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Blogging, Engagement, and Editorial Calendar Strategy

Your blog is the centrepiece of a well constructed content and lead-generation strategy. But making the most of yours involves more than dashing off the occasional article and posting it online. True content marketing success requires focus, consistency, and an eye towards what’s really important for your audience.

Yup, You're Stressing Your Clients Out

Somewhere around a decade ago, I was enjoying one of my regular coffee chats with my elderly uncle Wally. He's an exceptional fine artist who has spent 70-plus years painting some of the most incredibly detailed wilderness scenes you'll ever encounter. We generally talked about family, art, business, and people as well.

Is Marketing Magical or Simply Sensational?

For all the ways that digital media has changed the marketing world in the past few decades, it has done very little to alter the way that designers, agencies, and marketing firms themselves actually work. With a handful of notable exceptions, most still follow an old-world approach that was prevalent in the ’40s and ’50s… and probably even earlier than that.

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90% of All Blogs Aren’t Read. This is How You Join The Other 10%

Last week, Rand Fishkin of Moz released a study by BuzzSumo revealing the engagement data on 757k blog posts. Of those less than 10% actually received links and most received very few views. If you’ve received either, you are one of the lucky few, and it’s likely your content was pretty darn good.

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Are You Shortchanging Yourself One AdSense Click at a Time?

Recently, we had the chance to work with a new client who had a large, user-driven website containing over 8 million different pages. The content was unique and focused, and as a result the client was attracting thousands of visits from searchers every month. In order to monetize that traffic, they had installed Google’s AdSense tool, earning a few cents for each click generated through the ads (earning thousands of dollars per month).

On Page SEO Content Structure and Link Valuation

In the same way that a good written document (like a report, or newspaper article) should be arranged in a certain way to make it more accessible to readers, it’s a good idea to structure your webpages so they are easy for Google and the other search engines to crawl and understand.

How to Make PPC Work for Your Company

Earlier this summer, I took one of the major printed directory companies (or what’s left of them) to task for ripping clients off via generic, expensive, and ineffective pay-per-click advertising. It's not that PPC doesn’t have any value, but it was the ineffective way in which it was sold and delivered and how costs are artifically inflated by those big companies.

3 Easy and Proven Ways to Scare Away Your Prospects

Is your credibility as a marketer making it harder for you to keep up with the latest jokes and memes? Does it ever feel like too many people are responding to your offers, forcing you to process new sales and service clients when you’d rather be napping?

5 Critical Criteria for Communicating Credibility

Most of us, as consumers, have reached a point of digital saturation. Information and offers are everywhere, but credible, trustworthy resources seem more scarce than ever. We’re past the point of being skeptical – we actively distrust those we don’t know or have very good reason to believe.

Vanity Metrics and Social Proof. What Does it All Mean?

In June, I found myself meeting new people at the #SocialShakeUp social media marketing conference in Atlanta. Rather than collect business cards at events, I have a habit of pulling up my mobile and adding people to a twitter list made for the event. Before long, one individual in particular caught my attention, for he had more than 300 thousand Twitter followers. Which of course, quickly became a topic of discussion.

Semantic Search: Is it Time for a Think-Building Campaign?

Once upon a time, you could improve your search engine visibility by signing up for dozens (hundreds, thousands…) of different directories (of vastly differing quality), earning a link to your website in the process. At the time, each of these links effectively served as an “up-vote” of sorts to the search engines, making your website appear more authoritative with each entry.

Who Is Setting the Tone for Your Online Reputation?

Online reputation is a big subject that’s only getting bigger. We have already seen in the last few years that having lots of positive reviews and feedback around your business can encourage business… and that, conversely, even a single bad review can damage it (big time).

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7 Tips For Gathering Content From Your Team

Often, the hardest part of launching a new website or getting a marketing plan off the ground involves getting content from different members of the team or organization. Having multiple perspectives and ideas is helpful, but it can also turn something that seems simple into a herding exercise.

How Much of the Internet’s Potential are You Wasting?

There is an interesting dichotomy floating around on the Internet. On the one hand, the web (and social media specifically) is supposed to be fostering creativity and individual expression. On the other hand, the partisan and anonymous nature of the Internet is fuelling a stronger and stronger herd mentality. A distance that causes people to act as they were wearing a mask.

White, Black, or Grey: Which Search Optimizer Are You?

Spend enough time learning about search optimization, and you’ll undoubtedly run into strong opinions about “white hat” versus “black hat” tactics. Marketers argue (often very privately) all the time about which work best, or are even ethical to use.

Digital marketing insights.

Insights from Randy Milanovic, awarded Buzz Sumo's Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencer.