Analytics

You heard me right. Last Click Attribution (LCA) is dead. This isn’t one of those hoaxes like with Andy Kaufman or SEO. LCA was a doomed model for a number of reasons. But for me, it no longer applies to the world we live in now. And it barely applied before. LCA will only stay… Read More

Internet Marketing

Marketers have always had a difficult time justifying their budgets. My grandfather was a Mad Man – working in advertising and marketing from the 60s to the 80s for a series of companies. (He eventually wound up a Sr. VP of Marketing at Doskocil Foods moving armies of pepperoni.) I remember being a wee lass… Read More

Internet Marketing

I went a little nuts here. I started writing a short ‘how-to’ post on content audits. Then it turned into a longer post on content strategy. Then it became a mini-infographic. It ended up being a top-to-bottom guide on how we do content strategies at Portent. We put it into a custom format so it’s… Read More

Internet Marketing

We are over halfway through 2013, so we thought we’d glance back at some of our top Portent blog posts of the year (so far).  This was no easy selection — we are very fortunate to have a plethora of great content to choose from. The following posts were chosen based on social impact, traffic… 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

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

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

Internet Marketing

Marketing wasn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game. Your competitor bought a TV commercial, you bought a TV commercial. They bought radio time, you bought radio time. Even if they bought every available second of radio time on one station, you could buy time on another, or go to a completely different medium. That promoted… Read More

Internet Marketing

We’ve all seen it happen. An employee is doing killer work, initiating great ideas, and displaying a willingness to take on larger projects. The employee is quickly promoted to a manager position. But while this top employee has excelled at the tactical parts of the job, he or she has never managed a team before.… Read More

SEO

Ever had a massive, life-changing epiphany? Me neither. However, I’ve slowly reached the conclusion that we’re doing SEO all wrong. Not in the do-real-marketing sense, or the we-need-to-change-the-name sense. More in the wow-did-we-ever-screw-the-pooch-this-time sense. After 17+ years of beating my head against walls like IT departments, branding teams and disbelieving CFOs, I’ve figured out why:… Read More

Copywriting

When he’s not streaking through the Danger Zone on an Impossible Mission, the world’s biggest movie star (yes, still arguably) veers Far and Away from his core competency, occasionally taking a mega-risk with his Eyes Wide Shut. Corniness of that opening sentence aside, Tom Cruise makes for a compelling model of how to run a… Read More

Internet Marketing

We all know that the Super Bowl is the Super Bowl of, well, Super Bowls.  It’s even MORE super for mega-brands with colossal marketing budgets, fancy Hollywood contacts and burping frogs.  But not everyone is a Coke… Or even a Pepsi.  Consequently, if you’re a mid-sized business looking to maximize your advertising dollars this Sunday,… Read More

SEO

Short version of this article: If you’ve been penalized for unnatural links by Google, either manually or under Penguin, you need to cut deep or you won’t recover. Now, the long version, with examples: Here’s a joke I learned in hebrew school, an unmentionable number of decades ago: Three guys are walking down the sidewalk.… Read More

Internet Marketing

This is the somewhat annotated version of a talk I gave at this fantastic incubator here in Seattle called SURF. My main point: Marketing isn’t about interruption, trickery, SEO spam, etc. Marketing is about communicating true value and significance to your audience. Period. Anything else is just annoying. A brief expository interlude In 1992, I… Read More

Internet Marketing

You can learn to manage your time, or you can end each day curled up in a ball under your desk. At least, those were my choices. I never found a pre-conceived time management system that worked for me as an internet marketer. GTD, Pomodoro, etc. all have great elements but couldn’t quite fit the… Read More