April 2008 Archives
The day didn’t grow darker, exactly. But the light shifted in a way that was almost imperceptible, the day that Mediocrity rode into town. It rode a limping horse with a second-hand saddle on which it balanced precariously. Behind it rode its army: Whining, Ambivalence, and Lame Excuses. Taking a deep swig from its flask of Lethargy, Mediocre started to spit then decided it didn’t have the energy. “Well, well, what do we have here?” Mediocre said, with a mocking eye. “If it isn’t Creativity and it’s earnest band of overachievers.” He took in our shiny uniforms, our gleaming
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Continue reading Creativity Versus Mediocrity: A Country Western Parable
Twitter is a Popular Group Chat Client When Twitter came on the scene 2006 I was an early adopter. Chatting IRC style with the addition of subscribers and an archive was most compelling to me. I was quick to abandon it too. Back then you may as well have shouted, "Hello!," into a desert canyon, but without the comforting echo. Twitter reached a tipping-point (and I began using it again) during the 2007 SXSW conference when attendees used the tool to chat during sessions and figure-out which bar to convene in. At the same time conference bloggers lit the Internet
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Continue reading Twitter Secrets Revealed
Once in awhile you get a client who’s site offers a lot of little specific products that is great for niche keywords but low traffic. Those keywords are great when they convert, but the real traffic is in the high competitive keywords that bring the visitors to the site. These visitors that search by the broad terms most of the time don’t actually know what they are looking for yet. It’s a “I’ll know it when I see it” type of shopping mentality. So, the question is: how do you get the most out of those big terms you have
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Continue reading Make the Most of High Traffic Keywords
Recently I was looking for a way to make some cool rusted metal text in Photoshop, and after searching through a few tutorials on Google I decided that all of them were garbage. So I messed around for a while and created my own.
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Continue reading Create Rusty Metal Text in Photoshop: Tutorial
Lists and grouping are terrific ways to simplify or remember complex stuff. So today I am sharing how I categorize audience development for Internet websites. Before I start, however, I want to emphasize a point. Management guru Peter Drucker declared, "The purpose of business is to create a customer." Success in business depends on creating positive ROI; it requires profit. Everything below, no matter how counterintuitive, are pieces of a puzzle...a Rube Goldberg machine that delivers customers to your doorstop. Ever website should cultivate three audiences: The Sales/Conversion Audience Search Engines as an Audience The Social Media/Conversation Audience ONE: The
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Continue reading Three Audiences Every Website Should Cultivate
PPC, at times, can feel a bit like going to Vegas and pumping nickels into the slot machines. Except imagine the nickels are dollars, or sometimes several dollars. Ouch! Pretty soon you’ve squandered your dinner money, and the forgiving 7-7-7 has eluded your grasp all night. Fortunately, there’s a way to hedge your bets in Pay-Per-Click Marketing. A way to avoid the slot machines and move your money over to the poker tables, so to speak – where at least you can influence whether you win or lose. You can’t make people click your ads and you can’t make
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Continue reading Hedging Your PPC Bets: Geo-Targeting for Revenue
But give the actual interface a star and a half. (On a scale of four stars, Google being four.) Almost every time I call MSN adCenter support for my various issues, be it basic account editing, billing, ad approval, keyword status or a general “what just happened?!”, I get top notch support and “I’m sorries”. While I find the helpful, apologetic and even sometimes even humorous answers great, I just wish I didn’t have to call them so much. Here is a short list of fun items that I have had to call about and have the support specialist come
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Continue reading Give MSN adCenter Support Four Stars
When it comes to marketing, it’s always peanut butter and jelly time. No, this isn’t some lame joke about how lunchtime is the best part of an internet marketing gig, nor is it some vaguely incestuous reference to the necessary blend between technology and creative. Actually, this is a story about my fourth grade teacher, who in between Newberry classics and ancient Greece, gave me my most valuable internet marketing lesson to date. The infamous peanut butter and jelly lesson goes something like this, and I’m sure many of you can relate: Her: “Tell me step by step how
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Continue reading When it comes to marketing, it’s always peanut butter and jelly time
It Isn’t Not really. I mean sure, I could come up with some long winded post using the ball as a metaphor for links and making some contrived puns about bouncing. But it isn’t really anything at all like internet marketing. But that won’t keep me from going on and on about it on this blog. The Rundown: Last week some of the members of the Portent team came to the realization that none of us had played Four Square (heretofore known as 4sq) since grade school. This was clearly unacceptable, and had to be remedied immediately. Starting small,
