By Daniel Goldstein

Your website may be duplicating its own content without you even realizing it – and thereby possibly causing negative effects on your search-engine marketing performance.

Say that you are a company that sells widgets. One of your pages will list all of the widgets, say, by price in descending order while another will show them grouped by color. Most of the time, each specific widget will have its own product description – and therefore all of the product descriptions will be the same on both of the aforementioned pages. In other words, both of the pages of your website will have the same content.  Read more...

One of the things I’ve always advocated when consulting clients or internally is to measure business outcomes, not just activities.

Digital marketing has actually made tracking actual business results much easier and much more accountable than print or telephone channels.

In digital marketing, this requires web analytics. There are several types of analytics, but the most popular is click-stream, which tracks actual clicks and visits.

Many of us have Google Analytics or other click-stream tracking set up … but many of us probably have never checked it.

This is a huge mistake. By measuring our web data, we can:  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

Have you ever sat at a restaurant table, opened the menu, and then saw that there was something approaching fifty options? If you’re like me, it probably took you ten minutes or longer just to make a choice: “Well, I haven’t had steak in a while… but the chicken looks delicious! Wait, but what about the smoked salmon…? Oh… I don’t know what to order!”  Read more...

By Daniel Goldstein

If you live in the Boston area, you have a chance to win a free Dunkin’ Donuts deli-sandwich each day this month – if you use your smartphone to take pictures or answer trivia questions through the company’s mobile applications. Orvis, an outdoor-apparel firm, is engaging loyal customers through smartphone apps designed for the upcoming holiday season. Frozen-yogurt franchise Yumilicious is sending tailored promotions and loyalty offers to customers’ mobile phones.

These are just a few examples of companies that recognize the forthcoming dominance of mobile-based marketing.

What is your marketing department doing?  Read more...

If you owned a store and no one came to the store, you would worry. You wouldn’t say, “Well, I did my job. I opened up my store. There’s even merchandise here and a semi-functioning cash register. Someone who really wants to buy can.”

If that was the case, you would wonder what was wrong. Perhaps you would invest in a promotional campaign: maybe take out an advertisement, contact local media to try to get a story, give a sales discount, offer a Groupon or Living Social coupon, or pass out fliers in the parking lot.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

You might already know that companies that blog generally have more-consistent sales. But did you know that start-ups that blog and use related public-relations effectively have a better chance of attracting angel investors as well?

In today’s financial climate, it can be extremely difficult to obtain seed investment – so every available and relevant resource needs to be directed, at least in part, towards that end. Inc.com writer Matthew DeLuca understands this point well:

Edward Williams, partner at Brook Venture Partners, says that he looks at all the standard data when considering an investment, but treats blogs a little differently.  Read more...