January 31, 2007 by ian
There's an online directory (not one of the major players) that keeps contacting me wanting me to buy advertising. They literally call and e-mail every week. Here's why I'll never work with them: Honesty is Such A Lonely Word. In their pamphlet, they claim “2 million+ pages indexed at Googleâ€. My search only shows 148,000, of which only 457 are considered unique by Google. I don't know if that's ignorance on their part or outright fraud, but man, how do you get from 457 to 2 million? Apologies to Billy Joel. Links? SEO? Wha?... They also claim that their…
Continue Reading Internet Marketing Smackdown: Name Withheld »
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January 30, 2007 by ian
Usually I avoid books with BS in the title, lots of all caps print, and a plethora of exclamation points. But Dan Kennedy's book with the very long title: “No B.S. Direct Marketing: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-direct Marketing Businesses (No B.S.)†Is simply awesome. It's got advice from various professionals/proteges of the author. There's a lot of less-than-humble boasting about what they all get paid, etc., but if you get past the chest-thumping, there is some great, practical advice, as well as some nifty creative ideas. And the concepts…
Continue Reading Book: No BS Direct Marketing »
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January 29, 2007 by ian
I talked a client out of hiring us for two projects today. Before you wonder if I've cracked, here's why: Their site isn't up to standards as far as design and usability. And it's coded in such a way that we can't work around usability issues with landing pages. Investing $30,000 in a marketing campaign, only to have folks come to the site and then leave, isn't worth it. If you have doubts about your site's ability to convert leads or sales, check that, first. Your site is the foundation of your internet marketing campaign. Spending to attract visitors…
Continue Reading When NOT to Spend »
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January 27, 2007 by ian
Veoh.com is a client of ours - they run an online video network. Don't think YouTube, think NBC. We've been working with them on search engine optimization, bragging modestly. They've made a huge collection of changes to their site infrastructure, started blogging, and worked hard on high quality content to which folks want to link. The results are just starting to come in: I am immensely proud of the result, and of their sticking with the ethical, long-term approach. You don't get these kinds of results by tricking the search engines. You get them by building great content and…
Continue Reading An SEO Case Study »
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January 26, 2007 by ian
Yahoo has announced they'll be changing the way they rank paid ads: Simply bidding the most won't get you the top spot for their pay per click ads any more. Google Adwords have been ranked this way for some time. What's it mean? The quality of your ad, and of your landing page, is now as important as the bid amount. A higher-quality ad will get a higher clickthru percentage and move up in the rankings, regardless of bid amount. So just 'throwing together a few PPC ads' won't do the trick any more. You need to Sound Smart,…
Continue Reading Yahoo Search Marketing: The Conversation Widens »
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January 26, 2007 by ian
Matt Cutts has a great post about someone he caught using unethical but 'undetectable' search engine optimization techniques. The short version: If your search marketing firm/consultant mentions using 'doorway pages' or something like that to help you move up in the rankings, run. If they won't tell you what they're doing, run faster. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/undetectable-spam/ Technorati Tags: Google, search engine optimization, seo…
Continue Reading Beware SEO Snake Oil »
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January 23, 2007 by ian
Ever wonder if you could predict, with any accuracy at all, when you'll hit diminishing returns on an advertising buy? It's pretty important, yet almost impossible to figure out, or so you'd think. It's not actually all that hard, if you follow the square root rule. I'm not even going to try to explain it here though. Kevin Hillstrom has a far better explanation of the Square Root Rule than I ever will. The important thing to note is that yes, all numbers can lie. If your marketing is totally ineffective, or if you lack baseline, historical data, chances…
Continue Reading The Square Root Rule »
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January 22, 2007 by ian
