I don't doubt Rand Fishkin as a marketer. I just don't like misleading people via inventing new terms for already known concepts, like "content marketing" for PR. It disconnects his followers from a lot of knowledge and they keep on reinventing the wheel.
Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.
Fully agree there is a lot of fluff out there, and some of that is people trying to generate ongoing news or indexable content where there isn't really anything worth putting out.
That said, I'm not sure I agree with your take on the new terms. Sure they are buzzwords to some degree, but I see content marketing as distinct from PR in that it largely focuses on content creation, has considerations for SEO, etc. One could argue that PR has those components as well, but I see the distinction as PR focusing more on outreach to key individuals in the media, handling issues management, etc. Again, some overlap for sure, but I don't see content marketing efforts doing everything PR does or vice versa.
Again, people need to read a variety of sources, and part of the problem is there is no great way to tell whether a source is credible. But I think it is better that people start going down the rabbit hole than wander around completely oblivious.
Since you seem have a high threshold for what you consider value sources of industry info, do you have any recommendations for how others might discover those on their own? I'd be curious what you consider reputable sources.
Thanks for sharing your list. I have to say I find it a bit interesting that you knock on Optimizely, Rand Fishkin and co but then reference ppchero, conversion-rate-experts, etc. They all have a range of quality, but I've seen high-quality pieces from both the sources you discounted and the sources you like.
I LOVE the Meclabs properties. MarketingExperiments.com is absolutely fantastic in particular. Definitely a fan of the others you listed as well. Avinash Kaushik is my analytics hero and I often find myself linking to his pieces when trying to educate about attribution or how to look at data.
SearchEngineLand is pretty decent for getting raw industry news, but some of their pieces are definitely skewed based on the biases of the authors. Believe it or not, there is actually some decent discussion that happens on Reddit in /r/ppc and /r/adops as well as every now and then in Quora.
My biggest problem right now is finding time to digest all the info. I used to be able to carve out a decent chunk when that was a large part of my role in the agency world, but now that I'm client-side my days are filled with many other items, so I have to fit it in where I can.
Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.