August 2008 Archives
You spent thousands of dollars on a print advertisement. You included a special URL to help you track visitors. Then you showed them your home page? * * * F A I L * * * Advertising is all about the ROI or return on investment. You know the adage, “You got to spend money to make money.” Genius photography costs money. Compelling copy costs money. Eye-catching design costs money. Placing your ad in the perfect magazine costs money and getting onto the good pages costs lots of money. If you are willing to invest all of that time,
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Continue reading A Case for Customized Print Ad Landing Pages
Once again, it’s that time when Google AdWords announces to the world that they will be tweaking their Quality Score algorithm. Rather, as they put it “making an update.” Each time these “updates” occur, I end up on the phone with a Google rep. Each time they’ve done this though, I will give credit where credit is due, they’ve gotten smoother and smarter about the transition. Claiming to be rolling this out to a “very small segment” of advertisers and gathering feedback before unleashing their changes system wide, is a far cry from the day I would login and find
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Continue reading Quality Score Updates Make Me Nervous Too
Web 2.0 was sighted at a local party last evening. Many who attended expressed that he was ‘Not as cool as we remembered.’ Recently I was poking around a few design blogs and noticed something interesting. It seems like the trends and styles that were so popular only a year ago are starting to fall out of favor. Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Wall have all but declared web 2.0’s glossy style dead. Last year, or maybe two years ago, I got a lot of inspiration from this page, as I’m sure many others did. If you’re wondering what I
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Continue reading Does Web 2.0 still look good? Did it ever?
One of the most common misconceptions about a copywriting career is that all you need is good writing skills. This is hardly the case. There are many great writers in the world who would either not enjoy copywriting, or who would not excel at it. But there are definitely certain qualities that predispose people to a successful copywriting career. Some of them might surprise you, so read on! The Four Characteristics of a Good Copywriter Curiosity. Without a surplus of this cat-killing quality, you will neither enjoy nor be successful at copywriting. As an Internet marketing agency copywriter, you may
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Most optimization tips and instructional guides cover the big 3 of PPC search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. But what about all those little guys out there? Have you tried any of those yet? I’ll review some 2nd and 3rd tier interfaces in the coming weeks, how the traffic was, how much it was, the return on investment and the customer service. In the meantime, I’ve put together a short checklist of must do’s before deciding on whether or not take one of those lower tier PPC search engines for a drive. This doesn’t include sites that are content or
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Continue reading Top 11 Tips for Picking a 2nd or 3rd Tier PPC Engine
Two fundamentals of building authority in search engine optimization are adding content and earning links. A terrific way to do both is to add link-worthy and vote-worthy articles. Votes come from social media web sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Digg. The more votes an article receives the more prominently it gets displayed on those sites. Prominence drives visitors and links. As a business, you probably want to appeal to your core audience or prospects. After all, that's where the revenue comes from. Unfortunately it is likely that most of your prospects will never publish content about your company or
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Continue reading How to Build Reputation & Branding with Articles
When I was making some updates to the Portent Blog, I came across a strange problem. Whenever I highlighted the text with my cursor, I would get no visual feedback showing me what I had highlighted. I’ve actually run across this on a couple of other sites, which is why I thought I should share it. My coworker Anna discovered the solution, but since she doesn’t write blog posts I’m going to pretend it was me. Viewing copyblogger.com in Firefox 3 on Windows. If you go to copyblogger.com, using Firefox on the Windows platform, you can see what I’m talking
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Continue reading A Firefox Quirk You May Not Be Aware Of
Every month, TopSEOs ranks internet marketing agencies in the United States. This month, Portent is the #8 agency for both Pay Per Click Marketing and SEO. I’m not much of a bragger, but this seemed worth passing along. You can see the rankings at: http://www.topseos.com/CompRank/index/. Full disclosure: Portent Interactive is a paying advertiser on TopSEOs. However, so are about 2,500 other firms. So I’m still pretty flattered to break into the top 10 rankings.
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Continue reading Top SEOs Names Portent Interactive a Top 10 Firm
If you're like me, you have your Google Reader set up to feed you all the latest, greatest and newest news, tips and tricks in the world of pay-per-click marketing. At the very least you're set up to receive recaps or topical news items. I noticed that when I receive recaps from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, SEO Roundtable and their like, their stories rarely match up with the muck and the ilk I find in my Google Reader. Why? Because respectable news sources like the sites I linked to filter out articles from zealous spam laden proprietors whose
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Continue reading No Deep Secrets In PPC Marketing
