Blog

Why I Tell Founders to Chase Profit, Not Revenue

Founder Insights

A brand chasing $50M halted a hosting fix that would have saved $1,500 a month, then unravelled. Paul Ryazanov on why founders should chase profit, not revenue. […]

Where AI Helps Marketing and Where Google Punishes It

Ecommerce Strategy

Notes from a Google AI workshop. Paul Ryazanov on where AI clearly helps marketing, where Google still punishes AI content, and the line he draws between them. […]

Three Backlink Checks That Expose a Weak SEO Report

Ecommerce Strategy

Three problems show up again and again in link-building reports. Paul Ryazanov on the backlink checks that expose a weak SEO campaign before you waste budget. […]

How a Two-Minute Reply Became Our Best Advertising

Founder Insights, General

A new client messaged after hours and the team replied in two minutes. Paul Ryazanov on why response speed, not a pitch, is the real advertising. […]

Why Email Should Be 30% of Your Ecommerce Revenue

Ecommerce Strategy

Email should carry around 30% of ecommerce revenue. Paul Ryazanov on why, what the Klaviyo workshops get right, and how to use your agency’s partner status. […]

How We Won 25 UK Customers After Relocating

Founder Insights

Two years after moving to the UK, Paul Ryazanov on how MageCloud won 25 new customers from a standing start, and who actually made it possible. […]

Why LinkedIn Follower Counts Are Easy to Fake

Founder Insights, General

A cheap trick for inflating a LinkedIn following shows why the follower number proves little. Paul Ryazanov on what to judge an operator by instead. […]

Twenty Years on LinkedIn, Mostly Wasted

Founder Insights, General

I created my LinkedIn profile in October 2004. In the twenty years since, I have spoken with more than 20,000 prospects, partners, and clients, and treated the platform as a time-waster the entire way, because clients arrived through Rentacoder, Elance, and our site anyway. Those channels have dried up. Four […]

WP Engine vs Kinsta: Our WooCommerce Research

Ecommerce Strategy, General

We are preparing a research release comparing WP Engine and Kinsta for WooCommerce: features, performance, control panels, built on two high-traffic stores we manage with a combined 1.2 million visitors. To pressure-test the findings we audited five more WooCommerce stores, free, in exchange for using the anonymised results. Here is […]

Skip the Fancy Audit Report. Send a Loom

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

A client project brief went up: please do not use ChatGPT content, no generic recommendations, we already know about H1 tags, include the word AlphaMage to prove you read this. Six hundred words of filtering for a real expert. My proposal was a Loom video, one hour and ten minutes […]

Big Brands Break Too. Cheap Audits Catch It

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

One morning of approaching prominent brands about speaking at Ecommerce Camp turned up a national retailer with DNS problems and a seven-brand Magento group with security issues. Large in-house teams drift from their day-one sharpness. A $49 video audit from a random guy would have caught both, which is exactly […]

When Google Merchant Center Rejects Working Images

Ecommerce Strategy, General

A client asked us to connect their store to Google Merchant Center. The feed went in cleanly, and then Google rejected the images. Open the same image URLs in a browser and they loaded perfectly. The problem was the fancy CDN serving the catalogue images, and the fix was boring: […]

Your £1M Store Is Already a Success Story

Ecommerce Camp, Founder Insights

While lining up speakers for the next Ecommerce Camp, I keep meeting business owners who underestimate what they have built. Founders who started from nothing and grew to $1-5M in annual revenue do not see themselves as success stories, because they are comparing against brands that make millions a month. […]

A 12-Hour Invite Window in a 24-Hour World

Ecommerce Strategy, General

At MageCloud we ask clients to add our team directly into their tool accounts so they never have to relay technical decisions. While I was travelling, two clients sent me Klaviyo invites. Klaviyo invites expire in 12 hours. I was on planes for two days. In a world of remote […]

Our Emergency Policy for 46 UK Stores

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

46 UK businesses trust us daily to support their websites when something fails. Most of the time nothing does: we deploy twice a month and plan every release. But when a third-party provider breaks something at 2am, our clients have direct access to account managers, developers, and me. The policy […]

The SEO Cold Email That Audited Itself

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Normally I ignore these, but this one quoted my actual Domain Authority in the pitch, maybe an Ahrefs API wired into their outreach. Smart move, so I gave it attention. Then I checked their domain: DR 0.5 against our 41. I went to pitch our services back to them, and […]

Organic Is Shrinking. Plan to Dominate Every Channel

Ecommerce Strategy, General

The SEO industry and Google’s organic search are going through significant changes. My clients are losing blog traffic to AI answers, and commercial queries now open with sponsored Shopping filters, People Also Ask boxes, and Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart before the first true organic result appears. Here is what […]

The Three-Second Check on Your SEO Agency

Ecommerce Strategy, General

How do you verify your SEO agency is not doing a good job in three seconds? Go to Google Search Console, open Security and Manual Actions, and click Manual actions. If something is sitting there, like the user-generated spam flag in the screenshot, your agency is probably not paying much […]

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