Digital marketing insights.

Having your website cultivate new sales opportunities, automatically, is what we think online business is all about.

If there is one error that is more common than any other in online marketing, it would probably be prioritizing the pieces over the puzzle.

For all the time, money, and discussion that are given to online marketing in companies of all sizes, it can seem a bit baffling that businesses still make basic, critical mistakes when it comes to putting a plan together. These miscues are easier to understand, however, when you consider that they are often the result of more simple (and surprisingly common) mistakes in thinking.

Halloween is always a special time for us here at Kayak Online Marketing, and not just because we've been dying to wear our superhero costumes to the office all year long. You see, October 31 is our official launch date, and so today marks the two-year anniversary of our company.

Traditionally, the process of generating leads through search engine optimization looks something like this: figure out what keywords your potential customers are likely to search for, make pages that are easy for Google to find, and then make some kind of offer on the page that convinces them to take the next step.

As you might know, Kayak was recently nominated as a finalist for two small business awards by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. Ultimately, we weren't chosen for either, but the experience did give me a bit of time to reflect on just how far our little company has come, what the success we have had really means, and what lessons I could share with the world about it.

If there is anything every potential online marketing client in the world probably has in common, it's that they would prefer to see their investments pay off sooner rather than later. That's just the world we live in these days, and their impatience is understandable – business moves quickly, especially online. If you aren't getting ahead, you're falling behind, and there really isn't any time to waste.

In some of our previous posts (not to mention our highly recommended e-books, now available on Amazon), we've gone into a bit of detail describing our process for creating marketing personas – profiles of our best potential customers that allow us to communicate with them in a way that speaks to them.

Recently, we found ourselves on a conference call with a prospective new client that took on a slightly strange (but sadly not entirely unusual) direction – the client wanted to spend quite a bit of money on a website redesign, and we did our very best to talk them out of it.

As you might've heard or read in our blog, Kayak Online Marketing was recently named a finalist for a prestigious Calgary "breakout business" award, given to the small company making the biggest impact in its respective industry or market.

Regular Kayak clients and readers might already know that we aren't big fans of pay-per-click advertising, at least not as a long-term strategy for building traffic and generating sales opportunities.

Several times a year, major auto shows are held in cities like Paris, New York, and Milan, so the world's top car designers can meet to show off their concepts. According to media reports, it isn't unusual for the companies in attendance to spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make the trip and participate.

Recently, we were pleasantly surprised to find that Kayak Online Marketing was named as a finalist for the Breakout Business Award, awarded annually by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.

In case you haven't heard, the latest Google algorithm update (nicknamed "Hummingbird") is online and ready for action.

Over the life of the series, Breaking Bad has been big on drama, action, and suspense. One thing it hasn't had, however, is a lot in the way of practical business lessons – at least for the majority of us who don't spend our time running illegal black markets out in the desert.