All the recent buzz about Steve Jobs got me to thinking about some things lately.  I can't say that I have always been an early adopter, but I at least tend to stay near the leading edge of technology.

Hubspot's recent market survey on the state of Inbound Marketing for 2011 reveals some interesting trends in marketing spend validating the importance of inbound marketing as a low cost lead generator.  Consumers are becoming immune to uninvited communications and wish to be left to their own methods when going through the buying decision process.  It's about control, and the consumer is now the one who now has the power of choice in what information is received.

We'll admit it.  We're a small business, just like many of you out there, with the same challenges and daily struggles.  We've got lots of plates in the air, and quite honestly we tend to operate by Tyranny of the Urgent.  In the process, the things that we teach often get overlooked by ourselves - aka the "cobbler's children" syndrome.

We've been struggling (and you have too, we're sure) with an easy way to post blogs that is familiar and un-intimidating. We think we've found a solution, and this email will be a testament to that. Look for more info on this in later posts.

In my consulting endeavors for large companies, I have often observed disdain and sometimes even contention between marketing and IT.  Even though they both support the same common business objectives, it seems that neither one believes that they can be effective partners in the process.  And now with the move toward a higher concentration of digital marketing in the mix, IT believes that it should be the one in the driver's seat.  The real question here is:  who's driving the strategy?  And without a command directive from the supreme leader (i.e. CEO, President, etc.), strategy and tactics will go their own way churning up time, resources, and energy.

We recently finished a project for a company that specializes in loss prevention for restaurants.  Our methods involve getting deeply intimate with our clients business to understand their processes and goals.  Believe me, we got a really good education on what happens behind the scenes to cause profit loss in a restaurant.

We've been "doing" websites for over a decade now, and have seen some pretty interesting changes and advancements along the way.  Personally, I started with Dreamweaver.  Being familiar with page layout programs, I had to really adjust my thinking when it came to the HTML way of life. 

From time to time we get asked about "experts" that promise to get your website to appear on page one of Google's search results.  Our first question in response is usually "for what keywords or phrases?"  The answer is usually something like "I dunno." 

If you listen to marketers, you'll hear the mantra repeated about the face of marketing in today's world.  Now I could go on myself about this, but I came across an article from Jeffrey Gitomer about this very topic.  If you don't subscribe to his sales ranting newsletter, I highly recommend it.  Many times he talks about back to the basics topics, but we find that a lot of our clients benefit by reviewing the basics of their business, especially when considering a new website.

In a previous post, I talked about a couple of simple administrative things that could destroy a website.  Once site administration is under control, the next thing to address is content.  Content is king on the internet today, and setting yourself up with the right tools to always have fresh content is critical if you want your site to retain the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) rankings you've worked so hard to achieve.