Yearly Archives: 2008

PPC

Back in September of 2007, Yahoo announced the ability to choose Pay Pal as a payment method for adding funds to your search marketing account. Up until now, I hadn’t had a use for the option and continued doing manual refills, automatic deposits or invoicing for clients. But then a client came along (me) that… Read More

Random

[warning – navel gazing ahead] Why the hell am I in marketing? When I started college, my plan was to do ROTC and become a pilot. Then I because a History major and decided to go to law school so I could Save The World. Then I graduated from Law School and realized I’d be… Read More

Random

Next week I’ll be releasing another e-book. This one will cover web analytics for business. It’s going to use the same format as my SEO Copywriting e-book: Short, very high-level, only the essentials, and really cheap. This goes along with the webinar I’m doing with SEMPDX. I’ll also be offering a bunch of free copies… Read More

Analytics

I’ll be presenting a webinar today: Transforming Google Analytics Into Business Analytics When: Tuesday, December 9, 12 PM PST (that’s today) Where: Here, on the web, silly The focus: Making actual, real-life use of Google Analytics to grow your business. No fancy shtuff like advanced segments. I’ll talk about: Data overload and how to avoid… Read More

Internet Marketing

I’m a developer. There, I’ve said it. I’m out of the closet. It’s a little known fact, but I’ve been coding web applications since 1995. I used the very first version of ColdFusion (on 1,000 floppy disks), learned PHP while building Prius Mileage and have even (gasp) muddled through Ruby. While object-oriented programming still makes… Read More

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing isn’t mysterious. It’s the writing, stupid. This is a collection of random thoughts about writing, prompted by someone telling me today that “all you know how to do is write”. They were attempting to reduce my price for an SEO project. You inspired me! Cheers! Writing is what makes marketing tick. And the… Read More

Internet Marketing

So, Sears, you didn’t expect a lot of people on your web site today, the biggest single shopping day of the year? A few minutes later, we saw this: Target is up. So is JCPenney, Costco, Walmart, etc.. Too bad for Sears…

Random

SEO widows, you know who you are: Your spouse/significant other comes home with a twinkle in their eye because they just “fixed a major spider trap” or “discovered a new component of the Google TrustRank algorithm”. Then they leave for a week to go to some conference, and you get to hear about their drunken… Read More

Internet Marketing

Just wrapped up my Conversational Marketing Summit presentation titled ‘why does most marketing suck?’. In it, I review: A brief history of marketing, as told by beer. Why and how you should select, rather than accumulate, customers. How you can better listen to your audience. The meaning of life. At least as a marketer. I… Read More

Random

I’m presenting at a webinar tomorrow: The Conversational Marketing Summit. My presentation is entitled “Why Does Most Marketing Suck?“ A good time will be had by all. I’m on at 4 PM PST tomorrow, 11/24 (Monday). You can sign up here

Random

The Elite Retreat is almost totally booked. With speakers like Jeremy Schoemaker, Neil Patel and Gary Vaynerchuk, you’ll want to be there. Just FYI: They embargo blogging about the details of the event (from what I understand) so if you’re hoping I’m going to write lots of cool stuff to teach you everything, you’re out… Read More

Internet Marketing

Note: The following story is what we call character development. Feel free to skip to ‘Lessons in Internet Marketing’ if you don’t like hearing about people who did even dumber things than you did as a kid. When I was 14 or so, I jumped off the roof of my house. Holding a sheet over… Read More

Copywriting

SEO still lives and dies based on good copywriting. If you’re going to move up in the rankings and stay there, you have to know how to write customer- and search engine-friendly content. But you’re a writer. You shouldn’t have to learn about SEO, keyword mining, pagerank and the robots meta tag. You just want… Read More

PPC

If there’s one amazing thing about Google Analytics, it’s that Google’s ability to improve it is never dormant. At their Mountain View compound, they’re always looking for a way to constantly better their products. Here at Portent, we have a similar resolve – except that ours is to exploit Google’s tools to achieve our internet… Read More

SEO

At least, take everything they say with a grain of salt. Today, they came out with their ‘SEO Starter Guide‘. I downloaded it and took a quick look. And I’ve finally lost patience. So here I go on a Graywolf-style rant: Inconsistencies in the SEO Guide: Dynamic URLs On page 6 they say “Improve the… Read More