Tony Wright dot com

People are upset about the news industry dying/changing, and with good reason. There’s a lot of great history and romance in journalism, and it’ll be a shame to see them go. There’s a great summary of the issue by Nick Carr and some good thoughts (with a linkbait title) by Scott Karp. [...]

In the past two months I’ve been on two different panels with other entrepreneurs. The first was at WTIA in Bellevue, WA (”Cashing in on Web Services“)– the other panelists were very clearly what I’d call “business entrepreneurs”. All of them had relatively successful funded startups, but not a one of them had [...]

Just a short note to let folks know that I’ve switched my commenting system over to Disqus.
Disqus is a hosted commenting system (free) that offers a few clear benefits:

2 way communication with people who comment. This is the one I care about. Very often, someone leaves an interesting comment on my blog that [...]

One of the recent YCombinator dinners that we attended featured Joe Kraus (who founded Excite and then later JotSpot, which sold to Google).
Like all YC guests, Joe had piles of startup wisdom… One of the things that stuck out to me (which I’d never heard much) was when he said, “when we launched JotSpot [...]

I’ve been running WordPress for this blog since the beginning. It’s a great platform. I’ve officially been drinking the Kool-Aid. I tell my friends about it. I heard Matt Mullenweg speak (at SXSW last year) and I rave about that.
So when it made sense for us to spin up a little [...]

Absolutely priceless. Someone took the time to show us what Google.com would look like if they had to care about SEO.
Let’s face it– Google’s search algorithms rock. No search engine has succeeded in creating a system where publishers are incentivized to create high quality content.
You can take the high road, and just focus [...]

First off, for those of you who haven’t been exposed to the phrase yet, here is WikiPedia’s take on LinkBait. The definition doesn’t feel complete to me. I’d probably add a bit of language along the lines of “baits users to bookmark the link” (because many social bookmarking sites convey “SEO link juice”) [...]

For many years as a consultant, when a small business said they wanted a site search engine, I was flummoxed. The best site search option was clearly Google, but it was ugly (you had very little control over the appearance of the search results) and, of course, laden with text ads. I generally [...]

Tomorrow evening I’ll be speaking at the SeattleTechStartups meetup (starts at 6pm– click the link for details).
The topic will be “Bootstrap Marketing for Web Startups: SEO, SMM, and Viral Marketing“. For the uninitiated, that’s Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Viral Marketing.
If anyone has anything in particular they want me to chat [...]

Just read a great piece on Small Business Hub about SEO entitled Stopping The Google AdWords Morphine Drip: How We Saved $183 Last Week. These guys echo a sentiment that I’ve been expressing for a long time (and just posted about a few weeks ago)… Investment in SEO is virtually ALWAYS better than [...]