May 5, 2008 by ian
In any one day, I keep track of: 400+ web sites and blogs and news regarding 10-20 clients. In about 1 hour. I do not have a photocopier for a brain. Nor do I read particularly fast. Instead, I have a system. Here's how you can use it: Step 1: Set Up Google Reader Time required: 3 minutes. This one's easy. Go to Google.com/reader. If you have a Google account, you can just sign in using that username and password. You have a Google account if you use Gmail, Google Analytics or Adwords. Use the same login, and skip to…
Continue Reading Solve Internet Marketing Overload with Google Reader and a Process »
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April 6, 2008 by ian
This is another excerpt from the training course I'm putting together. As such, I wrote it while trying to figure out what I'm going to call the course and apologize for any frustration that seeps through. E-commerce software should be an asset to your internet marketing strategy, not an anchor. It often becomes the latter, though, when developers or business owners go feature-crazy. The Old Ball and Chain No, I'm not making some sexist 1950s reference. I'm talking about your e-commerce software. Make no mistake, your cart affects your brand. Customers' checkout experience will affect their opinion of you as…
Continue Reading Avoid Featuritis: Selecting the Right E-Commerce Package »
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February 29, 2008 by ian
I've been an SEOMoz Premium member for a while now. The content and tools are worth it: Great tips on search engine optimization basics, including "Viral Marketing and Linkbait on the Web". Higher-level stuff like tips on pagerank sculpting. Nifty tools for measuring keyword difficulty, basic site diagnostics (not PythiaSEO, but far easier to use) and ranking trackers. Access to the SEOMoz link and social network directories. Discounts on other services. Yes, I'm a paid shill in this case. Actually, I'm only a paid shill if you sign up. Otherwise I'm just prattling on. But I am a paying customer…
Continue Reading SEOMoz Pro: Join Before Your Competitors Do »
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February 14, 2008 by ian
Valentine's Day is the greatest marketing scheme ever created. As a marketer, I can respect that. So I used a Valentine's Mad Libs creator my company developed to write one to my first professional love, internet marketing: Dear Internet Marketing,My love is like a hot red Google Logo. Your tibia is timelessly beautiful and makes me want to scream sing it to me one more time. When I first saw you at Prodigy my heart went bzzzzrrrrtttttt modem beeps. I cannot live without the knowledge of your SEO goodness coloring my life. I love you more than kit kats and…
Continue Reading How do I love thee? Let me count the ways... »
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January 18, 2008 by ian
Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz very kindly invited me to this week's Whiteboard Friday to discuss personas in internet marketing. If you've never seen a Whiteboard Friday, they're brief videos, hosted by Rand, that discuss various internet marketing topics. You can see the video here. Does the camera make me look fat? Or just show how far my hairline has receded? You be the judge...…
Continue Reading Personas Video: SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday »
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January 9, 2008 by ian
If you blog, you want to figure out how those buggers over at Problogger.net and Gawker Media make so much money. Use this new gadget I just finished to figure out how many visitors you need to earn $X in advertising income. Advertising Income Calculator It's a fun exercise to figure out how many visits will buy you that new car. Note: If you run an e-commerce or leads site, you may want to look at a tool I built a couple years back: What's a Click Worth?…
Continue Reading New Tool: Advertising Income Calculator »
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January 3, 2008 by ian
I have an amazing team working for me at Portent. They just finished a super cool Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that includes three internet marketing calculators: An ROI calculator: A cost per click calculator: And, my favorite, a click value calculator: It's based on the click worth calculator I created way back. It's free. You can download the widget directly here, or visit Portent's site to read more. Internet Marketing Widget | More info…
Continue Reading Internet Marketing Calculator: OS X Dashboard Widget »
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December 7, 2007 by ian
I'm an old fart when it comes to landing pages. I started working with them way back in 2000 or so (gasp). So I can be a bit hard to impress. MarketingSherpa's Landing Page Handbook managed, though. It's absolutely crammed with useful tips, factoids, research and best practices. I didn't quite sleep with it under my pillow, but it did end up on my nightstand for a few days. The book covers the basics, such as landing page design best practices. It then moves on to more advanced testing techniques and provides a list of resources for landing page addicts…
Continue Reading Friday Book Review: MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook »
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November 19, 2007 by ian
