Internet Marketing

Sure, I could try to predict what’ll work in 2008. But I’ll point to things like great marketing copy, audience measurement and analytics, your eyes will roll back in your head and my subscriber count will fall even further. It’s much more fun to point out what’ll flop in 2008. Here are the Internet Marketing… Read More

You need an internet marketing strategy, even if it’s just “sell lots of stuff”. Here’s how you do it: Tear up the old marketing plan. Chances are, if your company’s been around for a few years, someone wrote you a marketing plan. It probably has an executive summary, spans 3 years, and cost a lot… Read More

Internet Marketing

Google’s webmaster tools are a great search marketing tool. But they’re also a fantastic internet marketing tool, because they let you peek into the heads of your audience, and see how search engines (and probably your customers) are classifying you. I recorded a brief video about it, and provided some quick guidance on getting set… Read More

Internet Marketing

If you’re new to Conversation Marketing, here are a few articles and other writings you might want to review: 5 Must-read Books for Internet Marketers I have a copy of each, dog-eared and sticky-noted. 65 Ways to Improve Online Sales I couldn’t come up with 99. Conversation Marketing, the Book I published my entire book… Read More

When I take my child to use your web site, it had damned well better work. My daughter just got a Rescue Pet. They’re adorable little stuffed puppies. They come with a code you can use at www.myepets.com to log in, groom your pet, furnish a little house for it, etc.. The fun stopped there.… Read More

PPC

My staff are a bit of a sick bunch. That’s why I like them. The PPC team has put together a PPC worst practices site: PPCVillain.com. There are plenty of best practices sites, after all. Here’s the first of what we hope will be many instructional videos:

If you’ve been following the PR world of late, you know that the social media press release (SMPR) has gotten a lot of attention. This update of the stodgy old press release tries to blend social networking, rich media and text into a single, self-updating landing page for the media. It’s a compelling idea. One… Read More

Update: The quiz tool I was using didn’t work quite as advertised, so I’ve just put the quiz right on the page. Correct answers are bracketed. Too often, web developers and designers say they’re SEO experts, when they’re not. As a client, you have to believe them – they’re the experts. So it can be… Read More

Analytics

Google Analytics is getting ready to roll out some cool new stuff. Looks like they’ve started. I went in to check the stats for my blog, and can now compare two metrics: This kind of comparison is very valuable. With it, you can check to see if, say, pageviews/visit remain stable with visits increase. If… Read More

A slow site sucks, no matter how pretty it is. It sheds visitors and customers like a raincoat sheds water. It can even hurt your search engine rankings. Fortunately, there are lots of easy ways to accelerate your sluggish site. Here they are, from easiest and least geeky to most complex and/or most geeky:

I am sitting in an coliform-ridden Best Western in Peru, Indiana right now (I'm not kidding about the e coli part), drinking bottled water and pondering the meaning of a marketer's life. The answer, I think, is 'Integrated Marketing'. Here's a conversation I had today with a client who I respect, and like, and enjoy working with: Me Smiling victoriously: ...and internet sales are up over 25% since 2005-2006. Client Frowning unhappily: Sure, but what if our catalogs did that? Me Nodding intelligently: Catalogs and other offline stuff definitely drive customers. Our online marketing insures that you're visible when they look for you. Client Parrying vigorously: Yes, but chances are they would've found us anyway. Me Gurgling internally: Well, we know that 60% of your search sales were new. But we can never attribute any one sale to any one source. So you may be right - our work may not matter.

This does have a happy ending. Keep reading...

Cyber Monday, if you didn’t know, is the Monday following Thanksgiving. It’s becoming a huge online shopping day. Think of it as Black Friday, only online, and on Monday. If you have an online store, and you haven’t done anything yet, don’t despair. There are still some things you can do: Look at last year’s… Read More

Online publishers - newspapers, for example - depend on visits and pageviews for their livelihood. The biggest source of visits is still unpaid, 'organic' search results. So, why do so many publishers do such a poor job of optimizing their sites? I don't know, either, but I've pulled together a list of easy tweaks and changes that can help make any publication improve its rankings, fast...

Improving online sales isn't usually a start-over-from-scratch proposition. Here are 65 little tweaks that can make a big difference.