I’m not a big fan of redundancy, especially on social media. Under normal circumstances, if you have good plugins and widgets properly placed on your blog, there’s no reason to have others. If you want to annoy me with a blog post, put an inline plugin, a floating plugin, and another one at the bottom. Oh, and throw in a “Share It” widget just in case three ways to…

Finding the right channel partners is essential when starting a new business that relies on relationships. That's why it gives me great pleasure to announce the first Dealer Authority partnership with a long-standing and respected company, Internet Marketing and Consulting Services (…

What? WHAT!?!? There have to be required fields on contact forms, right? There have been required fields on contact forms for two decades. Nothing could have changed so quickly that they have become unnecessary, right?

Actually, they're no longer necessary. In fact, they're a hindrance. Here's why:

People aren't stupid

Seriously,…

The next age of advertising is right around the corner. With Google's announcement of +Post ads, we…

There was a cry that was heard amongst many in the search engine optimization world on April 24th, 2012, as if thousands of SEOs suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. It was the day that Google Penguin broke link-building...

...or at least that's…

The merging of search, social, and content marketing into a single digital marketing strategy has been happening for years. Intuitively, many of us have been guided by this fact to create the type of strategies that bring the disciplines together appropriately. As the evolution of the three reach a tipping point that is breaking down a good chunk of the practices of…

Statistics can be a wonderful thing. They can show us information that can guide our decisions and bring us to see things in better focus. They can distract us, taking us down an incorrect path based upon lack of understanding. They can entertain us.

This infographic from Yoda London can likely do any of the three. As with any set of numbers, if you torture…

There are those who have been spreading (indefinitely, it seems) the thought that SEO is dead. It never ends, the thought (hope?) that search engine optimization has reached its conclusion. The main reason for these calls is, of course, when “experts” in search marketing start to find that their…

There’s a fundamental psychology behind visualizations that make them work. Reading is fine. Audio and video are often the best. When data must be seen and engulfed in order to make an impact, this is where infographics have their niche in our attentions.

In this very simple infographic from…

There's a rule when it comes to handling complaints and bad reviews on social media. The same rule applies for compliments and good reviews, but those are easy. Handling the complaints can be challenging and you may not want to do it, but as a rule you must reply to everyone who is talking to you publicly whether it's good or bad.

This is an…

There have been and always will be right and wrong ways to go about marketing on Facebook. The only things that change are the ways to go about doing the "right" things. While some would say there are no rules on social media, there are definitely best practices to do and poor practices to avoid.

In this infographic by…

If you're reading this, you're probably failing at social media image marketing. That's not me being cynical. By examining dozens of business social media presences every week, I get to see what so many are doing and the unfortunate fact is that 9 out of 10 are doing it wrong or not doing it at all. I'm being conservative with that estimate.

The "unfortunate"…

In the ever-changing world of online marketing, one of the tools that has stayed relatively consistent in its results over the past few years is the infographic. I remember first getting started with building and marketing infographics back in 2008. Things haven't changed a whole lot since then.

Two things that have definitely changed are the saturation and…

"ROI" and "KPI" are the longest sustained buzzwords in the world of marketing. They've been around forever and while they might fade for a short period of time from the talking points in sales presentations and blog posts, they always bounce back up with a vengeance. We're on the high-buzz portion of the cycle right now and more people are asking again, "How can I…

Let's state this for the record. I am not convinced that using the new image features on Twitter is the best way to go when it comes to marketing your business. It still smells too much like spam and if it's not handled properly it could do more harm than good.

With that said, there are definitely instances when it could do VERY well,…

Many of us who have been doing the hybrid search/social game for long enough remember what it was like to discover Tumblr. I got in pretty early and was able to get Social News as one of my Tumblogs, a pretty decent subdomain that is…

I know the feeling. Despite having worked every weekend for the last two years, I know the desire to let it all go and just focus on the important things in life like faith and family. I'll get there, someday, but you can get there now and still be strong at social media management.

See, the challenge is that social media for business is ever-so important.…

Presence is 50% of the game when it comes to social media. You have to be in front of people, accessible, and able to bring to them the other half of the social media equation: message.

A message without a presence brings to mind the old saying about a tree falling in an empty forest. If a Facebook post goes out and nobody saw it in their news feed, did it really get posted at all?…

In an ideal world, you're the social media and content manager for your company. You spend eight hours a day harnessing the power of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ while developing content for your blog and YouTube channels. It's tough, but you're making it happen.

In the real world, you're probably responsible for a ton of different…

It's that time of year, again. We're going to eat a lot of different foods that we rarely eat the rest of the year and we're going to hear a lot of predictions about the future of marketing. The future, of course, is made up of a ton of digital marketing practices. Every year, it gets bigger. Every year, there are more options.

It can actually get…