From the category archives:

Digital Marketing

Got A Business? Show Off Your Best Customer With A Foursquare Widget

by Bob Hazlett on January 17, 2010

PlaceWidget gives an interactive widget to add to your company’s website for showing off your best Fousquare guest. What a great way to spread the word about your business and offer up special deals to customers, and to coax them to check in regularly.

The widget displays the Foursquare mayor along with their picture. It also shows tips for that venue that Foursquare users leave about what to try, buy, or do at that particular location.

The widget is easy to setup. Find your Foursquare business location, determine your widget size and the site spits out some Javascript code to paste into your site. Right now, they only offer skyscraper size banners, but a WordPress plugin is rumored to be coming soon that will allow you to customize your widget. via TechCrunch

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Digital Marketing Haiku – Always Be Testing

by Bob Hazlett on January 13, 2010

Want to convert me?
Big buttons, clear and concise.
Always be testing.

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Opticana Eyewear’s Clever Marketing Campaign

by Bob Hazlett on January 10, 2010

Opticana Eyewear took a $500 online marketing budget, bought 10 misspelled domains and used them to offer users a special coupon. Buying misspelled is nothing new, but I like how they tied this back to poor vision. Very clever.

How could you use this same strategy with other businesses?

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Integrating SEO Into Your E-Mail Marketing

by Bob Hazlett September 9, 2009

SEOMoz did a great Whiteboard Friday video on using SEO to grow and expand your e-mail marketing list. Here’s the synopsis and corresponding video.
Step 1 – Attract the Right Audience
Target keyword searches in which users are looking to find out more or discover information related to your product or industry.
Step 2 – Deliver Compelling [...]

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5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009

by Bob Hazlett August 24, 2009

5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009 via ReadWrite Web
Sentiment Analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to a particular topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the [...]

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San Jose Mercury News To Charge For Online Content and Why it’s Doomed to Fail

by Bob Hazlett May 19, 2009

via O’Reilly Radar
San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content — congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it’s this. This business model didn’t fail in 1998 because there weren’t enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product [...]

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Online Marketing and Social Media Week in Review – January 31st

by Bob Hazlett January 31, 2009

In case you were too busy giving birth to 8 kids this week, here are some of the highlights you missed.
Advertisers are mashing online and offline events. This week Facebook partnered with AT&T to stream a live Lil’ Wayne concert and Sunday Pepsi is hosting and online Super Bowl Party. {NOTE: I wonder how you [...]

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Online Marketing and Social Media Week in Review

by Bob Hazlett January 23, 2009

In case you were too busy being inaugurated, here’s what you missed last week;

Belkin got caught paying people to write fake Amazon reviews of their products.

YouTube is expanding functionality to include links to the iTunes store. Currently only available in Europe, but could a monetization ‘buy this video’ option be too far behind?
Pepsi asked high [...]

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Quick Online Marketing Tip – Update Your Negative Keywords

by Bob Hazlett January 22, 2009

Originally posted January 15, 2009
As budgets get tighter, take 20 minutes today to update your paid search negative keywords. Negative keywords are those irrelevant or low converting keywords that you add to a pay-per-click campaign which tell the ad system not to show your ad when that particular keyword appears in a search.
To start, do [...]

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Using Video In Your E-Commerce Site to Spice Up Sales

by Bob Hazlett January 22, 2009

Originally posted October 28, 2008
While the internet is great for commerce, there are still elements of the brick-and-mortar world that customers crave. Engagement, customer service and human interaction are hard to replicate through a website. Video is a great way to add more of a human side to your online presence. Here are 3 quick [...]

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Lessons in Online Marketing – Make Sure Your Form Works

by Bob Hazlett September 11, 2008

Check out the image below, its from Rhodes College. While looking for some adult education classes I came across their form for a free class catalog. The only (and big) thing wrong with it is that it requires a CAPTCHA to process your request. The issue in this example is that the CAPTCHA image is [...]