When he beat Roger Federer in the recent Brisbane International, Leyton Hewitt managed to make himself look like a complete idiot, even though he'd won. Here's how not to accept an award - and why tennis players, too, need to add public speaking to their training schedules.  (image above: Fairfax Media).   Read more

Why make registering for a download an obstacle course?

One of our pet peeves is being confronted with the third degree every time we want to download an interesting resource. Why do companies who just want you on their lists ask more questions than a bank you want to borrow from?  Read more

What it is, why you need it, and how to get it right.

Marketing creates new buzzwords almost as often as fashion houses produce new styles. Content Marketing is one you bump into around every corner. Have you noticed that everyone is using the term as if they’d grown up with it? Are you still wondering what it means? There are manyanswers, mostly precise or uniform, so let’s cut through the nonsense and make sense of it.  Read more

After almost 2 decades of working with WWW, there are still many sites that have us looking for the nearest exit the instant we arrive. Now is the best time to check that your website is attracting visitors - not driving them away.   Read more

Everybody is doing it

Facebook, Twitter et al, once social platforms for people, have become marketing and advertising platforms for business. But success has been slow to follow. ‘Digital has changed marketing,’ says Fujitsu’s Simon Carter. ‘The economy has changed marketing. Bad weather changes marketing. So social media must have some effect. But my role as a B2B marketer is barely affected by social media. In 2013, I can’t see any results from social media yet.’  Read more

'Shopping Cart Abandonment' happens everywhere -- not just online

Do you know how many visitors come to your website or shop who are ready to buy - but leave instead? In the e-commerce world, Shopping Cart Abandonment is very common, but it happens in bricks-and-mortar shops too. Did you lose these customers because they just changed their minds  - or did your service or system change their minds for them?  Read more

‘2013 has proved to be an extremely turbulent year for search engine optimisation professionals,’ says one marketer.

Google tends to throw digital marketers into a complete spin every few months. Some run around proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh, while others write long and erudite blog posts on how to make a living after Panda, Penguin or Hummingbird. Others wonder if there’s a hidden message in the animals getting smaller and faster, and growing wings.  Read more

It’s not enough to be there and wave your flag

Experts in digital marketing are growing on trees these days; they talk the talk and most sound plausible. They claim their techniques will produce results, so how come we see more failures than results? When you look at the reasons, you might be surprised that most of them come back to Marketing 101.  Read more

What has changed?

A short summary with links to more detail.

A few weeks ago, Google decided to make all keyword searches secure, regardless of whether or not a searcher was logged into a Google account. In an instant, digital marketers were in the dark about which key words were effective in delivering searchers to their websites. Mind you, it wasn't all that sudden; we’ve been living with ‘not provided’ since Google introduced secure search for users of Gmail, Google Analytics, YouTube and Google Adwords a while back.  Read more

Without a unique value proposition, yours is just another business

Making your brand stand out is not a matter of coming up with a new logo and tagline. Sure, lots of big companies do that -- like banks, oil companies and telcos.  They’ll spend millions on a refresh, and millions more on advertising campaigns to support the new paint job. It’s a waste of money for the banks who’re already  branded as greedy and uncaring by customers who largely despise them.  Read more