy for humans to engage with.
So if you haven’t picked up the book yet, you haven’t missed the boat. If you already have it, we’d love to hear what the best advice you got from it. Leave us a comment below!