If you read this blog, you know how much I value personas. They're a great tool for everything from marketing planning to interface design to search marketing. “The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (VOICES)†(Steve Mulder, Ziv Yaar) is one of the definitive works on the subject. I just finished a re-read, and I recommend it, with a couple qualifications: The Not-So-Good This book starts with the basics, explaining personas and why you need them. Then the authors dive deep, into segmentation, cluster analysis and more technical details. That's…
Continue Reading Book Review: The User is Always Right »
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November 16, 2007 by ian
There are a lot of bloggers out there. Chances are one of them is saying something about your brand. They're starting a conversation, whether you know it or not. The question is, are you listening? If you are, you can observe and adjust. It's easier than you might think. Here's how I do some very basic reputation tracking using Google Blogsearch and an RSS feed reader: Get A Feed Reader First, you need an RSS feed reader. I use Google Reader, which you can find at www.google.com/reader. It's free, and gives me some great tools for paging through lots…
Continue Reading Stalking the Blogosphere: Know What Bloggers Are Saying About Your Brand »
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October 20, 2007 by ian
As part of the Stump Ian series, Tom asks: “What are the most promising new technologies for user-generated content and conversation on niche e-commerce sites? I'm considering, blogs, reviews, gift registries, wish lists as old hat.†Technology: Mobile is Growing (slowly) Tom, the technology I'm most excited about is mobile. At Portent we've experimented a bit with techniques that blend display advertising and user-generated content, like this: Create a simple poll, or ask a question that requires a brief answer. Put it into a display ad you show on a bus, in a subway, or just a T-Shirt ala…
Continue Reading User Generated Content: Tools and Techniques »
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October 2, 2007 by ian
Note: This is the fourth article in a series on personas. The first, how to create personas, is here. The second applies them to your internet marketing strategy. The third shows how personas can improve e-mail campaigns. Get Inside Your Searchers' Heads: Why You Should Read This OK, all you Heroes fans: I'm not talking about Sylar slicing the tops off of peoples' heads here. Don't read this post if that's what you're looking for. This is a respectable marketing blog, even if I'm of questionable character. We don't truck in such silliness. But aren't you glad Peter Petrelli's back!?…
Continue Reading Search Marketing and Personas: Opening Your Customer's Heads »
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September 27, 2007 by ian
At long last, I can join the world of the internet-worthy. I have my very own avatar, created by Chris Furniss, who happens to work for me. So it's not like he had any choice. But he still did a nice sketch that removes the bags under the eyes, vague 40-ish paunch and the 5-o'clock shadow: I did not have to pose for it, either. He's working on numerous action versions: Look for Ian Mugs, Ian Shirts, Ian commemorative license plates and Velvet Ians, coming soon to souvenir shops near you... Should I do a 500-foot tall poster, like…
Continue Reading The IanCon!!!! »
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September 26, 2007 by ian
If you haven't yet read my 9/24 article on personas, you should read that, first. It provides a very detailed look at personas and how to create them. Today's article explains what you do with the personas after you've written them. The 4 Rules of Personas Personas can drive a great internet marketing strategy, if you follow four rules: Pursue only focal personas as customers until you dominate this little marketplace. Then pursue the ‘eh’ personas on a test basis. Make them into either focal or exclusionary personas, and adjust your strategy as necessary. Then expand your business in a…
Continue Reading The 4 Rules of Personas: Creating Great Personas, Part 2 »
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September 24, 2007 by ian
How is it that some web sites just click, the moment you look at them? What makes some people just love Grolsh beer, while others swear by Guinness? Why do you like BMWs, while I like Teslas? Why do I like one candidate, while you like another? This isn't luck. Someone designed these brands or campaigns to appeal to certain personalities. And they started with personas. Personas: Your Imaginary Friends Wikipedia defines personas as “fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or productâ€. In short, they're…
Continue Reading Get In Your Customers' Heads: Creating Great Personas »
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September 12, 2007 by ian
A few weeks ago I streamed Conversations With the Candidates. Two years ago a project like that would've cost my client a small fortune to encode, stream and then deliver the video to a large audience. This time? The price of my plane ticket, plus my time in Orlando. The difference is a service called uStream.tv. With it, you can quickly create your own shows, then stream them, live and/or record them for later playback. This tutorial walks you through what I did, the tools I used, etc..: The Tools I used two tools to create the show: CamTwist,…
Continue Reading Streaming Video: Creating a Professional uStream Show »
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September 12, 2007 by ian
