When I was a kid in grade school, if your penmanship was up to par, you were given a straight pen. My guess is most people today have never used a straight pen or even a fountain pen. You really have to be ancient or a pen freak to bother. But what I remember most, is the frustration of using a new nib, it seemed to take forever to get it working by cleaning the nib and priming it with ink. Without priming the nib first all you had was a pointed stick, useless for writing, let alone anything else.

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The Web consumes content like a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Lots and lots of content makes you more search engine friendly, helps establish your knowledge and expertise, explains in detail what you offer, and justifies that offer with all the explanations, statistics, and rationale you can muster. The problem is nobody reads it.

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Every week I get asked to look at business websites and tell the owners why they’re not getting the results they want. Some of these sites are straightforward brochures, others are e-commerce catalogs, and some are those direct-mail-style pitches reminiscent of old mail-order magazine subscription schemes ported-over to the Web. Some have incorporated do-it-yourself audio and video and some even had this media professionally produced; still the results stink. Why?

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Search engine optimization dominates the thinking and to a large degree the marketing efforts of many small and medium-sized companies, but have you ever noticed that many of the largest and most profitable companies in the world ignore many SEO techniques.

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As Web-video presentations increase in popularity as a means of delivering marketing messages over the Internet, there will be the inevitable major successes and unfortunate failures. It is only a matter of time before Web-video becomes the dominating vehicle for businesses that are serious about marketing communication.

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Marketing is difficult because it is unlike any other business discipline. Most of our business day is filled with left-brain tasks that may be complex but are for the most part logical and procedural in nature whereas marketing and branding are right-brain activities governed by that hated enemy of rational business thinking, psychology.

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What do legitimate search engine optimization firms charge? Like most things involving the Web, prices are all over the place but if the price is extremely low you can be assured that the quality of the service will match the price.

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Change is inevitable; as an economy matures, ages, and ultimately evolves into something new, adjustments must be made to our business development, marketing and branding. Failure to adapt to new realities results in potentially unwanted dramatic consequences.

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Sometimes it seems like the hardest thing to do in business is to get things done: so little time, so many obstacles. And when it comes to marketing it gets even worse, after all there are all those administrative details that need to be dealt with, emails, inquiries, suppliers, and on and on. Finding the time to devote to creating a sustained, focused marketing effort seems like it’s near impossible.

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As of this writing, the television writers in Hollywood are on strike. The significance of this strike will be felt far beyond the current television season and impact what and where people will get their entertainment in the future. People are now not only embracing the Web for their information needs but are also increasingly turning to it for their entertainment needs as well.

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