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

Social Media

Sometimes when you’re a social media strategist (or, really, just a human with a smart phone or tablet), you get stuck in a routine that involves the same few social media mobile applications. Whether I’m on the bus or about to go to sleep, I find myself checking my three favorite apps: Facebook (I know,… Read More

Design & Development

In college, when we asked our teachers how to assign a price to our art, they would tell us to charge whatever it was worth to us. This answer was thoroughly infuriating because we wanted a ‘correct’ number. What’s the equation? Is each square inch of canvas (or wood, or paper) worth a certain amount?… Read More

PPC

Google AdWords’ recent announcement on the retirement of exact match in favor of the “close variant” default setting not only came as a bit of surprise to me, but definitely garnered the expected outrage from the PPC community, including petitions, Tweets and blog posts like this one. (Strangely enough, we seem to have avoided the… Read More

Copywriting

Last week I talked about the 20 biggest copywriting disasters I’ve suffered, and how to avoid them. Well, I never actually experienced some of the disasters I talked about — they were so over the top I don’t see how they even happened — but most of them come from painful, personal experience. Here are… Read More

Copywriting

I have a confession: I love TV. When I was a dirty-kneed seven-year-old sitting on our brown carpet, I watched the A-Team and MacGyver and Quantum Leap. I loved the consistency of these shows, how I already had an idea what the premise was going into it, and I loved to be surprised by the… Read More

Project Management

Here at Portent, we work together to do our best to wow the crowd with our many talented individuals and skills. Have you ever listened to a song that’s just one long guitar solo? I have, and while it’s an impressive show of expertise and skill, more often than not there’s a lot left to… Read More

PPC

What is the Google Display Network you might ask? The Google Display Network (GDN) is a collection of websites that partner with Google to display ads on their web pages.  Advertisers can use this channel to find relevant webpages for their message to appear on and increase their marketing reach. Building campaigns on the GDN… Read More

SEO

The first thing to do when you’re starting out your quest to be the master of international search is to go incognito. You can’t just search on Google.com for your product/service and expect to see the same thing that everyone else in the world will. Google personalizes search results according to your location, your search… Read More

PPC

“Persona” is not a PPC word, but it’s certainly been seeing a lot more attention as we shift more and more away from keywords to audiences, intent, behaviors and (not provided). Some marketers keep their personas in their heads, some write them on Post-Its and some have fully written profiles with pictures and graphs. I… Read More

Random

This is a broader, hand-waving bit about Net Neutrality. If you want to see how it might affect small businesses, and what you can do to mitigate the problem, read Josh Patrice’s post. The debate about Net Neutrality isn’t as clear-cut as some would have you think. Here’s how Tim Wu defined it back in… Read More

Project Management

Over the years that I have worked in the project management field, I’ve taken a number of courses, read a number of books, and have seen and utilized a number of tools that have all promised success in leading teams and managing successful projects. And as helpful as they were, I found that the greatest… Read More

Random

Shortest. Career change. Ever. I’m back as CEO of Portent after six months as Chairman and Principal Consultant. I’m damned happy about it, too. Here’s why: We hit our goals. Steve came on board to get our business house in order. Frankly, I suck at that. Steve is great at it. He got it done.… Read More

SEO

So it’s come to this. Our last stand against a tyrannical regime. Our last chance for our voices to be heard before the FCC screws it all up. Yes, the FCC is at it again, and this time, it could cost all us site owners a lot of money. First, a primer Up to now,… Read More

Social Media

It is not exactly breaking news that brand page organic social efforts are being thwarted by Facebook’s algorithm changes, which are making it harder than ever to get your organic social updates seen by your desired audience. But all hope is not lost! There is a strategy that, if implemented correctly, can potentially improve your… Read More

Internet Marketing

The rules of Internet marketing change all the time, and it’s increasingly difficult to keep up. What animal is Google focusing on now? Your site should load in under a millisecond, right? Or should it load before your customers even search for it? As frantic as the world of Internet marketing may seem, the end… Read More