Just a brief brag: The analytics tool I've been building a bit at a time, Pythia Analytics, is now tracking just over 2000 sites. Woo hoo! Coming soon: User accounts Google data Google analytics tie-in Technorati Tags: analytics, social media…
Continue Reading Pythia Analytics Hits 2000th site »
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September 6, 2007 by ian
Three tools I can never seem to leave alone for a whole day: TouchGraph TouchGraph technology lets you see who's in your semantic neighborhood. One quick search and I can see blogs that mention me or mention related topics: I use it to find and engage like minds in conversation, track down good linking potential, and basically keep an eye on my neighbors (that didn't sound right at all). Try it. It rocks. Just make sure you have some free time - I can easily spend 20 minutes moving the little discs around... SEOMoz PageStrength A nice, high-level view…
Continue Reading 3 Free Internet Marketing Tools I Love »
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August 28, 2007 by ian
I'm getting ready to crawl into bed for a few hours before I fly back to NYC. But some last thoughts about using uStream as a major event streaming platform: If you're hooked into a video feed like I was, try to avoid lots of pans and zooms. Not only does this kind of action make compression harder, it also places a strain on the server or local computer doing that compression. I am 99% sure that most of the hiccups we saw came right after a major change in camera angle or zoom. Use the chat feature! It's…
Continue Reading uStreaming Conversations with Candidates: Part 5 »
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August 28, 2007 by ian
Warm up the crowd. Piece of advice for uStreaming: If you are doing a one-time event, use a program like CamTwist, and put up a graphic at least 45 minutes before your show. That gives folks a chance to ask you questions in the chat room. It also gets you some presence on the site before your show actually starts. Technorati Tags: streaming, ustream, video…
Continue Reading uStreaming Conversation with Candidates: Part 4 »
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August 27, 2007 by ian
Followup note (8.28.07): I traced the problem back to Safari. I recorded the second session using Firefox, and was able to record and save the video just fine. So, use Firefox when you're using uStream on OS X. A shorter note: When saving a recording, make sure - 100% sure - that the recorder window prompts you to do something. Like 'save'. I just finished up and closed the recorder. Apparently, something in my browser went wonky, didn't display the save dialog (I think) and my recording is gone. Poof. Augh. It's not a total loss - the video…
Continue Reading uStreaming Conversations with Candidates: Part 3 »
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August 27, 2007 by ian
I just finished streaming Erin Moriarty's interview with Hillary Clinton. You can see it here. Some valuable lessons learned: Ideally, you need an internet connection with an upload speed of 1 megabit. We increased our speed to 1 megabit and the results were far better. If the video you're watching is skipping, it might be your computer or your download speed. Don't assume you're having streaming problems until someone else, somewhere else, has checked, too. We had a lot of skipping here (probably because my laptop was encoding and upload the stream). But most other viewers had no problem.…
Continue Reading uStreaming Conversation with the Candidates: Part 2 »
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August 27, 2007 by ian
I will be making little entries as the next two days unfold. One of our clients is conducting live conversations with presidential candidates. We're streaming it live, here. We're using ustream.tv to do it, and that poses some special advantages: We don't have to worry about streaming infrastructure. We can use a great program, CamTwist, to superimpose graphics, etc. over the video. I had our initial stream up and running in about 30 minutes this morning. It's free for the basic service. Some of the challenges you have to watch for: Watch your outgoing bandwidth. We spotted issues early…
Continue Reading uStreaming Conversation With the Candidates: Part 1 »
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March 18, 2007 by ian
It's Sunday, and I'm noodling around with ways to post photos to my various family sites. I use Flickr, of course, and I used to post photos using a script in Photoshop, but recently I found two other tools everyone may want to try: JAlbum is a great way to create, organize and skin albums on your web site. You need to know your server's FTP settings, first. Your hosting provider can provide those. Download JAlbum for free from JAlbum.net. BananaAlbumCreator is even cooler, doing pretty Flash-driven albums, but requires a bit more geekiness to get it working smoothly.…
Continue Reading Cool Photo Album Publishing Tools »
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February 21, 2007 by ian
I'm starting to keep a list of tools I've found or built. If you think I need to add one, just post a comment. SEO Related SEOMOZ.org's tool collection 301 Redirect Manager (by Conversation Marketing & Portent) Blogging Feedburner Analytics/Strategic What's a Click Worth (by Conversation Marketing & Portent) Google Analytics Google Trends Alexa The Square Root Rule, Explained Copyright Protection CopyScape Technorati Tags: internet marketing…
Continue Reading Internet Marketing Tools List »
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