Articles by Ian Lurie

If you want a great product, solve a problem. At least that’s what “they” tell me. So, I want to know: What’s the biggest problem you have with internet marketing? Answer this teeny little survey, and you get a chance to win one of two free sets of all of the Conversation Marketing e-books: Conversation [...]

My latest Search Engine Land column just went live: 29 ways to speed up your web site It’s timely for me, because we just finished a review of page performance versus page speed, and found that everything—conversions, time on page, scroll depth—improves when a page loads faster. That’s obvious. But the difference is amazing: Pages [...]

No matter why you have it, your web site needs to sell. You need to get visitors to do something, whether that something is ‘sign up’, ‘buy now’ or just ‘keep reading’. Here are 10 quick tips for copy persuades, sells and converts: Start by telling people why they should read. Marketing copywriting 101: You [...]

Quick update: If you type in ’2*4′ it will actually do the math for you. However, typing in ‘pointless’ still returns no results. I’ve long assumed that most folks who call themselves ‘gurus’ are pretty deficient in the guru-ness department. Turns out, the same is true of automated chat bots. Google just launched Google Talk [...]

You knew this was coming after yesterday’s post, right? Seems only fair that, after providing agency bosses a guide to employees, I now provide marketing agency employees a guide to bosses. Unfortunately, this is really only a guide to me. I can’t see inside other boss’s heads. And they can’t see inside mine, I hope. [...]

Important note! I should point out that these lessons had nothing to do the crapstorm that was my Monday. In fact, my employees probably kept me from flinging myself, clothed in raccoon pelts and howling with laughter, into the Green River. No one at Portent is in trouble! Except me, maybe. Yesterday, I finished some [...]

I am biased here. I’m writing a review of a PPC ebook that one of my own staff wrote. You might think that that means I’ll give her a glowing review. Wrong. I’m biased towards ripping teammates’ writing apart. I edit. I niggle. I ask for changes. I rewrite stuff. When the author is within [...]

I want to thank all the agencies out there who get Portent new clients. Thank you. When you promise a client you’ll send them ‘monthly reports’, and instead e-mail them something like this: You couldn’t be helping me more. Bless you. You’re totally disappointing your client, because they understand that a report is not the [...]

So, I’m greedy. I’ve got this amazing team at Portent, right? They produce all sorts of great training content, link bait, funny lists, news, etc. that we post for clients and for our own bizarre sites. But I want more, dammit. We keep a list of headlines, topics and stuff that we want to write [...]

If you’re a writer looking for freelance gigs, Portent needs YOU. We’re looking for great writers to do high-quality blog posts, articles and series on topics ranging from cloud computing and security to bikinis. Here’s the thing: Portent’s internal team is fantastic. They produce training, promotional and news content for our clients and have hit [...]