The 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide

Bluelock: Cloud Computing

Why Don't you have a Favicon?

With Search, Second Place Is Just The First Loser
Some folks get real excited when they start seeing their pages begin to show up on search engine results. Too many companies don’t realize just how huge the game is and how much money is at stake when it comes to keyword ranking and the value of search engine placement. So… here’s an example where I can quantify the value of rank. Let’s imagine we’re a San Jose Real Estate Agent and we’ve got a great blog and search engine marketing campaign that’s driving us upwards for the term San Jose Homes for Sale. Last month, there were 135,000 searches for San Jose Homes for Sale. The median

SEO: 10 Link Temptations To Avoid
Google’s gold standard of whether or not a website should be ranked well continues to change over time, but for quite a while the best method has gone unchanged… relevant backlinks from legitimate, authoritative sites. On page Search Engine Optimization and lots of great content may get your site indexed for specific keywords, but quality backlinks will drive up its rank. Since backlinks have become a known commodity, many linking scams and services continue to pop up all over the web. D

Your Bloated Website is Disqualifying Leads
TMI = Too Much Information. Most websites are built with TMI. I’d be willing to bet that there are 5 top locations everyone looks for on a typical website nowadays: Contact Page Customer Support Products and Services Downloads (if you provide them) Links to the Blogs and Social Media Connections I’ve been working with a couple clients of recent and have been pushing back on the volume of information they have on their websites. Friend and colleague, Kyle Lacy, r

Easy Usability Testing with UserTesting.com
An important, but unfortunately too-often overlooked, aspect of web design is usability. Most experienced web designers understand the basic concepts and principles of usability, but the more complex a website, the more important usability testing becomes. E-commerce websites are especially important to test because one small bump in your checkout process or design could substantially decrease your profits. Typically, I recommend some form of testing if there is any process or series of steps necessary on the website. There are many ways to conduct usability tests, but I think

5 Myths of Social Media
This may be a repeat post… but I really need to emphasize this. I’ve watched several companies stumble all over social media strategies. They eventually abandoned it altogether. The question I couldn’t get them to answer was why had they attempted in the first place? I like to think of social media as an amplifier… an incredibly powerful amplifier. If you have a solid foundation of public relations and marketing, and are covering both acquisition and retention effectively, your great wo