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

We write about a lot of fancy stuff on the Portent blog, such as server log analysis, advanced keyword research, and Tom Cruise. I want to address something that doesn’t have to be fancy: site speed. We’ve written two posts on how we configured Portent’s site: one is pretty advanced and the other is blindingly… Read More

Internet Marketing

Conventional wisdom dictates that working in teams is often the best way to accomplish a task. Many hands make light work, a bundle of sticks cannot be broken, etc. Particularly with large, complex projects, there is just no way one person can accomplish everything on their own. We can’t possibly know everything, or be experts… Read More

SEO

It seems like every other day, some SEO technique that used to be accepted is now being devalued or, even worse, penalized. (Remember when meta keywords and nofollow tags were totally legit?  Ah, the good old days…)  And now Google is threatening to crack down on two staples of the SEO stable: anchor text and… Read More

SEO

Even if you have zero interest in programming or SEO, I’m convinced you’re going to be glad you decided to read this blog post. And to make it a total no-brainer for you, I’m offering a 100% money back guarantee.  Sound good?  Keep reading. Hello, I’m David and I’m a wanna-be geek Sometime around Y2K,… Read More

Copywriting

So you’ve realized the benefits of having a kick-ass blog. Now what are you going to say on that blog? You could go the route of taking all that carefully-prepared corporate branding, and using your blog to put out press releases about things that you want your customers to care about (but really only matter… Read More

Design & Development

As you may already know, we’re a little obsessed with page load speed. We wanted our home page to load in under 1 second, and we were close. But close isn’t good enough. So, with some guidance from Ian, I started out on my quest for sub 1 second page load times. The journey took… Read More

Internet Marketing

Updated 06.04.13: Added lots more stuff to the presentation. More weird goodness! The University of Washington Web Council invited me to talk about search and internet marketing yesterday. This was my presentation. It steals liberally from lots of great marketers, like Seth Godin, David Ogilvy and John Caples. Oh, and Gary Gygax. I gotta give… Read More

If you have ever re-organized an inherited AdWords account to get in line with best practices by moving keywords into new campaigns and creating new ad copy, you may have noticed how you don’t immediately get the results you were expecting. In fact, you may have concluded that all of the work just made your… Read More

Analytics

I’ve talked about data visualization a few times now. Every time, I change the presentation, adding stuff, tweaking it, etc. This is the latest version. It’s not annotated (sorry) but it’s pretty self-explanatory. Have a look: There’s also a growing link bundle here that has all the stuff I reference. Oh, and hey: If you… Read More

PPC

Twitter took a large leap forward with their advertising platform Wednesday morning by introducing a new advanced interface that allows for keyword targeting. Twitter sent out a mass email to existing Twitter Ads users stating: “You can reach users at the right time and in the right context based on keywords in their Tweets and… Read More

PPC

You might not be. I was poking around in Google Shopping results the other day and found that there are some merchants who have partnered with major brands that are essentially “piggy backing” off their name through the Google Shopping Feed. At first, I thought NewEgg was being just really clever/sneaky by changing their store… Read More

Great marketing should be mouthwatering, scrumptious, and satisfying. Don’t you want customers pining for your next email, devouring every bit of information, and anxiously awaiting more? We don’t always think about marketing in terms of a delicious meal, but restaurants and marketers ultimately have the same goals. Give customers a taste of something yummy, satisfy… Read More

PPC

A study of 27 small business accounts Professionals who’ve spent any time in paid search – at an agency or in-house – can tell you how much of a big deal Quality Score (QS) is to us in the industry. We base our strategies on it. We lie awake at night wondering how to improve… Read More

  State of App Search: Needle in a Haystack Have you ever tried to meet someone at Grand Central Station or some other incredibly crowded venue? It sounds so doable and yet it is so not. There are too many people, too many distractions and too much stuff in the way. App (tablet and phone… Read More

In the summer of 2012, the Rolling Stones celebrated the 50th anniversary of their first gig at the Marquee Club in London. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the original bad boys of rock and roll have endured for a half century despite drug and alcohol problems, several changes to the band’s line-up, and occasional rumors… Read More