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

Design & Development

When developing responsive websites, you will inevitably encounter designs that require some kind of HTML reordering. Often this arbitrary reordering can be achieved through clever CSS tricks, but if that is not possible or practical, you may end up having to do some kind of javascript to sniff for browser widths. Enter Intention.js. Intention.js is… Read More

SEO

There are LOTS of people out there that don’t understand what SEO is and how you do it. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was told to go do my “SEO magic” by a client. These same people are hungry to see results to make sure that you are actually doing… Read More

PPC

Running paid search campaigns takes time, money and experience that many small businesses don’t have. They may have heard of PPC before and have thought about whether it can help their business, but who has the time or knowhow to run an AdWords or Bing Ads campaign? AdWords Express is Google’s automated PPC solution for… Read More

Internet Marketing

A writer at a book fair is a lot like a teenaged girl loose on the Internet with her mom’s credit card. The wonder! The excitement! The expense! When that writer is also a marketer, you can be sure she’ll be looking at the displays! The giveaways! The opportunities to build brand awareness! This is… Read More

Here’s a link to the segmentation deck: Portent Webinar: Next-Level Segmentation from Ian Lurie And the link bundle mentioned throughout Michael’s presentation today: http://portent.co/nl-segments Check back soon for video!

PPC

Ok ok, now that I’ve gotten all the link bait title out of the way, let’s get down to actual business. Now, I love my coworkers but they also set pretty high bar. When I inherited a major cosmetics account from my colleague Michael Weigand, I knew I had my work cut out for me,… Read More

Design & Development

Information Space has a conceptual mirror... Physical Space Having recently worked my butt off to earn a Master of Architecture, I often come across those who are curious about my decision to channel my design education into the wonderful world of the interwebs. Basically, I'm regularly asked what capital-A Architecture actually is– as in, physical… Read More

Internet Marketing

While television continues to have its strong hold on ad dollars, digital is a rapidly growing category and there are no signs of it slowing down. Take for instance Google’s $3.2 billion cash acquisition of Nest, with many reports suggesting it’s a play to better target ads in the home. These investments are increasingly putting… Read More

PPC

For the past few months, we at Portent have been trying out Google AdWords’ new Shopping Campaigns format for a couple of our clients. We had been eager to try it out and finally got the opportunity last November when one of our clients was accepted into the beta program. After 2 and half months,… Read More

Analytics

If you’re going to grow a marketing campaign beyond last-click converters, you have to know how to attribute value to channels that support conversion in other ways. A classic example: You’re running a social media campaign. Your client wants to turn it off, because they see zero conversions. But you know social media supports other… Read More

SEO

The SEO community and the web development community can often be at odds. One thing they’ll both agree on, however, is the importance of performance. The SEO’s favorite site speed tool is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which I’ve written about before. We’ve all seen this among the suggestions: CSS sprites. One tactic to improve site speed… Read More

Social Media

No matter where you looked in 2013, there was always someone within a few feet of you with his or her arm outstretched, snapping a photo or shooting a video. In fact, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2013 was “selfie.” Yes, that’s actually a thing. On the bright side, at least it wasn’t… Read More

SEO

If you haven’t already, I’d love it if you would read Matt Cutts’s The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO post to understand the context of my post. “Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your… Read More

Internet Marketing

The greatest thing about email marketing is how direct the communication is. Email is the closest you can get to dating your customers. Creepy? Maybe a little. Intrusive? Not if you do it right. Why bother with email? (Reasons to take the leap) People sign up for emails because they want the inside scoop. They… Read More

Design & Development

The Setup Front End Development is a fairly new concept. Back when “Webmaster” was an actual job title there was no real “development” on the front end. Websites were structured using tables, CHSS and SSP were being joined together to make what eventually would be CSS. The web was still primarily a place for documents,… Read More