I've been working on a small e-book, The Guide to Blogging, for about 3 weeks now. It should be ready in about 2 more weeks, I hope. I want to provide a brief, step-by-step guide to launching and then promoting a blog. This guide will be for regular folk like you and me, not veteran blogging geeks who actually know what an RSS file looks like (well, OK, I do know what an RSS file looks like, but that's memory space I'd just as soon get back). In the mean time, I thought I'd ask: If you have any questions about blogging, getting attention on a blog, or otherwise getting your thoughts on the web, please send them to me, IAN AT Portentinteractive.com. The AT is instead of an @ to stop evil spam bots blah blah blah. Please replace it with a real @ symbol.

Seth Godin has a great post today about intuition and analysis. Rely on your gut and you'll go far. Depend too much on analysis, though, and you'll stagnate.

David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, has some great lessons for marketing...

It's not a bad thing when marketing writers push content to tagging sites like Digg.com. In fact, just the opposite. I'm a 'craven seeker of hits', and proud of it. Read on to learn why.

If the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's web site is any indication, the Democratic Party learned nothing about online campaigning since 2004. Which is a bad sign, if you're a Democrat. Read on...

ClickTale is an about-to-be-released tool that will let you basically create movies of visitors’ use of your site. I don’t know much about it (just applied for the beta program) but have a look. It’s definitely got huge potential. What’s better than knowing exactly how, and when, people clicked?

Internet Marketing

Stock photography in an e-mail blast is a total turn-off. Trust me.

The Senators and Representatives deciding the fate of net neutrality have no clue about the internet. Here's proof.

I’ve never handled an internet marketing project with a team larger than four or five people: A marketer, a developer, a designer, a project manager, and maybe, if it’s a really big project, a producer. Our typical teams are closer to three: A marketer, a designer and a project manager, with a developer in occasional… Read More

The scandal hanging over this year's Tour de France holds a lesson for marketers everywhere.

Google just released their new Google Checkout service. Like PayPal, this service promises to let you easily accept credit card payments on your site. Does it live up to expectations, though? I set up Google Checkout on my own site as a test. Read the review...

ClickZ's latest article about banner ads says most users ignore them. I'm hardly a big fan of banners, but I don't totally agree, either. Read on to learn why.

CNN is calling Vastu Shakra web design a new trend online. True, or hooey? You make the call...

Google is testing a cost per action network. This could shake up online advertising...

Internet Marketing

I literally took a page from my own book today, and made some changes to the Conversation Marketing book sales page...