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Continue reading 14 Ways Internet Marketing Is Like Four Square
Per my post last week regarding Solving the (not set) in Google Analytics and Yahoo, we’ll continue this week bridging the gap between MSN AdCenter and Google Analytics. I did ask a MSN AdCenter representative once how come my two biggest keywords (in impressions, spend and clicks) didn’t register at all in Google Analytics, but yet I can see several of the keywords in other ad groups just fine. I was informed that MSN cannot be responsible (or apparently helpful) for anything involving 3rd party software or programs. And if I wanted transparency into my AdCenter accounts I should use
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Continue reading How to Make MSN AdCenter Work with Google Analytics
The title of this post is Search Engine Marketing Does Not Affect Your Business Model. If I went into a search marketing conference and proclaimed that Search Engine Marketing Does Not Affect Your Business Model I imagine that the conference organizers, the speakers and quite a few attendees would want to tar and feather me then run me out of town on a rail. I don’t care and I’ll say it again, Search Engine Marketing Does Not Affect Your Business Model. Search Engine Marketing Should Emulate Your Business Model. What do I mean by Search Engine Marketing Should Emulate Your
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Continue reading Search Engine Marketing Does Not Affect Your Business Model
Sometimes a rose is just a rose.* In other words, a landing page does not have to be a ship, a sandpiper, or a head of arugula in order for your audience to listen to you-really! In fact, there are many other lonely literary devices out there that just might give your internet marketing an unexpected boost. Witness A List Apart’s arresting use of allegory in this article on Findability. I never met a metaphor that made me want to kneel down and Eskimo kiss an internet marketing discipline the way this article did. Similarly, at Christmas this year,
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SEO can be confusing, especially for managers and others who must keep track of optimization efforts but do not do the actual work themselves. The SEO Matrix is a simple way to think about search engine optimization. In order to view the content on this page, you will need the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Click here to download it. //
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Continue reading The SEO Matrix is Calling You
Today’s tip comes from two sources: Alex L. Cohen and PPC Hero, with their mystery solving and publicly sharing their solution on how to import data and increasing compatibility between Yahoo PPC and Google Analytics. As with any search engine that isn’t Google, you have to expect a certain amount of disparity in reporting data imported into Google Analytics since the two were not created by the same company, nor made to fit together the way that AdWords and GA do. However, there is a workaround that will allow you to gather more data from your Yahoo paid search campaigns
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Continue reading Solving the (not set) in Google Analytics
In order to view the content on this page, you will need the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Click here to download it. // Today I’m going to show you how to do something a little more fun than usual. We’re going to be making a simple particle system in Flash CS3. Example Files fun_with_particles.zip Subscribe to my RSS feed on Veoh
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Continue reading Actionscript 3 Particles Tutorial
Hello blog readers. My name is Stacy Conner. I’m a Senior Marketer here at Portent Interactive and my focus is on developing marketing strategies for our clients. Marketing strategy is a lot of fun! I thought it might be helpful to start a beginning level or 101 series on general marketing principals and Internet marketing. Let me know what you think! Goals – Where Do I Start? The first step in starting a new marketing campaign, a new marketing job, or a new marketing relationship with an Agency, is understanding and evaluating your goals. First off, are goals preset for
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Continue reading Marketing 101 – From the Beginning
Yes, Gen Y is young, driven, spoiled, busy. But a slew of recent advertisements neglect to notice that we are also well-educated, scarily mature, and shrewd as hell. In other words, we know when we’re being talked down to. And now we are talking back with a message for you: When it comes to banking and savings accounts (and any other important issue), Gen Y doesn’t just want to have fun. When it comes to serious issues, we want to be treated seriously, shown the value, and supplied with all the facts. So please, lay off the bright colors and
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Over the last few months, Comscore has reported declining paid search clicks on Google.com. Hand-wringing pundits have therefore wrung their hands mightily, pointing to this as a sign that the End Is Upon Us. We found out that the clicks weren’t actually gone. They were just lost for a bit. Portent Interactive has conducted exhaustive research and discovered that Google’s Adwords click traffic has actually increased month over month for the last six months. The entire kerfuffle is due to a phenomenon known to anyone who does laundry and wonders where those odd socks end up. After speaking with an
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Continue reading Portent Finds Google's Missing 100,000,000 Adwords Clicks
