5 Common SEO Mistakes

Tweet Confession: I picked 5 because it’s a nice number, not because these are a true “Top 5 Mistakes” or anything like that.  There are a lot of site optimization mistakes that are easy to make – I just picked 5 that I come across pretty frequently and that are pretty easy for non-techies to [...]

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Use It or Lose It: How To Avoid Commoditization of Your Personal Brand

Tweet Being an Atlanta Braves fan, I never really got used to Greg Maddux pitching in any other team’s uniform.  But that’s the business of the MLB.  A team buys the rights to a player’s physical abilities.  And while we all would love to attach the kind of value to our abilities that would garner [...]

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Reuters To Reporters: Don't Be Transparent

Tweet Earlier this week, Mashable posted a summary of Reuters new social media policy for its reporters, with a good analysis. The part that stuck out to me was the part about bias: In essence, Reuters is advising its writers “don’t let people see your biases.”  Now, I’m sure there’s a worthy debate somewhere about [...]

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The Medium is the Message (or Why You Shouldn't Use Social Media)

Tweet In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote “Understanding Media,” in which he made his famous statement that “the medium is the message.”  Being the sharp guy (or gal) you are, you probably see that I ripped him off to name my blog.  I ripped him off because he was right.  McLuhan was considered a crank then, [...]

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If Looks Could Kill: How Bad Site Design Can Kill Your Conversion Rate

Tweet Like many people, my first job out of college was a temp at a large corporation.  The economy was bad, and let’s just say that not many places know what “Ag Development” is, much less how it applies to the business world.  So I signed up with a temp agency and worked my way [...]

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Planning for Failure: The Business Lessons of the Chilean Earthquake

Tweet UPDATE: If you’d like to contribute to Chile’s relief efforts, here are some ways you can help. Early Saturday morning, there was a pretty massive (8.8 according to the London Times) earthquake off the coast of Chile, and tsunami waves were expected to hit Hawaii and most of the Pacific Rim later today.  At [...]

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What Kind of Customer Are You?

Tweet As marketers, business-owners, or even customer-service reps, none of us like bad customers.  They take up an inordinate amount of time, they complain, they’re rude to anyone they encounter, and generally seem very unhappy with life in general and are taking it out on your company.  As many others have written about, I think [...]

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How To: Use Google Adwords to Maximize Your Direct Mail ROI

Tweet If you’re a local business, direct mail is probably both necessary and a little scary (because of the cost).  We’ve all heard the story: you pay to develop a postcard, you pay for bulk-rate postage, and you let it rip.  Thousands of advertisements go out – and you sit back and wait for the [...]

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Put a Ring on It: Why (Good) Marketing Looks More Like Marriage Than Hooking Up

Tweet Being the big nerd that I am, one of my most-watched DVD sets is the “Planet Earth” series (and – just to confirm my nerd cred – it’s the BBC version, which is far superior to the Discovery Channel version).  One of my favorite spots in it is the depiction of the elaborate mating [...]

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Optimizing Your Conversion Rate: The Scoreboard is the Only Metric That Matters

Tweet After the college football National Title game (or, at least, the BCS title game) this year, I saw several similar posts on Facebook from fans of the University of Texas.  They all said something like, “the better team didn’t win tonight,” and pointed to the fact that the Longhorns had to play most of [...]

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