Category Archives: Marketing and promotion

Slightly abridged with the author’s permission from Marketing Trenches. LinkedIn is a powerful tool for making business connections—but it is just that, a tool. Even the most active users miss on some simple ways to optimize the way they use LinkedIn.  This was true for me—I recently attended a seminar on LinkedIn by Colleen McKenna, [...]

This two-part post originally ran as one on the Content Marketing Institute blog. Here’s part 1. Reprinted with permission. So how can you collect the information you need to start engaging and determining whether or not someone is truly a prospective customer? Ideally you build up the information using progressive profiling, rather than hitting someone with [...]

This two-part post originally ran as one on the Content Marketing Institute blog. Reprinted with permission. Content registration is sometimes considered a no-brainer in the content generation and distribution process: Write a white paper, eBook, or other content asset, put up a landing page and reg form, and you’re off, right? The problem is that [...]

As a publisher, focusing on audience development in a highly-fractured digital world can be very difficult. One successful strategy for growing your audience centers around identifying digital influencers, then interacting and even working with them. What is a digital influencer? A digital influencer is anyone who already creates and distributes content that is frequently delivered, [...]

Slightly abridged with the author’s permission from the Vertical Leap blog. You might be selling DVDs, offering a collection of funny videos, blogging about your gap year in Moldova or running a petition against the price of donkey rides at Weston Super Mare, but all websites receive visits for one of three reasons: Reason 1: [...]

Six months ago we brought you a post on what questions to ask to get great testimonials. Recently we saw this post from Sally Ormond that adds many more questions to that list, so we asked her if we could reprint it. It originally appeared on the Briar Copywriting blog. One of your most powerful [...]

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Conversation Marketing I hate it when someone asks me “Have you worked with other companies like ours?” If I have, I consider it a vulnerability, not a strength, because I’ve got the a-word: Assumptions. Anyone starting a marketing campaign with assumptions is one step from failure. Why? Because those [...]

Reprinted with the author’s permission from the Big Star Copywriting Blog. In the minds of our customers (and many of our colleagues and clients) ‘selling’ has become synonymous with ‘hype’ and that’s not a great place to be for a marketer or copywriter. Hype is rampant in the websites and marketing all around the Web. [...]

Slightly abridged with the author’s permission from Neuromarketing. Marketers are being offered unprecedented new capabilities to target consumers by interests and behavior. There’s growing evidence, though, that consumers are finding these personalized pitches off-putting. A new survey of UK social media users showed that nearly half “don’t like having ads targeted to them based on [...]

It’s one thing to understand intuitively that different websites engage readers differently, and quite another to actually see it in brain wave patterns. Even though marketers buying advertisements or trying to understand the effect of different pieces of content probably do expect users’ experiences to be shaped by context and expectations, it’s still useful to [...]