Category: Rants

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Affiliate cheats and SEO link spammers.

The most powerful marketing comes from happy customers/clients spontaneously spreading the word. But increasingly vendors are saying nice things about each other for money.

If you need carrots and sticks to get your employees to work maybe you hired the wrong people.

There’s a difference between hunting and chasing. Similarly there’s a difference between PPC execution and marketing blather.

Are you looking at the right numbers? Do you control data or does it control you?

Transparency makes for better business, and for better government.

Check sign-up scams should be illegal.

Today’s pet peeve: illegible captchas.

if a company needs research to determine what customers want, then the company is probably too far from the customer, and the software or product or service they produce will likely miss the mark.

You heard it here first!

After years of content-bashing, a sudden twinge of guilt: was it hypocritical to criticize AdSense without testing the publishing side?

USPS direct mail usually leaves me befuddled, and the environmailist [sic] mailing doesn’t disappoint.

Sometimes, we take technology for granted. That can be perilous in the search game.

Are your affiliates thieves robbing you blind, or a valuable network of allies driving sales? Here are six ways to sniff out the truth.

Google, serving competitive ads against “Search Within The Site” results is greedy and wrong.

Our hapless Duck picks 2000+ MFA spam pages in 48 hours.

Something broke on my computer and Windows insisted on opening all folders in new windows. Hebert Jeremy’s registry hack finally solved this.

PR is about relationships and tone, not spam.

David Pasternack of Did-It argues that the reason 80% of companies are dissatisfied with their SEMs is that good service can’t be had without huge management fees. We say he’s wrong.

MSN and Atlas released a study suggesting that half of search budgets are wasted on brand search…whose campaigns are these guys looking at?!?

As with any marketing message, you win when you make life easier for your prospect.

Hate bad captchas, hate ‘em! Yes, let’s defeat the ‘bots, but please, consider the usability implications.

When some big players in your space are incompetent and/or unethical, it makes all of us look bad and damages the industry as a whole.

We live in the age of phishing. Use DNS to keep visitors seeing your domain whenever possible. Flipping them over to strange URLs creates fear and doubt.

User testing shows search is the most important navigation path for online shoppers. Poor site search is inexcusable in 2006. So why is search so poor at Amazon? They own A9, for goodness sakes!