March Madness is college basketball’s biggest tournament, pitting 68 teams against each other in elimination rounds until there’s one winner. This year, we wanted to capture the spirit by pitting 8 popular online marketing channels against each other. The winner will be the channel that you – and other small business owners like you – [...]

“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.” – Benjamin Franklin Since 2010, businesses have been increasingly adding game-like elements to their marketing campaigns. Viewers can participate, sometimes for the fun of it and sometimes to earn prizes. A fuller explanation of how it works is here [...]

The Super Bowl…the Oscars…the Olympics…the Grammys… all popular cultural events that get a lot of attention. What do these events mean for your business? Should you mention them at all? It depends on how you do it. There’s a right and a wrong way to do everything in marketing, and this is no exception. The [...]

Last fall, I talked to customer Tim Brennan, chess tactics master, about his marketing plan for the holidays. He’d written an ebook – his first – and had a fresh list-building tactic to try out. He just followed up with me to report, 3 months later, “This has been a HUGE success.” Here’s Tim explaining [...]

If you’re a blogger, it’s likely people are reading your posts through Google Reader. (Click if you don’t know Reader.) Google announced Wednesday that Reader’s closing. Which means your RSS followers won’t see your posts anymore. Email to the rescue! What’s Email Got To Do With It? Well, your soon-to-be-ex-Reader followers have 3 options: 1. [...]

You might encounter a mystery when you check your open rates. Along with the standard opens from each of your readers, you might find a few people who open your message more than once. Why would someone open your email more than once? The answer is simple: There are four different kinds of people who [...]

Regardless of whether you want people to join your email list, make a purchase, follow you on social media or read the rest of an article, you’ll most likely need them to click on something. This “something” is how you call your visitors and readers to action. There are many ways to do this, and [...]

Facebook just unveiled a major overhaul to its news feed. The good news? You don’t really need to do anything and it can really help your business. Just like Facebook Graph Search can make your business page more visible without much effort from you, these news feed changes will make your page’s updates easier to [...]

Facebook’s new Graph Search can make your business’s Facebook page easier to find – and get you more visibility. But that’s only one function Graph Search can serve for your business. Graph Search can also give you fun and surprising insights about the likes and tastes of your customers, which you can use to make [...]

Facebook is making some changes. I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not like that time they changed your business’s Page to a Timeline and you had to re-think your entire Facebook strategy. Facebook is replacing their search function with Graph Search. It’s a more natural way to discover the things and places your friends [...]