Mike sent me a priceless e-mail from Amazon.com. Here’s the important content: “For the next few days, you can pre-order your copy at a savings of 0% by following the link below.” Then below you see that the price is $6.96, for a savings of $.03. No doubt, this was generated by some of Amazon’s… Read More

The state of Washington is launching a new, $442,000 marketing campaign. They undoubtedly invested a lot of time in coming up with a slogan to rival ‘I love NY’ and ‘What happens here, stays here’. In the end they came up with ‘SayWA’. Yes, SayWA. Huh? After choking on my morning cereal, I decided that… Read More

You don’t have to take it from me. A Forrester Report states that only 13% of web professionals at 89 online companies said they actually measure the ROI of all web site changes. Only half said they measure the ROI of major changes. Half said they don’t measure the ROI of any changes at all,… Read More

The Wall Street Journal posted an article about a search engine optimization company called Traffic Power. It’s a great lesson in how not to hire an SEO firm. Traffic Power’s tactics included ‘doorway pages’, which are pages invisible to users but crawlable by search engines. These pages are packed with keywords, in order to draw… Read More

I am rereading Tested Advertising Methods, by John Caples. It’s the definitive work on effective advertising, copy and ad testing. If you want to learn all there is to know about successful ad campaigns, read this book. It provides great insight into testing ad campaigns and then adjusting those campaigns for the best results. Here’s… Read More

Nothing else needs to be said, really: www.milliondollarhomepage.com (note – as of 1/13 this site appears to be having some bandwidth issues, so you may get a ‘not found’ or ‘site busy’ error when you click the above link)

Google’s been dabbling in print ads, and the results so far haven’t been great, says Business Week. They cite lack of flexible pricing, higher costs and an inability to target ads the same way Google Adwords does online. I think there’s a different reason: Measurement. Folks flock to Adwords pay-per-click ads because they can measure… Read More

Standard & Poor’s is predicting a terrible 2006 for every advertising medium except one: The Internet. It’s not hard to figure out why: With the focus on leaner/meaner/faster everything, the Internet is the logical marketing medium. It’s the only one where organizations can measure their audience, place an ad, and then measure exactly how well… Read More

ZDNet has a new article up that refers to 2005 as the ‘turning point’ for online advertising. I look at 2005 as even more – it was a watershed year for online marketing. Organizations are catching on: In an age when consumers are skipping TV commercials, cancelling newspaper subscriptions and replacing their radios with iPods,… Read More

Sometimes you’re better off saying nothing at all: www.ralesforsenate.org/issues.html The page shows ‘under construction’ for his ‘issues’ page. All jokes about honest politicians aside, couldn’t someone have taken 2 minutes to write a few bullet points? The first rule of good Internet marketing or political speech: If you have nothing to say, say nothing. This… Read More

Tuesday, November 15, I’ll be speaking to the Seattle Chapter of SMPS about blogs as a marketing tool. It’ll be pretty free-form, but I’ll cover what really makes a blog a blog, how to decide if you need one, and a few do’s and don’ts… You can get the full information at http://www.smpsseattle.org/calendar/111505.html

Dang, looks like I missed another chance to coin a trendy term and make millions. Apparently Micropublishing is the new wave in advertising. Apparently that’s using blogs as an advertising vehicle. Put another way, it’s all about buying ads on lots of small, topical sites and then measuring the return. What a shock. Excuse me… Read More

Seth Godin’s latest ebook, Everyone’s an Expert (On Something) states that the current version of the Web “is about enabling people to share meaning.” The many blogs, customer reviews and online bids are ways that individuals share the meaning they attach to something. Hence, he says, everyone’s an expert about something. His upcoming service, Squidoo… Read More

My article on measuring Internet ROI made it into this month’s Direct Magazine. You can read it at this address. But my obsessive compulsive side is coming out, and I can’t help but point out that Direct could improve their production standards a bit. On my trusty Powerbook, running Mozilla FireFox as my web browser,… Read More

What is it about Internet marketing that has everyone so confused? Not the technology – you can always find folks to explain that. Not the creative, either. It’s how you blend them that drives marketers and technologists nuts. It’s a division between the creative and the technical. Some folks see their web sites as big… Read More