Internet Marketing

I’ve prattled on about the marketing stack for a few years now, but haven’t really explained each chunk. This 5-post series explains the stack as a whole, then piece-by-piece. I’m not some TV series jerk who will keep you hanging, though, wondering which of your favorite characters will die next (cough HBO cough cough). Instead,… Read More

SEO

I’ve noticed there’s something we’re sorely missing in our marketing mix: flowcharts. Making sure that Portent has mo’ flo’ to offer has become of my new life goals. As part of this endeavor, I created the following International SEO Strategy flowchart to help those who are trying to decide what the best structure is for… Read More

Featured

Last year I received an invitation to speak at one of the biggest search conferences of the year, MozCon. MozCon is put on by Moz (formerly known as SEOmoz) an SEO software/tool company in Seattle and MozCon, in the past, has been more commonly known as an SEO conference. As such, I’ve noticed that those… Read More

Social Media

Most marketers equate ‘influencer research’ with ‘finding a celebrity who will endorse for free.’ I call that the Rockstar Method. It’s a miserable approach. Ready-and-waiting rockstar social amplifiers are slightly less common than mint-condition K cars. The Rockstar Method has its place with major brands, pure luck and the well-connected. Mere mortals like you and… Read More

SEO

^ Note: That’s Ken Colborn up there. Keep reading. It’ll all make sense. ^ We won! Best SEO Campaign of 2014. Allow me to wax philosophical for a second: My team constantly teaches me new stuff. Their skills and approach are a constant inspiration, and I can’t say it enough times: It’s such an honor… Read More

Internet Marketing

Yesterday, Google rolled out ‘custom affinities’ — their way to cross-target different audience segments. You can read about it on The Verge: Google rolls out custom affinity audiences ad tool for targeting very specific groups of people We’ve been researching this for a few years now. We started showing our results when I babbled about… Read More

One spring day of 2011, Google announced a new thing called “Authorship.” They described it as a way of using data to “help people find content from great authors in our search results.” With little exception, the SEO community rejoiced. Finally, we, the content creators and bloggers of the world, were on top. By adding… Read More

PPC

Google AdWords’ recent announcement on the retirement of exact match in favor of the “close variant” default setting not only came as a bit of surprise to me, but definitely garnered the expected outrage from the PPC community, including petitions, Tweets and blog posts like this one. (Strangely enough, we seem to have avoided the… Read More

Random

Shortest. Career change. Ever. I’m back as CEO of Portent after six months as Chairman and Principal Consultant. I’m damned happy about it, too. Here’s why: We hit our goals. Steve came on board to get our business house in order. Frankly, I suck at that. Steve is great at it. He got it done.… Read More

Random

I’ve done some pretty awful presentations in my career. Here, I’ve pulled them all into a single, truly horrifying ‘ultimate’ slide deck. First, I pull them all together. Then I do the same presentation again, with annotations explaining where I goofed and how to avoid it.

Internet Marketing

TL;DR version: Portent’s just launched RainGage Enterprise and RainGage™ Essentials. RainGage assesses your online marketing and recommends improvements that win you more business. It provides three layers of marketing recommendations: A strategic assessment across your entire marketing mix A tactical assessment showing areas for improvement A page-by-page, post-by-post (on RainGage Enterprise) and image-by-image set of… Read More

Internet Marketing

Update: I wrote a much longer, more complete article about this, called One-Trick Ponies Get Shot And other stories: Digital marketing strategy done right. You might want to read that, instead. TL;DR version: Strategic thinking + tactical recommendations grows digital agency/client relationships. ‘Strategy’ means thinking across all digital disciplines — not just the ones in… Read More

Analytics

If you’re going to grow a marketing campaign beyond last-click converters, you have to know how to attribute value to channels that support conversion in other ways. A classic example: You’re running a social media campaign. Your client wants to turn it off, because they see zero conversions. But you know social media supports other… Read More

SEO

The SEO community and the web development community can often be at odds. One thing they’ll both agree on, however, is the importance of performance. The SEO’s favorite site speed tool is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which I’ve written about before. We’ve all seen this among the suggestions: CSS sprites. One tactic to improve site speed… Read More

Internet Marketing

Dear Chief Marketing Officers: For nearly 20 years, we have worked together to build digital marketing as a discipline. You’ve trusted digital agencies like mine with your consumers, your brand, and your marketing dollars. You’ve taken the risks and the responsibility, while your digital agencies have responded with clicks, likes, and an avalanche of data… Read More