Heather is the chair of the Direct Marketing Association’s Search Engine Marketing Council, the author of Successful Search Engine Copywriting (the benchmark work on the subject), and a petite, caffeine-fueled spitfire.

She’s dyed her hair red since this photo was taken, so the ’spitfire’ label really fits.

Heather is one of the very… Continue reading Heather Lloyd-Martin - SEO Copywriting...

This is a critical area in leveraging a website to close business, and Andrew Palmer is a master online marketer. His sweet spot is right at the juncture between content and search engine marketing. The two overlap with each other and with search engine optimization (which is tomorrow’s topic at the conference). I really enjoyed Andrew’s presentation. He’s a no BS guy with a sense of… Continue reading Andrew Palmer - Website Conversion...

Nick Usborne just finished delivering an all day seminar. It was valuable, educational and fun. There’s no way I’ll have time to synopsize it all, but I’ll be using the lessons learned on my site and for clients. As I use what I learned today, I’ll blog about it.

Just a quick overview of today’s highlights:

• online copy is different from print, print copy always belonged to commerce
• online has always belonged to

I figured this past week’s analytics wouldn’t tell me much. I thought they’d be the same as the week before because I haven’t made any changes to my website yet.

Wrong!

And this taught me a valuable lesson. Actually, retaught me.

Three website related but offline occurrences were different between the two weeks. This week I had much less traffic than… Continue reading Bolen Website Analytics from 7/27 to 8/02...

I think Evan Schuman’s ‘The Top B2B Communication Mistakes’ whitepaper has spot on advice for today’s B2B content marketer. I boiled it down to its essence here below.

1. Understand Your Prospects and Use That Information

Do you know what your customers’ and prospects’ top ten business concerns are? Most of you probably do. The mistake is not ensuring that all of your content reflects or includes those concerns. Closely review all… Continue reading The Top Seven B2B Communication Mistakes...

I had an interesting phone conversation yesterday with Evan Schuman, founder and CEO of The Content Firm. I had requested use of a whitepaper from his site. I want this blog to deliver relevant and useful information, so I dig deep when researching for it.

Evan’s concern was that I dug too deep. The whitepaper I was interested in is several years old. He didn’t want… Continue reading Walking the Tightrope and Making It Look Easy...

This is a follow-on to the last post, ‘Honest and Transparent Marketing’. A buddy of mine pointed out that what successful marketers do is not just compile and deliver the unvarnished truth. It’s much more complex than that. And he’s right. There’s a lot more that goes into it than just straight reporting. There are a number of necessary steps and inputs that result in content that’s relevant and useful… Continue reading Subliminally Persuasive...