Every now and then, I’ll post a job description here. This time it happens to be a job at MineralTree. I’m looking for someone to work with me to change the way small businesses make payments, and to revolutionize how banks market to their SMB customers. If you’re up to the challenge, let’s talk.
Marketing Manager, MineralTree
At MineralTree, we’re building software that changes the way small businesses pay their bills. MineralTree’s automated bill pay software helps business owners process, approve, and pay their bills online with a simple, secure, and mobile platform, giving them more time to focus on their business. Our employees solve problems that help our customers every day in a fun and fast-paced environment.
We are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts steps away from the Alewife T Station.
We’re looking for a creative Marketing Manager to join our small and tenacious marketing team. We’re a fast-paced startup, so if rolling up your sleeves, multitasking, and staying on top of multiple projects concurrently are what you look forward to in your work, we want to talk to you.
Roles & Responsibilities
- Writing – You are able to communicate effortlessly in emails, expertly in blog posts, and it shows. You don’t have to know every technical detail of our product, but you do have to grasp the fundamental concepts and be able to convey that in words.
- Prospecting – Admittedly not the most glamorous of marketing tasks, but one that is critically important. You’ll find new potential customers, and will be able to plow through a list, qualify prospects, and load them into our CRM.
- Events and PR Coordination – We’re doing several events and PR campaigns in 2013-14, and coordinating everything takes time and effort. From printing the right product sheets and shipping USB drives to booking hotels and meeting with press, there are endless tasks to complete. You’ll be asked to help out with some of the meeting logistics, and you don’t mind nagging people to get things done.
- Marketing Operations – You’re disciplined enough to get things done. You’re able to work through our marketing systems (Salesforce.com, Marketo, WordPress, etc.) to manage the entire lead cycle.
- Social – Our social channels need care and feeding. You are able to stay on top of industry news, post updates to our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages, and own the social channel.
- Metrics – You will help to produce marketing metrics each week to show visitors, pipeline trends, ranked account acceleration, and other KPIs.
- News – You’ll stay on top of news trends, and will share relevant items internally, and can turn news stories into blog posts and social announcements.
Requirements
Must Have:
- Marketing Experience in a Company – 1-3 years experience in a marketing department.
- Passion for Making an Impact – You want your work to make a difference.
- You are Ultra-organized and Self Disciplined – The term fast-paced startup isn’t just a cliché in this case. You’ll be bombarded from every angle with tasks, but that’s no big deal to you. Water off a duck’s back. Spreadsheets are your best friend.
- You are Eager to Learn – We have a great team and are always willing to share what we know to help you learn. This isn’t a punch-in, sit around for 8 hours, punch-out kind of a gig.
Nice To Have:
- Marketing experience within a software company
- Use and Understanding of Salesforce.com, WordPress – It’s a plus if you know your way around a CRM, CMS, and have either used or understand the concept of a marketing automation product.
- Design experience is a huge bonus. We’re always coming up with new ideas that need graphic work, and our designer is perpetually overbooked.
Please apply at jobs@mineraltree.com (or email me personally at nathan dot burke at mineraltree.com)
{ 0 comments }
We’ve just posted three jobs on the MineralTree site, and we’re looking to fill three positions in our Cambridge, MA headquarters (in walking distance from the Alewife T Station). If you or anyone you know would be a great fit for these positions, please let me know at nathan dot burke at the name of the company I just mentioned dot com.
Startup marketing is art.
After taking a month to get settled into my new position at MineralTree, it’s finally time for our next 
The Down Side of Content Marketing: Spamming is Really Easy.
by Nathan W. Burke on April 3, 2013
Cross posted on medium.
I don’t know why this touched a nerve today, but when I received yet another comment spam notification, I kind of blew up. The trigger:
The Goal of Comment Spam
For years, companies have hired “website promotion firms” to try to get their site ranked higher in search engines, and one tactic is to get as many inbound links as possible. As part of their ranking algorithm, search engines look to see how many sites link to a certain page and count links as “votes”. This is a vast oversimplification, but you get the picture: the more sites that link to your page, the more valuable that page seems to search engines.
And that’s where comment spam comes in. Companies will use software, scripting, and other brute force methods to send what appear to be comments from human beings, hoping that a blog or site author will publish said comment, along with a link to the commenter’s site. And since it’s easy and free to do, why not send the same comment to millions of blogs, hoping that at least some of them will fall for the hoax and publish a link back to a page? Just like email spam, it’s a numbers game.
Content Spam as a Larger Spam Strategy
Because setting up a web site and publishing hundreds of pages of keyword-laden pages is simple (if you don’t care about quality of writing), people will focus on a market, and will create content spam as bait, in the hopes that they will rise through the search engine rankings. The process:
Step One: Find a market that requires local services. In this case,
(I’m not going to use the term in text here, as these spam companies have a history of DDOSing anyone criticizing them). When you’re locked out of your house, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to do a search for 
+ {whatever city you’re in}. This makes a perfect market for spammers.
Step Two: Build a cheap, basic website that can be repeated over and over. Since this is a numbers game, spammers focus on repeatability rather than quality. The example in question:
Look generic enough? Good. Because we’re going to be using this a LOT.
Step Three: Build a few pages that are lousy with keywords. Don’t worry about creating sentences that make sense. Focus on what people are searching for as they’re watching the dog chew up the couch from the back porch. They don’t care about spelling mistakes, they care about getting back inside!
Step Four: Build hundreds of these sites, all linking to one another. Just change “Boston” to any other city you can think of:
Step Five: Sell your services. Go through the yellow pages and call your target with an exclusive offer. Explain that you’re already bringing in x leads a month, and they’re begging for your business. We’ll make you the exclusive {job} in {city}, and you’ll already have a website. We’ll feature your phone number exclusively on a site that’s getting ###,### unique visitors per month.
Step Six: Repeat over and over.
Summary
Some will say that this way of doing business is simply taking advantage of the search engines, and is completely valid. Maybe.
But by spamming blogs and web sites using comment spam to lift these content farm sites to the top of search engine results, that’s not okay. That’s crossing the line. And a quick BBB check tells us that the company behind this spam empire is up to no good:
{ 0 comments }