The value of professional development

It’s a fact: Any serious professional worth their salt – in any industry – should be dedicated to ongoing professional development, skills enhancement, and lifelong learning. It provides those with experience expanded career opportunities, and make new professionals competitive quickly. And a comprehensive training program means faster onboarding of new staff. It’s what makes conferences, in-house training sessions, and professional certifications so valuable.

A recent poll by Kelton Global, on behalf of University of Phoenix, revealed that “nearly nine-in-ten (89 percent) working Americans believe there is still room for them to grow in their current careers, and can point to at least one skill they will need to learn to take their jobs to the next level.”

But with tight budgets and increased competition comes a heightened sensitivity to lost opportunities while away from the office, travel and lodging expenses, and a desire for quality training that moves fast. Read the rest of this entry »

SMX West is just around the corner, and there’s a lot of fascinating and business-critical fun to be had. We’re looking forward to three days of great talks, a little networking, and catching up with a lot of old friends. Plus maybe some stuff that’ll just have to stay in San Jose.

Everything at SMX is worth doing, of course, but if you want to hear what the Market Motive faculty has to offer, we’ve put together a crib sheet to guide you through the conference.… Continue reading

How binder manufacturers might spin the “Women in Binders” meme to their advantage, and help a worthy cause in the process.

What’s a company to do when they become the unwitting focus of a social meme?

How about playing along?

After one man’s tongue-in-cheek comment on the Bodyform Maxi Pads Facebook page went viral (he complained that their television commercials filled with ecstatic women enjoying monthly bicycle rides and roller coaster outings were misleading), Bodyform responded with their own comic video response.
“If Facebook had a ‘love’ button, we’d have clicked it. But it doesn’t. So we’ve made you a video instead.”
In the video, a faux CEO apologizes for misleading him, and admits that they’d done so because “some people just can’t handle the truth.”

That video itself now has over one million views. Way to leverage a meme, Bodyform! Read the whole story – and see the video – over on Mashable…

Now there’s a new meme, thanks to a comment from Mitt Romney in the last Presidential Debate. Women in Binders (or Binders of Women) is now a certified viral phenomenon.… Continue reading

There are lots of predictions for 2012, some more fantastic than others. Sure, there’s going to be change, but it needn’t be disastrous. Change, when you’re prepared for it, becomes opportunity.

So what kinds of changes in Online Marketing should you be preparing for?

Do a quick search for “online marketing trends in 2012″ and you’ll find plenty to read. Every marketer has their opinion, and they’re all offering prognostications in their particular areas of expertise: SEO, PPC, conversion, social media, or web analytics.

Those individual online marketing disciplines work best together: SEO and PPC put your message in front of searchers and motivated shoppers, conversion optimization turns those visitors into buyers, social media builds and maintains real relationships with those customers, and web analytics crunches the numbers and finds opportunities for data-driven improvement.

Where can you go for a qualified, single source presenting online marketing trends for 2012 from respected industry experts across all disciplines?

Right here.

We brought our faculty together here at Market Motive for a brainstorming session to talk about the trends online marketers should watch for in 2012. We brewed a pot of coffee, gathered around the conference table, freed up the white board, and each instructor offered up the top three trends they think you should know about during the coming year.… Continue reading

Gathering keyword data from organic Google searches just got a little more complicated. Here’s what you can do about it.

What’s Changed

On October 18, Google switched search for their logged in users to SSL (HTTPS). At first, this may not sound like much of an issue, but because of the way URLs are constructed when searching with SSL, analytics tools can’t track the keywords used. This means that if someone who is logged in to their Google account searches for “Market Motive”, one piece of information will be missing. Yes, we’ll still know that the person came from Google; but we won’t know the keyword they used. (Remember, this is only for users who are logged in to their Google account when they do their search.)

What You Can Do About It

You’ve got a client who wants their videos online and optimized. But they prefer Vimeo to YouTube.

Should you let them build their campaign on Vimeo? Recommend they  focus on YouTube? Or is a two-pronged approach in your client’s best interest?

That’s this week’s hot topic in the Market Motive discussion forum. And although I’ve already weighed in with the members on the forums, I thought I’d… Continue reading

How one online company is embracing the customer experience to instill confidence, improve conversions, generate referrals, and retain customers.

Lately I’ve been studying some of the new models for promoting local businesses online … daily deal websites in particular. I signed up for Groupon and Juice In The City deals and have been researching the types of businesses that promote through them.

One offer on Juice In The City caught my eye. It’s from a… Continue reading

What makes you stay on an email subscription list?

I posed this question to a few of our own subscribers and the answers were both surprising and expected.

The reasons they stay on had little to do with the subject line or the time of day we send our newsletters — we know these have more to do with the open rate. What keeps people subscribed boils down to one thing: The expectation of something valuable in the email.

In my email marketing course, I teach that there is a direct and inverse… Continue reading

Why domaining rarely works.

Ask an internet marketer “how many domains do you personally own?” Now ask, “How many have you developed?” Chances are the domains are simply parked, collecting dust. Successful domainers are like commodity traders — 98% fail.

Why do domainers usually fail?

Because it takes work. The idea that a great one-word domain like Cameras.com guarantees direct type-in traffic (and truckloads of money) is a myth. So is domain parking. And revshare. It takes a tremendous amount of real effort, research, and development to bring a site up in value. In the end, the… Continue reading

I’ll be sharing best practices for assessing and recovering banned sites this next Wednesday at WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas.

It’s pretty hard to get ‘accidentally’ banned by Google these days. Either someone reports your site for a borderline technique or you are knowingly pushing the boundaries and trigger a flag with the engines. In both cases, there is intent.

We’ve been through the process of advising our friends and clients for the recovery of hundreds of banned sites. It’s not always pretty, but I’ll share what we’ve learned in the process.

In this… Continue reading