Digital marketing insights.

In a recent post, we shared one of our little online marketing secrets: that we are willing to do things like create cardboard cutouts of our best customers to help us better understand them and remember their needs.

In television crime dramas, detectives draw painstaking detail from victim interviews, drawing one little piece of information after another until that "ah ha" moment where the sketch artist puts them together and the guilty culprit is identified.

What is the sound of one keyword clapping? Can Google itself create a site so large that it can't even be indexed? Can any marketer ever step into the same algorithm twice?

We'll be the first ones to admit it: we absolutely love automated lead generation systems. It's what we do, but you could almost say it's what we live for.

Can anything about Internet marketing really be 1,000 years old? That might seem like an impossibility, but we certainly think so.

Specifically, everybody wants to attract more leads online, but not everyone understands what that really means, or how to define online success.

Automation has become a hot topic in recent years, and for good reason: It represents the next logical evolution in finding customers through the Internet.

Having a search engine optimized business website is a little bit like running a marathon, or writing a novel: Lots of people want to have the finished achievement, but don't look forward to the time and effort it would take to make it happen.

A lot of time and money are spent on improving a business's website search engine positioning – where it shows in search engine rankings for important keywords and phrases.

It's surprising how few businesses make real resolutions for their Internet marketing plans. After all, what better way to heat up your bottom line than by gaining more customers over the Internet in 2013? That seems like a big missed opportunity, so in case you haven't made yours for 2013, here are a dozen you can borrow from us:

Flip on your television over the next few weeks, and you'll be reminded of the many heart-warming lessons of love this holiday season. Pay attention to the way shoppers and customers act, however, and you can learn a lot that can help you grow your business for any part of the year.

How does SEO work?

Despite sounding very complicated and technical, search engine optimization is more about writing content and understanding the way people search than it is technical.

Given that they can determine the success or failure of your search engine optimization campaign (and possibly your Internet marketing campaign as a whole), it is surprising how little attention is often paid to keywords.

Embarrassed by your website?

Regardless of whether you launched your online presence years ago or last week, it's important that you look through your pages from time to time and ensure that what you have on your site is still accurate, relevant, and putting your company in the best possible light.

Imagine if you will your company as a shiny blue door and your customers as the door frames holding you up.