When writing direct mail it is vital that you understand what direct mail is and how is intended to work. Direct mail is in essence a written brochure with a twist. It is a form of direct-response advertising, but unlike other printed ads it has the added goal of asking the reader to follow a [...]

One of the most fundamental rules in marketing when taking on a competitor it to always understand your strengths and your competition’s weaknesses. When hired to develop a marketing for a client that wishes to challenge a competitor(s) position in the market, I first evaluate the company’s strengths and weaknesses and look for all the [...]

First you must analyze Wikipedia’s existing content to determine what has already already been written about your topic. It helps to read everything that you can find on Wikipedia and conduct site-based searches at Google for any pages in Wikipedia that includes your main phrases. You are basically looking for information gaps that can be [...]

I was recently hired to create a custom brand for a city-wide community visioning workshop. The idea was to create a custom event brand and use effective marketing strategies to create a sense of “newness” and community buy-in and trust in the event.
I decided to write about this experience and branded events to highlight [...]

If you have ever done a search for “auto insurance quote” and clicked on any of the sponsored ads, you may have noticed that the sites have a lot in common. These type of pages are called landing pages, or lead capture pages.
In online marketing a landing page is a page that appears when a [...]

Adding Google Earth video into PowerPoint presentations is a great way to enhance your presentation and give a more ‘interactive’ looking show.
Adding a Google Earth video to a PowerPoint presentation is very easy, if you do it correctly. If you simply try to insert movie from file, you will likely run into problems or [...]

Using Google Trends, you can compare the search traffic for your industry’s main phrases. Google Trends also displays data on how often specific topics appear in the news. It can even tell you which geographic regions have searched for phrase the most often.
This data can tell you a lot about your industry and [...]

I came across this heat-map at Google today:

This “heat map” illustrates these ideal placements for content on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance).