Today’s topic is all about using blog (or forum) comments to drive qualified traffic to your site, and how to begin the persuasion process.  It’s an interesting topic for me since I read nearly every comment that gets left on my GrokDotCom posts.

Note: before you read further, understand that this post is NOT about how to use blog comments as a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactic.  This post is about how to use blog comments to begin an…

...continue to read "How to Use Blog Comments for Persuasion: Dos & Donts"

We all know from experience that it’s difficult to get ahead in the online world without spending on marketing in one way or another.  Since it’s hard to be the expert at everything in the online marketing industry, outsourcing expertise ends up being the most efficient strategy. Now, you just need to balance your limited budget so that you spend your marketing dollars in a way that realizes the highest return on your investments (ROI).

These are some of the questions…

...continue to read "Where to Spend Your Marketing Dollars in 2010"

Yesterday, Brendan Regan and myself were looking into a client’s marketing efforts in Google Analytics and found something extremely disturbing–they were using Google’s AdWords content targeting as their primary means of paid traffic. Nearly half of their traffic was coming through paid search, and of that half, around 80% was content targeting. In comparison to the rest of the site, page visits were down 37%, time on site was down 20%, and their bounce rate was up 40% .  There’s no…

...continue to read "Content Targeting: Helpful Tool or Money Pit?"

Last week, I posted Part 1 of my book review of Steven Wood’s Digital Body Language book.  It covered how the landscape of B2B, complex sales, and marketing has changed because of rapid developments in the Online world, and what the Digital Body Language (DBL) concept is.

In this post, I’ll wrap up by covering some of the benefits you can get if you learn to observe and leverage DBL, as well as some of the author’s ideas about the future of…

...continue to read "B2B Marketing Book Review and Commentary, Part 2"

I recently finished up a darn good book on B2B marketing called Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World. It was written by Steven Woods, who co-founded the ‘marketing automation platform’ vendor, Eloqua, in 1999.

I’m going to attempt to summarize, review, and add some commentary as it pertains to how we at FutureNow use this concept of ‘digital body language’ to increase the marketing effectiveness of lead generation sites.

First off, I would say that the title of…

...continue to read "B2B Marketing Book Review and Commentary, Part 1"

Early this morning, I was woken up by a constant pinging sound coming from my Blackberry.  Yes, I know I could turn it to silent or even off, but what can I say, I’m attached (they don’t call them “crackberries” for nothing).  After a few more hours of tossing and turning, I woke up to review the 47 new emails I’d been receiving since 4:30am.  I didn’t find a note from Grammy, or a funny story from…

...continue to read "Email Feng Shui: The Unsubscribe Option"

This post is designed to get your creative juices flowing when it comes to leveraging your Unique Value Proposition (UVP).

For those who aren’t familiar with the phrase, we at FutureNow define Unique Value Proposition as: The brief, memorable phrase that concisely and powerfully describes the value of your business and creates excitement in the prospect.  The value proposition is not a slogan or a phrase designed for advertising, although that is one potential use for it.  Instead, its…

...continue to read "Take Your Unique Value Proposition to the Next Level"

Seth’s blog post on “Things to ask before you redo your website” is a must read for everyone involved in online marketing.   Seriously.  If you haven’t seen it yet, go read it now.

What I love most about this list is the way it segregates into sub-components or elaborations on Future Now’s  three questions that are the basis of Persuasion Architecture:

1) Who is coming to the site?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

3) What…

...continue to read "Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!"

When you think of improving your web site’s conversion rate, you probably think of increasing sales or leads online. The “clicks’ are the actions you are tracking as conversions for your web site.

One of my clients from over a year ago, was successfully implementing our recommendations. He was seeing increases in his conversion rate, measuring success in “clicks”, or more orders being completed online. After speaking with one of his customer service reps one day, I was informed that her…

...continue to read "Track Calls, Not Just Clicks"

Human nature hasn’t changed and neither have the priorities required for successfully conveying your message.

Contrary to common opinion, David Ogilvy didn’t have a preference for long copy.

What he had was an overwhelming bias towards anything that had been proven to work (which included long copy).  Ogilvy’s real, professed preferences were for consumer testing, research-driven techniques, and performance-based advertising in the truest sense of the term.

Based on those things, the conclusion he came to was that messaging and relevance had…

...continue to read "Tests Indicate Ogilvy’s Old-School Layout Still a Winner"