Digital marketing insights.

Could you be crowded out of search listings – and your readers’ attention – by your own content?

In a perfect world, your social connections would be within arm’s reach of a smartphone, eagerly anticipating your next post or comment. And, anytime you wrote something brilliant or insightful, there would be multitudes of readers ready to jump in, comment, and add their own thoughts.

There is a lot of information and advice being thrown around when it comes to how marketers should handle social. That’s mostly a good thing, since we can all use more ideas and best practices about getting our messaging right.

I’m relatively outspoken on a lot of different topics, and one of them is the need for business owners and marketers to handle their own social engagement. Doing so allows them to keep their finger on the pulse of their industry, along with customer discussions and concerns and insights they just couldn't find 'not' being there.

Fill in the blank: “If I were just able to use a ______________ tool, my problems would be solved in an instant.”

Here at Kayak, we have a pretty open stance about ethics when it comes to sales and marketing – we prefer an inbound, attraction-based approach where prospects seek us out based on our being helpful and valued. We’re simply not in the habit of thrusting ourselves into the faces of prospects.

Imagine for a moment that we travelled back in time to the 1800s, into the dusty centre of an old Wild West town and transported the local snake oil salesman right off his wagon, forward into 2015. How hard would it be for him or her to adjust to the present day? Possibly not that challenging actually, for there’s still plenty of decent (though uninformed) businesses searching for SEO answers.

Recently, I found myself Googling for “big island real estate” as part of a new client project. Imagine my surprise when a trio of business listings appeared near the top of the page as local search results. Otherwise known as the Local Pack, this group of listings – presumably – is intended to display local (nearby) business listings.

Sometimes, the most important lessons you can learn about online marketing – and indeed, dealing with people – aren’t the ones you get from blogs, surveys, or brainstorming sessions. In fact, I was recently reminded how important things like perspective and insight are from a simple cup of tea.

Colour is a part of everything we do.

From selecting our clothing for the day, to picking out the vehicle we choose to drive, colour makes a continuous impression on us each and every day, but does it have any impact at all on the websites we choose to visit, and if so, why?

I had the great fortune of writing and posting some of my best articles around online marketing ideas over on Social Media Today last year as one of their Best Thinkers. In case you missed my articles there, here is a roundup of a few of my favs, in no particular order:

One thing you’ll notice if you stop in to see us at Kayak, is that our team is quiet eclectic. From young people to industry vets, we run the gamut. What you won't see though, are unpaid marketing interns.

Is the most valuable part of your content, the discussion it generates? Can social comments add more authority and semantic search value than many marketers truly appreciate? These were among the questions on my mind when I sought advice from a handful of connections in GPlus (who just happen to also represent some of the top minds in Semantic Search).

Wouldn’t it be nice if every article was the source of tens of thousands of views, thousands of social shares, and a long list of engaging comments? What a wonderful bit of exposure that would be! Could it happen for you? It happened for me, and I think I know why.

Not long ago, I shared my opinion that marketers were being overly worried about duplicate content, specifically for sharing their articles and posts in a variety of places.