MarCom Professional

Here’s a quick look at some fairly obvious keyword terms - the first figure shows the search volume in the UK for June 2008 and the second figure the expected cost per click for a 1 - 3 ad position. More...

The excellent Jason Baer at the Convince and Convert blog makes some very good observations as to why this is going to have a big impact on digital marketing. In particular when he says:

“If Google makes the marketing and advertising business as transparent as travel planning and stock purchases, the only agencies that will be able to survive are those that can add real value in messaging, creative, and integrating data into actionable tactics.”

I would of course include PR in the above too. More...

(In tune with the zeitgeist, he says he was prompted to write the piece after he made a Twitter comment about his traffic/contributor analysis - and I and others asked him for more detail).

Specifically, he highlights things that he believes freelance writers will need to consider and change their working practices to incorporate. If you substitute the term “PR” for freelance writer, much the same principles apply.

For example, on SEO, Chris says: “This is key to the future of online publishing. More...

What about £300K a month? There probably isn’t a PR account in the country that would come close to this kind of spend.

Guess what. Search marketing agencies are now beginning to command that kind of expenditure. Some will (rightly) argue that much of this is going on PPC campaigns ie the actually revenue and profit claimed by the agency on this will be a smaller percentage. However, in spite of this, the bigger search marketing firms are clearly achieving much better margins than most PR firms. More...

People often ask me about search engine optimization. In particular, many ask what search engine marketing techniques they can use on their site to "get high rankings."

Inevitably with most of these requests, I find that the site that they want optimized sucks. It's poorly written. It goes on and on in an egotistical way about what the company's products do. It's filled with gobbledygook.

I tell these people that they need to understand buyers and create some great content that people want to consume. That way, they will get high rankings as the search engine algorithms reward the great content. More...

Well, I’m now one of them. And what a revelation. This book works on so many levels. First, it is easily the most practical and informative book on the subject of web analytics. Which would make it valuable in its own right. But perhaps more than that, he outlines a practical blueprint for a data driven, outcome based approach to business generally. More...