The PIBlog: Internet Marketing Views and Tips
Full disclosure: I am not a designer. I cannot select color palettes. My favorite textures involve brushed steel. Whenever I walk by, our design team seems either out for coffee or in a meeting. That said, even I can recognize colossal web design blunders. It's amazing how the perfectly wrong photo will rip the eyes out of your sockets and whimper them off from a web page's correct eye-tracking path. Design is subjective. You see the world like no one else. What seems like a perfectly comforting image to you and me might creep-out an animal rights activist or a
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Continue reading Have You Been A/B Tested Recently?
Who says on-the-job research can’t be fun - and heavily caffeinated? Last week, Portent Interactive took a field trip to the Seattle headquarters of what is quickly becoming our tastiest new client: Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea Company. In the Name of Research A field trip seemed like the logical thing to do - even the biggest coffee junkies among us admitted that drinking four cups of Folgers a day did not a coffee-expert make. And getting to know our clients - their passions, their work ethic, their product - is a huge perk of the job. So who were
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Continue reading Portent Interactive Visits Zoka Coffee
Todd Mintz interviewed me for Search Engine Journal. If you’re looking for a chance to embarrass me at the next internet marketing conference, this interview has lots of good material: Read the interview here. You can follow Todd Mintz on Twitter at ToddMintz. Recommended reading! Also, best title award goes to @AlanBleiweiss:
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Continue reading Interview on Search Engine Journal
It appears that Google’s new infrastructure, code named Google Caffeine, is rolling-out live to data centers. Why is this important? Expect to see ranking changes. Don’t freak-out. We’re not talking 2012 or Alderaan upheaval here. That said, expect disturbances in the force. While most well and legitimately optimized websites should remain unscathed, it’s likely that others could experience some organic ranking unpleasantness. What is Caffeine? Caffeine is an infrastructure change. Think of it like upgrading from XP to Vista or from Vista to Windows 7 or from Snow Leopard to Windows 7. Google seems to make infrastructure changes every three
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Continue reading Google Caffeine - Don't Let It Keep You Awake at Night
In January of 1995, I took my one credit card, purchased a Pentium 75 PC (running the latest version of Windows 3.0) and a business license, and launched The Written Word, Inc. That company is now named Portent Interactive. The date on that first business license is January 7, 1995. So, as of tomorrow, we’ve been around for 15 years. For perspective, when I started my company: There was no such thing as wifi; My 2800 baud modem was state of the art; Google and Yahoo! didn’t exist; Actually, neither did Firefox, Blackberry or cell phones that weighed less than
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Continue reading 15 Years
Product Extension Ads isn’t the newest tool on the block from Google AdWords, but it most certainly is pretty cool. Especially if you have a Google Base Merchant Center account with product feed. The Help Center stuff at Google is a wall of explanatory text, but I still found myself emailing the reps asking for the nittiest and the grittiest of details, in particular, how these ads are tracked, attribution and how items are chosen. So first of all, these are the “plus box ads” that were buzzed about earlier this year in beta. The feature is available on a
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Continue reading How to: Set up and Track Product Extension Ads in Google AdWords
I’m going to tell you a secret that people in social media marketing and social media optimization don’t like to talk about. Fame begets fame. If you’re a celebrity or popular brand then social media will be particularly easy for you. For those of us who are celebrities only in our own minds, you and I will have to work a bit harder to succeed with all this social media stuff. That’s okay. Social media marketing is eminently doable. You just have to smash a few popular preconceptions then roll-up your sleeves. Social media is not new. Facebook and
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Continue reading Spin Your Social Media Marketing Flywheel
A Horror Story by Evan Fishkin Recently, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about PubCon, (which is one fantastic search marketing conference!), but just one keeps repeating: “Why Evan, would you let Matt Cutts shave your ‘Curls of Righteousness’?” (witness the horror) For the hungry masses, yearning for answers to questions so long contemplated, the answer is simple....and here. Matts Cutts meets Evan Fishkin Once upon a time, on a social media website far, far away, there tweeted two nerds. One came from spam-kicking country and could see spam coming a mile away. He protected Googlers of the great
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Continue reading I Went To Pubcon 2009 And All I Got Was This Lousy Matt Cutts
Check out Portent Interactive’s own Evan Fishkin at PubCon 2009 in Las Vegas, NV. Evan’s head was shaved by Google’s Matt Cutts due to a lost bet. Evan bet Matt that no one would submit a spam site to Google’s interactive site review. Clearly, someone did. “You can take my hair, but you can never take my link juice!”
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Continue reading Evan Fishkin's PubCon 2009 Head Shaving by Matt Cutts
While this is a true story, it took me awhile to stop being creeped out and make the connection to how this could apply to internet marketing. Once while home was a mere four blocks from a friend’s house (granted I crossed a major avenue in which prostitution is a known issue, but 35 blocks south) I was marketed to offline by a young man in a red car. The young man followed me off the major road onto a side street and offered me a ride. I of course declined, since I was only 200 feet from my home,
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Continue reading Don't Market to Me like I'm a Prostitute
