According to copywriting legend Eugene Schwartz, a headline’s main job isn’t to sell; it’s to gain the readers attention and compel them to read the ad.  And this is sound advice, but the Internet also requires one other thing in today’s web 2.0 copy world… Step 1. Scent: Web copy add...

There has been plenty of hot air blown into the bubble that’s getting ready to burst on Internet marketers again. I watched it happen the first time. With all the financial chaos crashing around us now, the last we need is the blind ignorance of the “new economy” happening again. E...

If you’ve been to one of our trainings over the past few years, or seen any of us present at a conference, you’ve probably heard the line about the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer being less than the gestation period of an elephant.  Well, it’s time for some new materi...

My Amazon habit goes way back. I joined Amazon Prime as soon as they started the program. If some villain wanted to take away my Amazon he would have to pry my mouse from cold dead hands Maybe I’m being overly dramatic but you get the point. I no longer think about the selection, convenience, serv...

Holidays or no holidays, there’s simply less money to go around. As obvious as that statement is, many still seem to deny the obvious implication: you won’t keep profit margins healthy unless you actively take business away from someone – either from direct competitors, or from businesses outs...

Click here to view the embedded video. When Michael Lewis wrote his article on Coach Leach and the Texas Tech Football program, that program was known as an offensive powerhouse that relied on sheer scoring power to outgun opponents.  Its defense wasn’t mentioned in that article, and one can only...

Tom Peters called it “…the best article on business strategy I’ve ever read,â€� and advised his blog subscribers to “read every damn word.â€� And Tom isn’t alone in considering Michael Lewis’s sports writing to be a hidden treasure; just look at this marketing-based analysis of his b...

Just before his keynote presentation at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto the other week, Search Engine Watch executive editor Kevin Heisler caught up with FutureNow co-founder Bryan Eisenberg to chat about website optimization, split-testing, word-of-mouth marketing, social commerc...

Last week, the online world was jolted with something we all thought was impossible: Amazon.com went down. Outages happen all the time, but there is a scale at which this becomes amazingly rare and the amount of time of the outage was surprising. 30 minutes to two hours doesn’t sound like a lo...

Yesterday’s visit to the Omniture Industry Insights blog gave me a one-stop-shop for fodder on marketing optimization tactics and strategy worth sharing (and a personal opportunity to apologize to boot!). First up, John Broady writes about 5 fundamentals for improving the ROI from landing page...