Design & Development

In internet marketing, you have to design something, eventually. When I’m stuck I do what any good creative does: Steal. Here are 15 blogs from which I regularly steal get ideas. A List Apart A List Apart is an old favorite of mine. The design is one of the best examples of a 3-column layout… Read More

Random

There are sooo many awful business blogs out there, I figure folks must really want to create them. So, in 13 easy steps, here’s how you write a terrible business blog, torpedo your internet marketing strategy, and gain the scorn of your customer base at the same time: Talk about yourself. Ooooh, this is a… Read More

Internet Marketing

Dear Google, I ran over a squirrel on the way to work today. I tried to avoid it, but when I swerved it accelerated under my car, tail twitching, mouth agape. It made a little rattling sound as it flattened under my tires. That’s not a squirrel, by the way – it’s a prairie dog.… Read More

Internet Marketing

Microsoft’s trying to stop the bleeding with their new ‘Cashback’ program. It’s not going to work. The program gives you a rebate on products you buy from their cashback page. It has three huge problems: You have to wait 60 days for the rebate. They don’t appear to have the lowest prices. It doesn’t work.… Read More

Internet Marketing

StumbleUpon can provide a valuable boost to an internet marketing campaign: It can indirectly lift link building efforts. A lot. Read on and I’ll explain how it works, how I researched this, and how you can get the same benefits. What Is StumbleUpon? Skip this section if you already know this. StumbleUpon is half site,… Read More

Internet Marketing

Let’s face it. Customers are a pain in the ass. Always asking for annoying things like service, honesty, quality. Always whining if they don’t get what they want. Well, you’re in luck. Here’s my 13-step process for making sure your customers hate you. Just build these features into your web site. They’re like an internet… Read More

The whole fuss around buying competitor’s keywords in pay per click marketing campaigns is stupid. Moronic. Foolish. Wasteful. Did I mention bad? And stupid? There is nothing wrong with bidding on a competitor’s brand name. Let me say it a different way: If you’re Infiniti, it’s perfectly OK to make sure your ad shows up… Read More

Today, ShoeMoney and Marketing Pilgrim provided great insights into why they think search engine optimization has no future. I don’t agree. Times infinity. Nyah nyah phbltbltbltblt. So there. Marketing Pilgrim says: “Take my industry of health supplements. Do you think Google wants to reward the SEO contortions of unknown companies and affiliates with lots of… Read More

Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing isn’t all misery and torture. So, in honor of National Grump Out Day, I dug deep and celebration-worthy advances in our industry: Analytics: No Longer Death By Details Two years ago, “analytics” meant “hope for the best”. Lousy interfaces, slow reports, moronic support staff and high costs drove us all crazy. There haven’t… Read More

Analytics

If you’re using Google Analytics to record sales data, you may have noticed really horrible sales over the last couple days. Don’t panic. I don’t think it’s you. It appears that, starting April 30th, Google Analytics isn’t correctly reporting e-commerce revenue. We figured this out after noticing that, of our 10+ clients using Google e-commerce… Read More

‘Link building’, for those who don’t know, is the practice of gaining links from other sites. Links are important. They deliver authority in the eyes of search engines, traffic if you’re lucky, and a chance that someone else will link to you, too. You can’t live without ’em. But there are no established best practices… Read More

SEO

Eric Shonfeld at Techcrunch just posted Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point? So, are we headed for a search apocalypse? Better hope not. And I don’t think so. Eric cites Nova Spivack’s presentation. In it, Nova says that if the amount of content keeps growing keyword search will collapse, leaving the internet… Read More

Brought to you by the same manic-depressiveness that generated 11 Internet Marketing Trends To Ignore. Here are 17 internet marketing things I will not write about: Twitter. I love Twitter, and spend a fair amount of time on it. But a quick search on Google shows 37,845 blogs posts in the last week. What. The.… Read More

Internet Marketing

It’s tempting to offer stuff for free to lure in customers. And it can work (sometimes). Overused, it’ll actually lead to unhappy customers, not happy ones. Here’s how my family’s new pets re-taught me this lesson. The Guinea Pigs Hated Me My kids persuaded me to adopt a pair of guinea pigs: Gandalf (my son’s)… Read More

Marketing is not about lying or cheating, or tricking consumers into wanting what they think you’ve got (even if you don’t). So what is it? I’ve briefly opened my psyche’s closet doors, shoved back the “Haven’t studied for finals” nightmare, knocked out the three-headed monster that keeps yelling “Ian, the clowns are coming” and even… Read More