The digital marketing experts featured for 2010 are Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Avinash Kaushik, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall, Bill Slawski, Seth Godin, Joe Pulizzi, Karen McGrane and Scott Brinker.
What changed in digital marketing in 2010
Instagram launched in October 2010, a photo-sharing app built entirely around mobile. There were no brands or ad platform on it yet, but the kind of visual, influencer-driven marketing it's laying the groundwork for is starting to look like where social media is heading.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Rand Fishkin
Co-founder, SEOmoz (now Moz)
By 2010, had turned SEOmoz's free tools and Whiteboard Friday series into one of the most-read communities in SEO.
The company's unusually open approach to sharing data and tools, in an industry that mostly kept its tactics private, has built a following few other SEO companies can match.
- 02
Danny Sullivan
Founder, Search Engine Land
Founded Search Engine Land in 2006, after founding Search Engine Watch a decade earlier, and was one of the most cited voices in search marketing journalism.
Running two of the industry's defining publications back to back gave him a rare continuous record of how search marketing evolved from its earliest days.
Also featured in 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2018, 2020 and 2026
- 03
Avinash Kaushik
Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google
Published Web Analytics 2.0 in 2009 and shaped how a generation of marketers thought about measurement.
The book is pushing marketers past vanity metrics toward outcome-focused analytics, a framing that's starting to spread well beyond the web analytics niche it started in.
Also featured in 2002
- 04
Barry Schwartz
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable
Had already been running Search Engine Roundtable, a daily digest of SEO/SEM industry discussion, since 2003.
Publishing daily for seven straight years by 2010 made him one of the industry's most reliable sources for tracking algorithm changes and forum chatter as they happened.
- 05
Aaron Wall
Creator, SEO Book
Built SEO Book into a leading independent SEO resource after launching it in 2003.
Keeping it independent and subscriber-funded, rather than agency- or vendor-backed, let him write more bluntly about tactics than most of the industry's other publications could.
- 06
Bill Slawski
Founder, SEO by the Sea
Had been running SEO by the Sea, the industry's go-to source on search patents, since 2005.
His deep reads of Google's own patent filings gave SEOs a rare evidence-based way to reason about ranking factors, rather than guessing from observed results alone.
- 07
Seth Godin
Author & entrepreneur
Already a widely read marketing author, was shaping how a generation of marketers thought about permission and ideas that spread.
Concepts like permission marketing and the purple cow had by this point moved well beyond his own books into the everyday vocabulary marketers used to describe their own campaigns.
- 08
Joe Pulizzi
Founder, Content Marketing Institute
Founded the Content Marketing Institute in 2007, helping popularize "content marketing" as a discipline.
Giving the practice a name and an institute behind it helped content marketing graduate from something individual bloggers did into a budget line brands took seriously.
- 09
Karen McGrane
Content strategy consultant
Was an established voice in content strategy and UX.
Her consulting work pushed organizations to treat content as structured, reusable data rather than static pages, a shift that mattered more each year as sites had to serve more devices.
- 10
Scott Brinker
Creator, chiefmartec.com
Started chiefmartec.com in 2008, tracking a marketing technology landscape that doesn't have a widely used name yet.
Charting the growing number of marketing software vendors early is giving him a front-row seat to a category that's expanding faster than most marketers have noticed.
This page is an independent editorial mention published by Digital Business Marketing. The numbering above is a browsing order, not a formal award, contest, vote, or ranking, and inclusion does not imply any named person endorses Digital Business Marketing.
