Yearly Archives: 2015

User Experience

Let me start with a disclaimer. If you haven’t started blogging, get a plan together and start. Don’t write just for the sake of writing, but create a strategy around what you’ll write about and then actually do it. Publishing content on a regular basis benefits search engine visibility and audience building. If you are… Read More

User Experience

Note: Right now I’m bragging, but Blake has promised he’ll soon write a post about how he actually did this stuff. So you might want to subscribe to the blog using that form on the right over there. See what I just did? Marketing!!! Our resident all-things-user-experience nerd just developed two new site feature/thingamabobs (that’s… Read More

PPC

Alternate Title: How I doubled Return on Ad Spend in branded PPC PPC 101 – Branded Search The first rule of PPC is to make sure you bid on your branded search terms.  Actually, scratch that – the first rule of PPC is that all must bow down to Earth’s future overlords, Google.  Or was… Read More

Analytics

Now is the perfect time to learn more about website tag management. Google Analytics (GA) Academy recently released their new Google Tag Manager (GTM) Fundamentals course, an excellent way for anyone to learn more about using this free tool. Why should I care about understanding tag management? Don’t Care. Take me to the guide, man.… Read More

Random

I periodically fire potential clients. It’s hard to walk away from the revenue. But clients hire Portent for our advice. It’s also hard work with clients who ignore that advice. And that kind of relationship typically starts with more than one of these statements: “I just want to crank out blog posts.” Basically, they’re hoping… Read More

Internet Marketing

Everyone knows I’m normally a diplomatic guy… HAHAHAHAHAHAHA SNIFF AHAHAHAHAHAHA SNORT AHAHAHAHA OK, now that you’ve sputtered coffee all over your keyboard: Somewhere, sometime in our professional lives, we’ve all been confronted with idiocy in the form of lazy ignorance: “Ignorance” = Not knowing the answer. Which happens to all of us. “Lazy” = An… Read More

Project Management

I love meetings. Actually, let me clarify. I like creative, strategy-focused meetings like a brainstorm or its emo cousin, the Post-Mortem. What is a post-mortem? To some, it’s an examination of a corpse in order to determine the correct cause of death. To other more well-adjusted individuals (no offense Dana Scully), it’s a discussion (usually… Read More

Copywriting

Mr. Fisher Goes to Washington Steve Fisher, co-organizer Design & Content Conference recently visited Portent’s office in Seattle (Washington) to exchange brilliant ideas, but also to tell us some horror stories. For example: What do zombies have to do with content and design? Clearly, a lot. We Content Strategists are officially outpaced and outnumbered. So… Read More

Random

This is what I said at Portent’s 20th-anniversary party. It’s also a kind of open letter to my team. For posterity, I’m posting it here. If you really want to know what we’re all about, this is a really good place to start: 20 years ago when I started Portent, as my accountant filled out… Read More

Social Media

My internship at Portent is ending, and although I am sad to be leaving, I want to take the time to reflect on my past three months. Here are some thoughts I want to share for anyone out there looking for an internship in social media or something related to digital advertising. To the best of… Read More

Internet Marketing

TL;DR: I wrote my very first Medium post ever. It’s about marketing leadership and getting to “Why not?” Click here to read it. Any smart organization has the risk-takers and the risk-averse. That’s a very necessary balance. If all you have are risk-takers you’ll probably run aground in a hurry. If everyone on your team… Read More

Design & Development

In an effort to streamline development updates to a code base in a staging or production environment, we have created an auto-deploy setup guide for any GitHub (github.com) repository. What you will need: A server to host your site. Our example is a Ubuntu (Linux) server running either Apache or Nginx and PHP SSH access… Read More

Social Media

Well, it’s been two months into my internship at Portent, and I’m beginning to get a firmer hold on my day-to-day workflow. I get the feeling that my friends still think I spend my entire day surfing Facebook and Twitter… and to be fair, I do spend a good chunk of my time each day on different social… Read More

Random

Today Portent is 20 years old. I forgot until another Portent-ite reminded me. Which is painfully typical. Like a lot of CEOs, I tend to focus on the bad areas for improvement and mistakes instead of the milestones. We’re having our big party next week, but for today I’m going to: 1. Break protocol and… Read More

Internet Marketing

This is the very last post in the digital marketing stack series! Want to start from the beginning? Click here. Part 1: The digital marketing stack Part 2: Infrastructure Part 3: Analytics Part 4: Content Part 5: The channels – paid, earned and owned ← You are here Channels are like pipes. They’re the machinery… Read More