RIP Sweet Prince of Creativity

Hasn’t everything been said about Steve Jobs and Apple that can be said? Actually, no. That’s because every person who has been touched by Steve and his products has a story of their own. This is mine. He has been called the Thomas Edison of our time. I have to agree. Without him and his “little” company with the cute name, chances are, my life would have taken an entirely different path.

One of his best quotes was to “Live your life for yourself. Do something bold and do something you love.” This has been my basic tenet in life. But my life with Apple began in the mid-1980′s. Sorry, one thing I have not done is keep a diary, but it had to be somewhere around 1986. I had just come off a rough landing from [Read more...]

It’s the Sum of the Parts

By now, if you have been involved in marketing a business on the internet for any amount of time, you’ve realized there is no single powerful secret to world wide web success. Instead, it is a never-ending process of strategy planning followed by execution. Once you have created all of the necessary ingredients you have to feed them and engage them in activities designed to draw interested people towards your brand.

Each component takes time to develop before it can fully assist in the holistic process:

a) 2.0 web site that is SEO friendly and capable of expansion and change by the owner. Once built, regular updating and buildout required. Increasingly, it needs to be functional on a mobile device. [Read more...]

Social Media Auto Posting Misses the Point

You are overloaded. It’s a fact. Before the internet came along you were already plenty busy. It’s taken you a decade of weening yourself from traditional media, transferring marketing dollars over to the digital side of the coin.

Now, along comes the Social Networks (SMM). If a business is to participate, there are so many things to learn and do at once. It seems insurmountable. Smart marketers saw this early on and developed management tools. A component of most of these tools is the ability to “load” posts for Twitter (or Facebook and others) to autopost in the future. And it is oh-so-easy to flip the switch that auto posts whatever you post at Twitter directly onto Facebook. Whew! That cuts down the workload.

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Google Working Hard to Control the Universe

I read a lot of search engine optimization blogs and articles every day. On any given day Google has better than a 90% share of the news for the day in one way or another. The social web sites increasingly get a good share of the news recently. But most days it’s just wall to wall Google.

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Facebook Advertising is a Big LIKE!

We have been engaged in pay-per-click advertising for so long we actually coined the name, “pay-for-visitor” (PFV) way back in the 90′s. Suffice to say, PPC beat out PFV as the acronym we now know and use today. Never the less, we have been around the block! When Overture kicked off way back when, we were one of the first consultants to recommend it as a strategy for our clients. Those were the days when you could scoop up visitors for a dime a piece on average. Oh! those were the days!

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If it Were Easy Everybody Would be Doing it!

Report from the Trenches: For over fifteen years, we have been providing an ever increasing smorgasbord of internet marketing services. At first, clients had to “steal” funds from their traditional marketing budget to pay for online efforts. These days, the online marketing budget has become the major portion of the business building budget. Back then, the skeptics didn’t believe in the internet being a viable media. Today, most business owners believe an opportunity exists but who has the time to figure out what works and what doesn’t? The learning curve has increased every year exponentially too. Today, thankfully, we find business owners who have a general understanding of the job at hand on the world wide web. But the main driving fact remains; there is not enough time in the day to get it all done. After all, you still have to run your business like you used to… only now, there are enough time killers lurking about that there is just no way you can get it all done effectively and properly, yourself.

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