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Smart Marketing: Is It Time to Wean Yourself Off Of AdWords?
AdWords is one of those marketing tools that sounds much better in theory than it behaves in practice, at least for many companies. The initial selling points are compelling: Visibility on Google, the...
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Why Inbound Marketing is Simply the Next Phase in an Ancient Discipline
Marketing is as old as commerce itself. Most business history literature will describe marketing as a discipline that grew out of economics studies in the early 20th Century, and for most research...
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A TV Station In Your Pocket: Will Periscope Be A Net Positive For Marketers?
The new age of mobile streaming live video is only about two months old, but the potential this technology affords us is so apparent that I’m totally fine using the phrase “new age.” Meerkat and...
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It’s Not the Bot’s Fault: Hidden Costs of Marketing Automation
From time to time, I get caught up in these awkward exchanges on Twitter that are brought about entirely because someone got too clever with his/her social media automation. Here’s what happens:...
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Lies, Mistakes and Outright Plagiarism: How to Catch Dangerous Errors When...
As more and more newsroom refugees move over to content marketing, and as more companies understand that they are now media outlets themselves, we as an industry are having to relearn the big lessons...
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Be More Valuable: Our Evolving Content Strategy
As a small agency, we constantly have to evaluate the work that we do and find ways to make it better. At the root of this evolution is a push to always create more value for our readers. Creating...
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Positive Crosstalk: 50 Facebook Advertising Experts You Should Follow on Twitter
Content marketing and advertising have the ability to reinforce one another, and Facebook’s ad platform is uniquely positioned to amplify that relationship. Whatever your campaign, a significant...
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New Content Now: 23 Content Generation Tools To Start Using Today
With the significance of content generation more prevalent than ever, letting your blog or social media accounts stagnate can spell certain doom. Still, if you’ve mined through all of your available...
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Advanced Copywriting Tips: 5 Mental Mistakes That Can Doom Your PPC Ads
Banner ads, PPC ads and social media ads are so deceptive. Especially from a copywriting perspective, they seem so easy to create. How hard can three lines of text be, anyway? That’s the classic...
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Top 20 Affiliate Programs You May Not Be Using Yet
Our team does a lot of research into various markets, which introduces us to a wide variety of niches and affiliate programs. This research leads to us compiling tons and tons of data that might not...
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You Won’t Convert Paid Traffic Without Understanding User Intent
This post will reach across a variety of marketing disciplines. Understanding the user’s intent behind each keyword has become a matter of best practice among SEOs. The organic traffic marketers who...
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WordPress Security: Is Your Site Vulnerable?
Very few people in the course of human history have known the frustration of waking up to find the nonprofit website they manage hacked and covered in Viagra ads. (True story.) Such is the nature of...
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The Image Shoppe Releases “Lake Michigan Beach Guide”
Our colleagues and friends at The Image Shoppe, just released a beautiful new mini-site and e-book: Lake Michigan Beach Guide. They explain: Because we’re so partial to Lake Michigan, we wanted to...
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Taking the Long View on Snapchat Marketing: A Guide for Businesses
Snapchat is an alluring platform for marketers, especially when they have a brand they’d like to get in front of younger Millennials, Snapchat’s primary user base. The company has been fairly...
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Outbrain Marketing: Best Practices, Plus 4 Sly Tactics to Supercharge Your...
Doing quality work won’t necessarily earn you an audience. Virtually no one knew who Vincent van Gogh was, for example, until after he died. It turns out even transcendent work needs a little nudge to...
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Earned Media Trumps Ads: How to Get Press Coverage for Your Business
Attention — it’s so valuable that drill sergeants ask for it by name. At the most basic level, attention is what all marketers and PR professionals are after. It’s a fundamental requirement for being...
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Trade Show Marketing: 17 Tips That Will Attract Prospects and Build Real Value
Trade shows are great places to build out your network and connect with potential customers — if you come prepared with a real strategy. Many participants and attendees don’t, however. These are the...
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20 Chicago Software Companies to Watch in the Second Half of 2016
It’s been a big 18 months for startups and software companies in Chicago. In 2015, local startups raised more than $1.7 billion in funding, Built In Chicago reports, and the tech industry has kept its...
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The Rules Have Changed: SEO Writing for Small Business Owners
For most companies, the majority of your web traffic will probably come from search engines. Maybe those site visitors searched the name of your company, or maybe they searched a topic related to the...
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Don’t Always Be Closing: Why B2B Companies Need Sales Funnel Content
One of marketing’s great insights over the last 20 years is that the act of buying something is best described as a journey. Instead of thinking of a purchase as a single transaction, we now think...
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