Making money on the Internet is harder in some ways than it used to be. To survive in a mature market, companies are moving content and features behind paywalls. Subscriptions, a key indicator of this, are up; subscription eCommerce is expected to hit $904.2 billion worldwide by 2026. Consumers are finally realizing that good content has a cost. Continue Reading...

In our last Dispatch, we talked about the importance of owning your own content. The only way to build a defensible digital presence is to own your websites and permission-based mailing lists. But “rented” social media channels like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram are still critical. Why? Field of Dreams told us to build it and they will come. Continue Reading...

Marketers are inundated with news about the platforms they use. Twitter advertisers are fleeing the platform in droves. TikTok users complain they can’t see posts from people they follow. The European Union and iOS are forcing social media apps to adjust their business models with their privacy measures. Every day there’s another news story Continue Reading...

Let me start this off with a disclaimer: I hated popups. I wasn’t a fan of scrolling down the page, minding my own business, when BOOM — I’d be stopped in my tracks by someone asking for my attention. It seemed like everyone in content marketing was asking for an email address so they could sign me up for one more email I wouldn’t read. But Continue Reading...

Content is still king. But methods and media have changed. When I first got into this industry back in 2012, larger sites were still gaming the system with high-volume content stuffed with keywords. Google was engaged in an ongoing war with link farms, which used backlinks at scale to inflate rankings. I always found it scummy; maybe that was Continue Reading...

I remember when affiliate marketing was THE big trend. The early blogosphere felt like boomtown-era San Francisco. “Get rich quick” language was everywhere as marketers scrambled for a chance at affiliate marketing gold. The shine of those early days has worn off. Does affiliate marketing still matter? Yes — but like many other aspects of Continue Reading...

You can’t log onto the Internet without running into a podcast. Podcasts have gone from niche channel to mainstream powerhouse. The Joe Rogan Experience is one of the most influential pieces of media in the world, and hundreds of other smaller podcasts still garner massive audiences every week. There are 464.7 million podcast listeners around Continue Reading...

Bad links have a bigger impact than you realize. I was trying to update the Rainmaker Platform Knowledge Base the other day and noticed broken links to resources from some companies that produce our platform add-ons. They had moved or changed links. In some of those cases, the resource didn’t exist anymore or I couldn’t find it, and they lost a Continue Reading...

I’ve written and edited literally thousands of item descriptions. Several years ago, I worked for a distributor. Part of my job was putting together item descriptions — either writing new ones or rewording what we got from the manufacturer. Just about every description I wrote was dry and boring. But they don’t have to be. Every brand has Continue Reading...

If you’ve been watching the news, you’ve probably seen the drama over Twitter’s new Twitter Blue and Verification for Organization services. Premium services for social media aren’t new. LinkedIn’s premium version has been around for a while. Meta is starting a paid program of its own. But Twitter Blue is a hot topic in the news, and more Continue Reading...