St0n3y

People can sniff out your "marketing speak" from a mile away, and won't respond well to fluffy "we're the best" claims. Your content needs to focus on your audience's needs, answer all of the questions they could possibly ask, and tell them what you read more »
Discuss     
With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Dan Thies says "As you can clearly see by searching Google for [seo book], my site is nowhere to be found on the first page…In fact, there's some guy named Aaron (probably not even his real name) ranked #1, 2, 3 read more »
1 Comment     
Mao Tse-Tung understood the power of words when he wrote that “words are like little dynamite sticks in people’s minds . . . .” He was talking about communism, but the same holds true for marketing. Words are much more than labels, they are potentia read more »
Discuss     
"There’s someone in Houston, Texas who you’ve probably never met. But he is a very influential person in the world of small business. Last week I finally got to meet the elusive Robert Clough." read more »
Discuss     
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. read more »
Discuss     
There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue fr read more »
Discuss     
There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites sites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be diffe read more »
Discuss     
Too many times, marketer’s feel as through social media has been created for their benefit, when in reality it is a group of people with similar interests who joined into a community. A community where marketers are free to participate, but not free read more »
1 Comment     
Infomercials universally dramatize the benefit to the point where viewers can't help but picture themselves enjoying the product themselves. But don't confuse the infomercials cheesy execution of this technique with the core strategy itself. read more »
Discuss     
Many marketers don’t realize that pay-per-click campaigns can quickly get out of control. Traditional marketing metrics can usually be measured over the course of several weeks and months, whereas online marketing metrics can spike on an hourly basi read more »
Discuss     
short list of (success factors for businesses creating viral videos as sales tools. Please feel free to debate these or add your own in the comments. read more »
Discuss     
Jennifer says: In fact, just last week I was trying to find a contact in the marketing/PR department of a fairly large company. I went to LinkedIn and ran a search using the marketing/pr title and the name of the company. When the results popped up, read more »
Discuss     
A tongue-in-cheek assessment of how Analytics and PPC don't mix: Numbers are your enemy. They will only complicate your life and take time away from your instinct and opinion. In fact, I think analytics just might ruin your pay-per-click campaigns read more »
1 Comment     
Diane Aull says "One of my pet peeves is website owners who think they should target “everyone” with their website marketing. Look, I don't care what you offer, “everyone” is not your target." read more »
Discuss     
Ian McAnerin posted a three-slide graphical presentation showing SEO, SEM and how the two interact. read more »
1 Comment     
Great post from GrokDotCom about how personals lead to actionable insights that demographic and psychographic data alone can't provide. read more »
1 Comment     
Jakob Nielsen discusses the pros and cons of using long articles vs. short articles in his article Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy read more »
2 Comments     
One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful. read more »
1 Comment     
I love it when a good poem comes together. Michelle gives us a cleverly written SEO poem that's sure to make you smile. read more »
2 Comments     
Lisa Barone gives us some tips on how to improve your blog's performance. read more »
Discuss     
Not a rerun of a previous Sphinn. This is a new article hitting a similar theme: "These days, every web publisher wrestles with finding the right balance between producing their own content versus relying on contributions from visitors. It’s almost read more »
Discuss     
The good news is that social media is user driven. The bad news is that social media is user driven. Yes, there's the rub. Users are fickle creatures - they can love a product one minute and then drop it like a lead balloon the next, depending on th read more »
Discuss     
This is a nice little tool I just found (hat tip to SEO Buzz Box) that calculates the percentage of your site pages that are in Google's dreaded supplemental index. read more »
8 Comments     
This week, the Google Website Optimizer team hosted a two-part webinar series on how to use their powerful — and free! — testing software. In addition to the popular A/B and multivariate tests, Google walked attendees through basic testing methods, read more »
1 Comment     
Coremetrics has revealed the results of their second annual Face of the New Marketer survey. The results show that social media marketing is quickly gaining popularity as a way to gain a competitive edge. However, companies appear to be very relucta read more »
1 Comment     
Search Marketing Expo

Save the date for:
SMX China (Nanjing) - Sept. 23-24
SMX Stockholm - Sept. 23-24: See who's speaking or register now.
SMX East (New York City) - Oct. 6-8: See the agenda or register today and save!
SMX London - Nov. 4-5: Pre-agenda rate now available. Click here.