Recent Posts
Is Your Website Just Sitting Around Gathering Dust?
10/20/2015Why not pull it out, dust it off, and put it out where your potential customers can find it? Oh, right, it's stored in some server in some dingy basement of some web hosting company in only God knows where. So buried that Google doesn't want to bother pulling it out without a little help from you, in the form of you paying for Google AdWords and adding to their $30 Billion annual AdWords revenue... Read More >Don't Buy AdWords from a Flat Rate Reseller Who Calls You On the Phone
11/26/2014Over on a Google AdWords Community forum we were having a discussion about certified AdWords re-sellers in general and BrandRep in particular and Jon Gritton gave a response that was so good I thought I'd reprint the whole thing here: OK, let's call a halt to the slanging match with some cold, hard facts: 1. Being a Google Certified Partner, on its own, means virtually nothing. Someone could s... Read More >There Are Now 1 Billion Websites, How Much Room is There for Growth?
09/22/2014At just about 23 years since the first website, there are now one billion of them, and more cropping up every second. We crossed that milestone this month. You can even watch them being added to the World Wide Web in real time. That's about 1 website for every six people on the planet, but if you account for the fact that the one billion figure includes inactive websites that are just parked doma... Read More >Kirby Wins Meme Contest
08/31/2014I don't win many contests, but when I do, I like to brag a little. The folks at Page One Power put on a series of contests to see who could create the best captions for pictures they provided. I won the first contest by creating this meme: ... Read More >Review of BrandRep (Brand Local)
08/30/2014Typical Ignorant, Lying Telephone Solicitor I don't do telephone cold calling but if I did and you got a call from me you wouldn't get a telephone solicitor who claims to have four years of internet marketing experience but doesn't know the difference between organic and paid listings on Google. Nor will you get one who will ask you to answer questions like how long you've been in business to see... Read More >If "Content is King" How Does a Page With No Content Manage to Rank?
07/24/2014You may have heard the phrase du jour in internet marketing circles: "Content is King", and then ran across a home page that ranked well enough that you found it on Google's first page of search results yet it didn't have any content to speak of and wondered how that can be. What is that website's secret sauce for being the exception to what Google has been advising for years regarding giving them... Read More >What Your About Page Should Be About
06/17/2014Time for a quick quiz. Website About pages should be about: The owner The company Both For a small company, one in which the owner is still guiding the ship, the answer should be primarily #1, the owner. The About page SHOULD NOT be another list of sales pitches, cliches, "we are the best because", another explanation of what your company offers, or otherwise reiterate what's already ... Read More >Why Rand is Wrong When He Says "Reputable SEO Firms Don't Promise Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings"
05/21/2014Anybody who is curious about the idea of guaranteed SEO can do a Google search and find a few companies that offer guaranteed results. You will also no doubt run into Rand Fishkin’s mug shot on the first or second page and his Moz blog post with the same title I’ve quoted in this article title. It’s enough to scare many a potential client away from the idea of buying from the others who are offeri... Read More >What Is WordPress And How Does It Work?
04/25/2014First, How a Website Works A website is a bunch of files filled with the contents of a website and coding called HTML and CSS (and others) that your browser (Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc.) reads to know how to put together a website. That coding includes things like box sizes, placement, types of borders, and font style, size and colors. When you call up a website by either typing the addres... Read More >Have You Ever Been To Colorado?
04/11/2014In 2006, the State of Colorado quadrupled its Tourism Department’s marketing budget, and saw the state’s profits from tourism reach record highs, which now continues year after year. This came after a decade of operating with a much smaller (occasionally non-existent) marketing budget, and results to match. So, the real question is: Why on earth did they wait through a decade of futility bef... Read More >Atlanta Portable Toilet Company Uses Website to Stay Strong in Weakening Economy
03/28/2014Instead of griping about a painfully slow construction economy, the partners at Nix Tank Company Inc. in Gainesville, GA looked for ways to increase the selling of portable sanitation and construction site services to a large swath of metropolitan Atlanta. “The period from 2002 through 2007 was great,” says Clay Crocker, manager of the portable restroom division. “But construction is just awful... Read More >8 Excellent Reasons to Redesign Your Website
03/14/2014From an excellent article by Hubspot, here are the 8 reasons to redesign your website: You aren’t getting the results you want. The purpose of your site has changed. Your website just doesn’t work. You have an effective web design strategy. Your site isn’t responsive. You want to incorporate a better content strategy. Your competitors changed their site. ... Read More >Reputation Management the LinkNow! Media Way: Shameful Bullying
03/06/2014Canadian culture isn't much different than ours. I mean when was the last time you heard anyone say, "Let's stay home and order some Canadian food"? If you've watched the comedy movie Canadian Bacon, however, you might agree with some of the stereotypes: they are nice, they are polite, and they don't litter. For British Columbians that's true I'm sure but I'm not so sure about French Cana... Read More >144 Resources Every Marketer Should Know About
03/04/2014Bookmarks Marketing, Business, & Tech Blogs to Read Matt Cutts | Gadgets, Google, and SEO. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog | Stay up to date on changes to Google. Moz Blog | Articles on modern-day SEO and inbound marketing. Content Marketing Institute | Content marketing strategy, research and how-to advice. Convince and Convert | Thoughtful posts on content and so... Read More >Google Plus a New Way to Promote a Business? Sorry, Wrong Approach
02/28/2014With all the activity I've seen lately Google Plus seems to be gaining traction in the social media world. Many of us have been wondering when this would happen and knew it would given the rather obvious connection it has with the 800 pound gorilla in the search market that Google has become. Like Microsoft which at any given time has a few hundred spare engineers and a few billion dollars layin... Read More >Small Business, Small Market, Small Budget - We Think That's a Big Deal
02/21/2014We think it's a big deal, but apparently the SEO industry thinks you are, well, small potatoes. They have bigger fish to fry. And to add another metaphor, you are not the low-hanging fruit SEO companies love to pick and get into their baskets. Simply put, you just don't pay enough in this get-rich-quick mentality that has dominated the SEO industry thus far. Which brings to mind another metapho... Read More >Social Signals to Boost SEO? Don't Waste Your Time.
02/14/2014I've never really jumped on the get-social-signals-to-boost-seo bandwagon because I never really understood why Google would even use this metric to rank a site in the first place. There are just too many questions and issues: How many signals is enough to do any good considering awful sites can purchase likes and follows? Does Google grade on an exponential scale so that you have to increase you... Read More >Many SEO's Are Adamantly Against Guaranteed SEO - But Why?
02/07/2014I recently sent this question out on Help A Reporter Out: Both Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin have said that reputable SEO's don't guarantee results. Do you? If not, why not? Do you think it's ethical to keep your client's money if you can't get them ranked on Google page 1? Do you know if your SEO works a certain percentage of the time? If you offered a guarantee and could not get them ranked would... Read More >Why Worry About a Duplicate Content Penalty?
01/31/2014For some time I was concerned with my own SEO website building practices because of all the talk about duplicate content but I don't worry so much about it any more. Matt Cutts says so. After doing some reading on this I've discovered that there really never was a "duplicate content penalty", and that makes sense to me. What there is is a duplicate content "FILTER" so that Google can prese... Read More >Ways to Guarantee SEO
01/29/2014While many SEO’s are quite adamant that no legitimate SEO will offer guaranteed services others have come up with novel approaches that do just that. Satisfaction Guarantee Tyler Young at Conversion Insights, which specializes in marketing automation for attorneys, offers a 3 month satisfaction guarantee. If after the first three months a new client is not happy with either his work or the resul... Read More >
