Two months into this new year, marketing can still feel too much like a round of Russian roulette. The Capitol riots and, more recently, the implications of February’s polar vortex added to an already exasperated nation dealing with sickness, joblessness, and unprecedented social isolation. It’s no wonder some brands continue to pull back on advertising. They’re struggling to know what to say and how to say it. Read More

Here’s why you’ll never look at blogs the same again.

What’s his story? What’s her story? What’s your story? Hey, want to hear a good story?

Of course you do. We all want to hear a good story. We have since we were children.

Oh, the Places Your Brand Will Go: Why Parents Should Read to Their Children, and Why Your Business Should Care

Here’s a fun stat: Kids who are read one short book per day enter kindergarten hearing 290,000 more words than kids whose parents didn’t read to them. Read More

I ran across this post today and really like it. Sometimes in the day-to-day stress of the job we need a little reminder.
Treat clients like friends:

Understand they have bad days, good days, days they need you and days they need to be left alone
Give them a second chance if they make a mistake
Give them a hand when you can
They have different levels of knowledge (sometimes you have to walk them through things)
Show them something new, Read More

We all know that SEO is critically important. People make billions of unique searches each month. So search engines drive a lot of traffic. But the content on your site must, first and foremost, be compelling (and readable) to the people who are reading it or you’re wasting your time.
Use your keywords, in context, within the text of your page. Repeat the keyword, in context, throughout the text.  But don’t simply repeat the keyword over and over again because it makes you sound like an idiot or a sufferer of some kind of obscure tourettes syndrome and it sends people running for the hills. Read More

SEOmoz has posted a great list of a few things to do with Google Analytics in order to get more out of the tool. Some of the tips are basic and some are advanced, but all help you to better understand what’s happening with your site and the visitors to it. And that’s very important to your digital marketing efforts.
Topics covered include:

Use regular expressions for fine-tuning your traffic analysis
Make sure your analytics code is installed correctly
Segment your funnels
Track SEO variables
Track form abandonment

Read the full article here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-quick-google-analytics-hacks Read More

Most people use three different sentence formats when they write. With only these three variations your writing can get monotonous. If you expand your repertoire to include six additional sentence formats your writing will automatically seem more sophisticated and be more appealing to the reader. Don’t let the “grammar” scare you, once you read the examples it all starts to make sense. Here are the different formats that can transform your writing and they’re very simple to master if you use these guidelines:
Main clause: subject + verb + completers

Jeremiah walked home. Read More

Send your cover letter and resume with clear direction as to which department you are interested in joining. When letters come in saying the writer wants a job “anywhere” in an ad agency it is clear that they don’t know the business well enough to know where they fit in. Read More