I talk a lot about search marketing and search engine optimization, and how important they are as lead generators. That's true. But there are other vehicles, too, and you can't ignore them. Here's a quick example: A client of ours was using pay per click to promote a business opportunity. We did everything right: Highly focused phrases, tested landing pages, etc.. But we just couldn't seem to crack a ceiling of about 20-30 leads per day. So, we purchased banner ads on relevant industry association sites. Bingo! Leads immediately jumped. Just wanted to share that, so no one accuses…
Continue Reading It's Not Just About Search »
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January 20, 2007 by ian
I've gotten great comments since I put my book online. One of the best was: “As I continue reading, I am hoping for insight on how to respectfully convince the ego-driven website owners to convert to a conversation-based approach. Can it even be done?†They wrote that to me after reading about how to dress appropriately. The key to dressing appropriately is designing a site for your audience, not for you. The former is great design. The latter is ego-driven design. Ego-driven design leads to sites that may be 'cool', but definitely aren't 'appropriate'. So, how do you avoid…
Continue Reading Ego-Driven Design »
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January 19, 2007 by ian
Thanks everyone for the great input regarding my book, which is now online for free, in HTML. Some changes, and a bit of explanation: Some folks noticed some missing “f'sâ€. Two-word explanation: Regular Expressions. For those who don't know what a regular expression is, consider it a nuclear search and replace. Used correctly, it's a fantastic tool for doing broad, sweeping search-and-replace, like 'replace all instances of <font> with anything after it with <P>'. It's also a fantastic tool for doing broad, sweeping destruction to your documents. Which is what I did, thereby replacing hundreds of instances of the…
Continue Reading My Book, for Free, Day 2 »
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January 18, 2007 by ian
I've just taken a deep breath and published Conversation Marketing online, in HTML, for free. You don't have to register or do anything else - you can just read it. Why on earth would I do that? Three reasons: First: I'd like to get more input. There's a comment form at the bottom of each page. You can submit comments to me using that form, or just e-mail me. Second: I'd like this to grow. I have lots of ideas and ways I'd like to flesh out the concepts in my book. I can write a new book, going…
Continue Reading My Book, for Free, Online »
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January 18, 2007 by ian
I wrote this entry on our company wiki, and thought I'd share it here, too: Whether they know it or not, none of our clients come to us for 'just a web site'. We are an internet marketing agency. That means we're helping every client ring the cash register more efficiently and more often using the internet. So everything we do is relevant to 99% of our clients. Please don't ever consider any project a 'web site design' or 'development'. If we're designing a site, we're designing it so that folks will buy more, or sign up more often,…
Continue Reading No One's 'Just a Web Site' »
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January 16, 2007 by ian
When I saw that SearchMe launched Wikiseek, their new search engine, I was pretty excited. But, as with all new things, it's a mixed bag: The Good It's a beautiful, clean interface. As you start to type in search terms, Wikiseek automatically shows you possible categories: And it restricts searches to content that's in wikipedia. The Bad When you start typing a search term, Wikiseek immediately removes your search results from any previous search from the page. You can click to return to a previous search, but for me at least it seems like a jumpy interface. At least…
Continue Reading WikiSeek Search Engine: First Impressions »
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January 15, 2007 by ian
I had a change of opinion today. I used to say you can try a little internet marketing, then expand it. That's great, but it doesn't work for a few of the areas that fall under the umbrella of internet marketing: Search Engine Optimization. Doing 'a little SEO' to see what happens is like starting heart surgery then seeing if you feel better. Design. Doing 'a little design' is like painting your front door and then waiting a year to paint the rest. By the time you finish, the door will have faded, and nothing will match. Analytics. Doing…
Continue Reading Halfway Doesn't Work »
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January 14, 2007 by ian
In the last four days, I've seen two instances where someone duplicated content from one of my sites. The first instance was so far beyond the pale that it was clearly grounds for a lawsuit. The second instance was more subtle. I have an RSS feed from my site. It's there with the expectation that folks can use it to subscribe to my site using their newsreaders. But in this case, someone took the RSS feed and used software to publish that feed directly to their web page, with no attribution at all. So they had a page on…
