Featured

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

Internet Marketing

Most people hate public speaking, don’t they? Anecdotally, we hear that people would rather die than have to get up in front of a group of other human beings and make a presentation. I sure can relate to that! People who know me now might not believe this, but I grew up very shy and… Read More

Copywriting

For a highly visual medium, the Internet has been slow to attract marketers with a graphic bent.  Perhaps due to proliferation of search engine optimization, or web browsers originating as text-based applications, many of us have focused on the word, not the image, video, or application. But words aren’t attracting the attention they used to. … Read More

Design & Development

If you’re like me in the kitchen, sometimes you want to add a little North African flavor to dinner. After some light Googling the other night, I found plenty of couscous recipes, but I also found this culinary gem: “5 Couscous Cooking Mistakes to Avoid.” Wait, what? “Cooking” couscous amounts to no more than adding… Read More

PPC

Weekly and monthly reporting is one of the most important things I do as a PPC strategist.  Clients invest a lot of money into paid search and need to be able to keep track of progress.   More importantly though, clients need to understand the strategy and the reasoning behind what’s going on.  That’s where I… Read More

Design & Development

Change is in the air around Portent. Change that’s directly tied to how we see the future of Internet marketing. And it’s exciting. And it involves cool design innovations like parallax scrolling and HTML5 animations. As we shift our focus more and more towards what we call 10% content—deeper, larger projects that take bigger risks… Read More

PPC

When I was 8 years old I wanted to be a paleontologist. So…very…badly. I even had a jean jacket with dinosaurs painted on it with jewels and sequins. (Hey, it was the ’80s.) Then I discovered the amount of biology and sciences (mostly the dissecting and looking at the insides of living animals) that turned… Read More

Copywriting

The World Wide Web has robbed the world of mystery.  Its epic reach into the far corners of the collective conscious has placed long odds against unleashing amazing new information – and with every blog post and product description, these odds get longer.  As a result, it is imperative to creatively impart information to differentiate… Read More

Social Media

My rule in a social media crisis: Apologize, but verify. If your brand screws up: Remind yourself that you do not get to decide what an apology is. The audience does. Apologize sincerely and promptly. Start monitoring response sentiment. If you don’t see a recovery within hours, try again, with feeling. In real life, failing… Read More

PPC

I know it’s a horribly dead horse-beaten topic now, but (not provided) is a bigger problem than ever for search engine marketers. If we obsess over it, we lose sight of more important parts of a campaign. If we don’t address it, the client thinks organic traffic on their bread and butter keywords is plummeting.… Read More

SEO

Last month, I did a webinar called “Everything Non-SEOs Need To Know About SEO.” The goal was to give developers, designers, and other web professionals a core understanding of some of the more complex SEO concepts. Here’s the full video along with the link bundle that includes the slidedeck. Enjoy! You can find the link… Read More

Just a quick week-of-July-4th, I haven’t-gotten-to-rant-in-a-while rant: Say you have something when you don’t. You may think that 200 units is enough for your big product launch. But the customers you lose because you’re out of stock will seek alternatives. Make sure your product sourcing is sound, and you can fulfill market demand. Say nothing… Read More

Copywriting

A couple of months ago, Kane Jamison asked me to present at Content Harmony’s first ever content meet up. I was excited, but wondered what I had to say that would actually help other copywriters. And then I realized that my MFA in creative writing means I bring a different set of tools to the… Read More

Random

It’s been awhile since we’ve checked in on the internal workings of Portent’s Smith Tower headquarters, and I figure it’s about time since we have some pretty exciting news to announce. The very first winner of the Best Section in the Portent Office has been selected and it’s none other than… The Southeast Corner, aka… Read More

PPC

Identifying the Issue with Your PPC Account Have you ever caught yourself staring at data from AdWords, trying to find an explanation to why your conversions dropped x% month over month and y% year over year, and not even knowing where to start searching for an explanation? So many variables come into play on a… Read More

PPC

In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. This is the last post of the six-part blog series in which Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson lay down the knowledge on best practices for achieving PPC success. Follow… Read More