Yearly Archives: 2015

Internet Marketing

Last February, I had to have hernia surgery. I was so stressed about work that, as they put me under, I was just happy to get some sleep. Yes, I was treating abdominal surgery as ‘me time.’ For me, late 2014 to early 2015 was a poop cyclone of biblical proportions. Things have changed. I’m… Read More

Internet Marketing

Short version: If you’re running for office, you need to reserve the right web addresses before someone else does. We’ve got a tool that generates the obvious ones for you. Obvious for you. Given the news lately, maybe not others. If you want to skip all the jokes and just try the tool, click the… Read More

PPC

“What should my PPC budget be?” How to set a PPC budget is one of those questions I get asked on an extremely regular basis as we start working with new businesses. So much so that I thought it’d be a good time to put the “quick” answer out for general consumption. Depending on how advanced… Read More

SEO

Or, “How I Became a Certified Jedi Knight” Yay! Star Wars! I can’t wait for The Force Awakens! It comes out in a couple weeks and I have totally bought into the hype. I know I’m not alone, even after a certain late-nineties, floppy-eared, backward knee-walking, CGI disappointment, who shall remain nameless. Now here’s the… Read More

Internet Marketing

Why does marketing advice suck? We all look for marketing tactics we can repeat. You know what I mean: Some guy writes an article about marketing strategy, and boom, everyone’s off to the races. And 95% of the time, the tactics out of context fall flat on their metaphorical faces. Using the latest marketing how-to… Read More

Random

I’m jumping on the bandwagon. I’m surfing the trend. I’m grubbing for 15 seconds of fame by reporting the biggest news of the last 24 hours: Twitter is replacing stars with hearts But I’m different. I’m… special. My spies have the inside story. And they brought back 11 possible reasons for this bold change of… Read More

Social Media

You see millions of viewers on YouTube. You want a piece of the action. So you borrow a video camera, snag a GoPro from home, or just use an iPhone to get what you need. You record, upload the video and wait for the fans to pour in. Sometimes it works. Usually… not so much.… Read More

Internet Marketing

No. Epilogue All hail RankBrain! Remember this day when we’re all slaves to machines that barf information on us, filling up downtime and turning us into drooling screen addicts… Wait. Since I’m too late to do anything about that, I thought I’d get one thing out of the way: RankBrain doesn’t matter to marketers. Or… Read More

Analytics

This is the last ‘here is what I presented’ links for a while, I promise. I just did this presentation at MarketingProfs B2B Forum (a conference I highly recommend, by the way). Here’s the deck: ROI Rage: Tying KPIs to Marketing Strategy and Tactics from Ian Lurie The Capybara are back!!! The links Google Analytics… Read More

Internet Marketing

I talked about Distance from Perfect at SearchLove London. There weren’t a lot of links, but here are they are. Plus the slides: The links: Factoids How Quality Score Affects Cost and per Conversion Twitter’s Algorithm Naked Mole Rats (you had to be there) The stats and explanation around revenue vs. page load time The… Read More

Internet Marketing

I talked about site speed today at OMCap Berlin. The presentation included a lot of little tips. Here are links to any relevant stuff, in the order they appeared in the presentation. The links: Site speed vs. revenue The stats and explanation around revenue vs. page load time. Diagnostic tools Google PageSpeed Insights GTMetrix Pingdom… Read More

Design & Development

This is a question I get asked a lot as senior developer at Portent. A client, new or existing, has an established site running on some platform, and wants to add on a blog, a microsite, or the ability to easily control top-of-funnel marketing content. Technically, “in parallel” means WordPress (WP) is set up to… Read More

Internet Marketing

I saw a Christmas ad last week. Complete with one of those sanity-imploding ditties that make me want to scoop out my medulla. I won’t tell you the title. You’d share my curse and hum the stupid thing until mid-January. It’s not even Halloween yet, people. Hopefully, you aren’t responsible for this atrocity. And hopefully,… Read More

Internet Marketing

At ConfluenceCon last week I explained why marketing is worldbuilding, not storytelling. We’re not inserting customers into storylines. We’re providing them with a world that has many points of entry, lots of places to stop and many routes to conversion. Worldbuilding. Here’s an annotated slide deck: Weird, Useful, Significant: Marketing as Worldbuilding from Ian Lurie… Read More

Internet Marketing

A lot of time, effort and resources go into creating high quality content for your business. Regardless of format – infographic, blog post, video or something else – you need to create, produce and publish every piece. You’re expending resources: Time, money or both. After making that hefty initial investment you need to get it… Read More