Continue Reading How Much Copying is OK? »
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January 13, 2007 by ian
My firm just re-launched ColdHeat's web site. The team did an amazing job. But the most remarkable thing about the site is a bunch of little things that make it a pleasure to use (I can brag like this because I had almost nothing to do with the new design). My favorite example. Here's the shopping cart icon: And here it is if you've added something to your cart: Little things can make a big difference. The folks on the design and implementation team didn't have to add the glowing icon to indicate something's in your cart. No one…
Continue Reading Usability Is About The Details »
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January 12, 2007 by ian
Campaign Monitor has a post about Microsoft's Outlook 2007 implementation of HTML e-mail. It's not good. Exactly what genius decided to yank standardized HTML support and take a 5-year step backwards?! I won't waste time in a tirade. If you're an e-mail marketer, here's what you'll need to consider: Avoid multiple column layouts: Outlook 2007 won't support a lot of the CSS layout tools you might use to properly format a two- or three-column e-mail layout. Stick with one column. Don't use background colors or background images, because Outlook 2007 either won't support them or will do so without…
Continue Reading What Are They Thinking? »
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January 12, 2007 by ian
Just a quick note for those of you whose palms sweat when your search ranking changes: Google is updating pagerank system-wide (I think) right now. They started earlier this week. So no, you're not going nuts if you think your ranking has yo-yoed a bit. Technorati Tags: Google…
Continue Reading Google PageRank Update »
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January 10, 2007 by ian
Imitation without permission is not the sincerest form of flattery. It makes me very, very angry. An internet marketing company called Vodazon in Barcelona apparently decided that Portent's design was just great. They also liked our content, our portfolio, our Google certification, our news and just about everything else. So rather than waste time and effort on silly things like, oh, original work, they ripped off our entire site. All of it. Their site is at http://www.vodazon.com Compare it to my company at http://www.portentinteractive.com And just in case they already took it down (I've already contacted them), here's a…
Continue Reading Imitation Sucks »
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January 10, 2007 by ian
I'm prepping for my talk tonight at the SDMA (the Seattle Direct Marketing Association) and realized it's been a long time since I revisited the fundamentals of Conversation Marketing. The rules are simple: Know Your Goals If you don't know what 'success' is, it's hard to achieve it. Make sure you know what action(s) you want your online audience to take: A purchase, a download, a registration, or maybe just a minimum number of page views. Having this goal clear in your mind makes the rest of the job easier. Know the Room Know who your audience is, and…
Continue Reading A Conversation Marketing Refresher »
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January 9, 2007 by ian
Assuming we don't get any snow, leading Seattle folks to go hide in their houses, I'll be speaking about Conversation Marketing at the SDMA monthly meeting. You can read about it here.…
Continue Reading SDMA Speaking Gig Tomorrow »
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January 6, 2007 by ian
A pretty graph isn't analytics. It's a report. What you do with that report is 'analytics'. It's an important distinction. Look at this graph: It's a Google Analytics report showing me which pages get more or less traffic on the Portent Interactive web site. The subtler and most important point, though, is how important our Portfolio page is. It's 7.5% of all page views on our site. That doesn't seem like much. But drilling down a bit deeper shows that 30% of the people who visit our portfolio go to our 'Contact Us' page, and 4% sign up for…
Continue Reading Reports Aren't Analytics »
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January 4, 2007 by ian
I reached a major milestone today, when some spammer somewhere lifted text from this blog for use in their filter-fighting gibberish. I'm just giddy. It's like the excitement I felt the first time someone plagiarized the entire Portent Interactive site. Click the image below if you want to see the full-sized version. Technorati Tags: e-mail marketing…
Continue Reading I'm In Spam! »
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January 3, 2007 by ian
It's not as competitive as, say, 'Search Engine Optimization' or 'Viagra', but it counts: Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, seo…
Continue Reading Number 1 »
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