Especially with a company’s first website, navigation is designed based on what the company wants people to know.  This is often compounded by the lack of a real, organized plan for how the site should flow.  The result is a site that’s hard to navigate, with links that lead to dead ends or pages that…

Captchas — those little boxes with hard-to-read words or combinations of letters you encounter online — are there to make sure you’re a real human.  What they actually do is make sure you’re frustrated, especially if you’re on a mobile device, as more and more online traffic is.  In fact, it’s fair to say that…

Whether you use them to prospect for new customers or to deepen relationships with the ones you have, special events are an overlooked marketing tactic.  And joining forces with non-competing companies who are targeting the same market is even more often overlooked.  But a joint event lets you share resources and costs, while aligning your…

If you’re in sales, there’s nothing quite as frustrating as having a prospect who clearly needs what you provide and clearly prefers to buy from you, only to find when you present pricing that you’re far beyond their budget.  This is true whether you’re making a small sale to a consumer or a big one…

Especially for a company with a tight marketing budget, e-mail marketing is the cost-effective way to build brand awareness and drive repeat traffic to your website.  How much effort have you put into building your e-mail list?  Here are three simple tactics that can have a big impact on the number of sign-ups you receive. …

If you’re responsible for marketing, here’s some good news.  Most of what’s out there is mediocre.  Most websites.  Most billboards.  Most TV spots.  Most social media efforts.  Most e-mail campaigns.  Most print ads.  Why is that good news?  Because it means that the bar is set pretty low.  It means that if your message has…

We hear this question all the time: “How do we market ourselves when there are five competitors doing the exact same thing we do?”  You can guess what the answer is, can’t you?  If they’re really doing exactly what you do, exactly the way you do it, you can’t compete — at least not very…

If you’re trying to generate ideas for anything — new products, new services, marketing tactics — there’s a way to make your time more productive.  Set yourself a specific goal, and write it down.  If you’re trying to come up with ideas for blog posts, write the numbers one through twelve down the side of…

If you go to a conference with several speakers, you talk a lot about the ones who “wowed” you; you seldom even remember those who didn’t.  Public speaking can be a fantastic tool to help promote yourself and your business, but it only works if you’re one of the memorable ones.  If you speak –…

We all know that the search engines are drawn to websites that are rich in content.  But for many companies, the prospect of creating that content just seems too daunting a task, and so it’s left undone.  So here’s a first step.  Whether you do this yourself or sit down with others in your company,…