Jeff Scholes

Email remains one of the best ways to promote your products and services and nurture your prospective customers. All too often I see customers creating emails—or I get them myself—with some basic mistakes that may lead to big performance issues.  Here are a handful of important things to keep your eye on when creating your next email campaign. (1) Create a Bulletproof Email Design When designing the layout of an email I think of two major things: keep the message simple and on target and regularly test your designs in different email clients. Just because your design and layout comes through as intended in Outlook doesn’t mean it will look okay in gmail or another email client. Whether it is just a simple email with one offer and call to action or a newsletter, here are some tips for a bullet-proof email design: Maintain a balance between content and... (more)

Success with a Sitemap!

SEO Journal on Ulitzer Four or five years ago if you said to your web guru, "let's make a site map!" you'd probably end up with a quaint-looking single web page that had a list of links and categories indexing your site. You can still find these from time to time. As it turns out, Apple still has one, go figure. As you may recall, this was yet another alternative to a search engine, to help visitors find your content. Not your grandfather's web code, the "site map" of the 21st century, however, is something a bit different but with the same goal of helping visitors find your con... (more)

Internet Marketing Essentials: 4-Part Series

New Media on Ulitzer Many B2B companies know that they should be incorporating an ongoing social media campaign into their arsenal of tactics to generate leads and sales. But, as a business owner or marketing professional, half the battle is trying to get your head around the social media wave, the crushing amount of information about it, where to even begin, and how to make it all fit into your marketing plans. The great news is that being successful at Internet marketing does not need to be as complicated as others may sometimes make it out to be. It will, however, require som... (more)

Why Does Everyone Want to Be Your SEO BFF?

SEO Journal on Ulitzer If you are like me, you are regularly receiving unsolicited email from various quarters, telling you about the latest and greatest SEO solutions on the planet. Just buy the book, or guide, or download the promotional whitepaper and this expert will offer you the latest "Secrets" to search engine success. Google it. At last count I saw millions of results! Well, it's not a very well-kept secret anyway. One reason for the mysterious "secret" is simple: Google and other search engines do not publish their algorithms, and they are known to change without noti... (more)

Blogging For Your Business Is Easier Than Driving a Car

When I speak with small business owners and marketers, one of the persistent obstacles to creating a blog presence often are expressed as two key points: 1)      We don't have time to write regularly. 2)      We don't have the ability to write regularly. That seems like a non-starter, right?  If you find this is your situation, please think again, as you are missing a key opportunity - since, as mentioned in an earlier business blogging article, YOU are the expert in your field.  Vehicles, Blog sites and Web sites Think about what you do every day.  And bare with the drama but... y... (more)