How do you best use outside help for online marketing?

Know what you need before you call!

See the article here.

How do you promote cruises nowadays? Try blogging about a ship as it is being built.

At www.eurodamnews.com Holland America shares with you the incremental building and design of the new Eurodam cruise ship.

This blog supports one of the most important parts of marketing- make your clients feel like part of a private club.

When someone wanted to see what the elevators looked like, the Eurodam folks blogged it and fulfilled their request.

I feel like giving them a high five and buying them a drink. Good job!

AdAge asked bloggers what technology in 2008 marketers should be thinking about most.

They posted my response:

——
Search marketing. This includes search engine optimization, search engine marketing (also called pay-per-click), and dealing with universal search.

When Jeremiah and others say that your corporate website is less relevant than ever, they’re right. But if you ignore the basics in favor of the hot new technologies, you will fall behind those who made sure they built a strong foundation.

Are you highly ranked for your most important keywords and phrases? Have you done the research to know what those phrases really are? Are you paying attention to how you are spending money on search engine marketing? Far less sexy than Facebook ads, no question — but almost always a better generator of sales.
—–
See the post here.

Note the variety of answers people gave. Sure, they picked responses that said different things, but look at the overall variety of “most important” subjects:

branded microcontent
local search
mobile apps
last.fm
twitter/micro-blogging
SEO
storing data on the web
content marketing
search marketing
online video/tv
micro-communication
action+ethics
Keywords
content marketing
Facebook
online advertising exchanges
Blogging
video
site optimization (testing)

This says to me that, if you are involved in online marketing, you’d best have some clue about all of these, and really understand a handful.

Go read the whole article. It’s worth your time.

Read my post on the Portent blog on the Portent Client Matrix to see what kind of client you are. Complete with a handy dandy 2×2 matrix!

http://www.portentinteractive.com/2008/03/what-kind-of-client-are-you.htm

Kelly Smith, founding partner of Curious Office, spoke at NWEN today on the first six months of a startup.

Big ideas-
1. Most of your stress will be about people. (IE, don’t worry about the tech so much, because dealing with the people around the tech will be harder)

2. Don’t do a startup just for money.

3. Family, health, and friends (for Kelly anyways) are more important than work. Starting a company is probably not worth killing yourself over through lack of sleep, lack of exercise, poor eating, etc.

4. Months 3-6 are really hard because it is too late and too early to quit. You have put in a few months and some money, so you want to keep going, but you haven’t really put in enough time to say that you know it won’t work.

And the big one:

5. When I start a project, everyone knows that I will finish it. Doesn’t matter what happens- I’ll turn it into a concrete mixing company if I have to to make it work. I don’t fail and I don’t stop. (from memory, so not his exact words)

So keep your priorities straight, and don’t stop. Good advice from a serial entrepreneur.

Next question for Kelly- what experiences and skills does someone need before they enter the startup arena on the sales/marketing side?

Side note- Kelly helped work on SEOmoz, one of the most respected SEO companies, period, so props for that decision.

in the Snohomish County Business Journal here

“Savvy online marketers use landing pages to increase conversion rates in their online campaigns. Simple design combined with continual testing gives better results than simply pointing traffic at a page and hoping it produces results…”

Enjoy!

Click here to see the American Stationery mad libs Valentine’s Day card creator.

Simple, effective concept- your sweetie needs a card, you don’t want to get them the same thing every year, and this card is funny and geeky and takes a minute to make.

Of course, not that you shouldn’t buy her chocolates as well…

Anna Liotta writes here about paid time off and how different generations in the workplace perceive this issue.

I would love to hear more about how different generations perceive sales messages. If we have a site selling Lasik surgery, for example, how should we approach different audiences differently?

Anna?

Recently, a firm I use made a big mistake. I was inconvenienced and unhappy.

They fixed the problem (eventually), and sent a Starbucks gift card.

I went to starbucks this morning and used the card.

Total value?

5 bucks.

IE, less than the price of coffee and a donut at Starbucks.

Fortunately, I bought less than $5. But you can imagine if you usually didn’t go to starbucks, going just this once to use the gift card, and finding that you had to pay a dollar or two more to get your coffee and donut.

I understand that they want to keep costs down, but I have used this company for 10 years. A $5 card? Come on, guys, you can do better than that.

If you are going to go to the trouble of saying “sorry, we screwed up, here is a gift,” make it at least $10-$20. Give me a pound of See’s chocolate- that way I’ll know you care!

Enjoy my email marketing column.