In the Japanese martial arts, there’s an aphorism worth noting: on ko chi shin, “study something old to learn something new”. When you’re starving for new creative ideas for your content marketing, a step into the past might be called for. Let’s specifically look at the golden age of newspaper advertising, from about 1880 to…
What one mental trait, what one mental gap separates out successful marketers and businesspeople from mediocre or poor ones? In the modern economy, I’d argue that the gap can be described in a simple phrase: “I can figure this out.” Why is this tiny mantra so important? The phrase separates out those people who are…
The world of marketing has increasingly become a 0-day, real-time world. Events happen, news scrolls by, memes catch fire – and the savvy marketer has to be able to catch the waves as nimbly as a professional surfer. None of this is news, or shouldn’t be news to you. What is worth thinking about is…
With all of the recent discussion about ending comments on your blog due to the spam problem, I thought it would make sense to do a very quick round up of the tools that are available to us as bloggers to keep our blogs relatively free of garbage. There are four levels of defense you…
It’s funny. I write about marketing, social media, business strategy, and productivity a ton. But make one mention of a strawberry tower and the Interwebs light up like a Christmas tree with people wanting to know more. Message received, my friends. Let’s dig into this fun construction project. First, what is a strawberry tower? Simply…
I woke up with a to-do list over the weekend that looked something like this. Make yogurt Do laundry Build strawberry tower Make coffee Do dishes If I put the time each task required on it, it’d basically be a full day’s work. Make yogurt: 12 hours Do laundry: 2 hours Build strawberry tower: 2…
One of the things I hear people say most often is, “I want to learn how to do X”, whether X is learning how to code, how to cook, how to be a better marketer, and this statement is almost immediately followed by the sentence, “but I don’t know how to get started”. You can,…
One of the topics I was asked about recently by Vocus was about the influence of visual content. I wanted to add some color to my original remarks, which you can find here. Visual content is the fancypants new term for what we used to call rich media, and it’s in fact a subset of…
Here’s a simple, painful truth: the free ride in social media marketing is over. We’ve known that this was coming for some time – there’s no such thing as a free lunch in the long-term, though there are the occasional free snacks. But the days of dining at someone else’s expense? Over. Facebook is almost…
Google made a very important announcement about AdWords and its offline conversion tracking tool a little while back. Put simply, it issues a click ID on every ad click that is sent to your website so that you can then take any leads generated and track them by that click, then eventually upload that click…
