Permission is powerful. When you have someone’s permission to market directly to them, they’ve chosen to listen. You’re not just another message fighting for attention in the middle of their social media feed — you’ve been invited in. Email is the predominant permission-based channel, but it’s not the only one. There’s another Continue Reading...

What does your business provide for your audience? Products and services are important. But knowledge is often the most vital solution your company provides. Knowledge isn’t just power. It’s profit. You’re missing out if you don’t use it. And one of the chief vehicles you can use to share knowledge with your audience is an online course. Many Continue Reading...

Modern websites should be mobile-friendly, or they’re missing out on a huge chunk of potential audience. Don’t believe me? Look at the stats. About 60% of web traffic today is mobile. That number’s been over 50% since 2017, and it continues to climb slowly. This has had a number of knock-on effects — the rise of responsive web design, Google’s Continue Reading...

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...