My article encouraging people to avoid buying traffic and instead buy intent generated a fair amount of comments and thinking.
My friend Ralph Wilson just posted an interview we did together that I think does an even better job of clarifying my point.…
We all periodically receive emails from social apps requesting that we add a contact, confirm a contact is a convicted mass murderer, or that we trust a website to divulge the pecadilloes of everyone we know.
In the distant past we had only a few social media apps. Plaxo might have been the first business oriented one (am I wrong?) and LinkedIn got going eons ago. I'm a late adopter of such things, so I got into Facebook only about 6 months ago. Now it seems like a new social media app spams me every week.
Or: Three ways to get around misleading paid search reporting:
Most of us feel good when we see a positive ROI on our paid search campaigns. And most analytics tools give us plenty of opportunity to feel good about our campaigns.
But there is an inherent lie in the majority of PPC reporting tools, and that lie is based on the assumption that you have zero cost of goods. With few exceptions your products DO cost you something and thus any ROI analysis should be influenced by profit which in turn requires knowledge of margins.
When your campaign performance is measured by… Continue reading
During Webmaster World last week I had the opportunity to see what surely must be the best show in vegas : Blue Man Group. I've found other shows failed to meet the expectations I had. Not so in this case. The experience was moving and thought provoking.
The Blue Men are puzzled or indifferent to the physical world around them. They might be space aliens or time travelers. They might understand some of the world they see, and choose to remain above it, or they really don't grasp it at all. One can imagine a future in which human interaction… Continue reading
To the speakers who still reveal how it really works. Neil, Rand, Aaron, Todd, and others kept the spirit of Pubcon by sharing some raw, unfiltered truths of how things really work in SEO, social media and SEM.
To Joe Morin for arranging for us to see… Continue reading 
It wasn't too hard to figure out how to fool the Adwords Bot into thinking every page was relevant (I'll show you how). But (warning, spoiler ahead) in the end, this exercise simply came back to a clever way to create relevance among keyword, ad copy, landing page and adgroup semantic grouping -- which is good marketing in the first place. So there you go. It'll be informative, I promise.
But what might… Continue reading You can't beat a good cliché, especially when mangled.
Anyway, a Future Now survey of online retailers illustrates just how dire most online retail sites truly are. We all know it's true. They (we) could do so much better. Those that try just a little bit are held up as shining beacons of mediocrity.
Recommended reading if you run a retail site.…
Bryan Eisenberg Alan Rimm-Kaufman
Bryan and Alan fulfill the vision of the "Internet Marketing Dream Team" whose purpose is to teach our members how to be successful in online… Continue reading
