Articles by Portent Staff

On Sunday, Rand Fishkin posted a great heads-up piece about how personalized search, branding, and leveraging your current rankings can make for an interesting marketing strategy. His mention of the 2007 Pontiac commercial brought up a particularly interesting idea. In the commercial, the viewer is instructed to “Google” Pontiac as opposed to going to a [...]

Who says on-the-job research can’t be fun – and heavily caffeinated? Last week, Portent Interactive took a field trip to the Seattle headquarters of what is quickly becoming our tastiest new client: Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea Company. In the Name of Research A field trip seemed like the logical thing to do – even [...]

A Horror Story by Evan Fishkin Recently, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about PubCon, (which is one fantastic search marketing conference!), but just one keeps repeating: “Why Evan, would you let Matt Cutts shave your ‘Curls of Righteousness’?” (witness the horror) For the hungry masses, yearning for answers to questions so long contemplated, [...]

As Mad Men’s Don Draper so eloquently put it, to sell a product you have to first evoke an emotion. Get your audience to feel. Sex doesn’t sell; desire does. But how do you get your customers to feel desire when you can’t even see them?

Like every morning, I began today with a sane dose of looking around my iGoogle dashboard, checking email, reading important news, and consuming my Calvin and Hobbes comic of the day. What grabbed my unexpecting eyes was the iGoogle search box. This is an important feature. It gives me quick access to all things Google. [...]

Become instantly cool with High Tweets! You thank your lucky stars.

Any reputable Internet marketing company will tell you that you need product descriptions. That’s the bad news. The good news is, they aren’t difficult to write and they not only help sell the product, they can improve your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Who knew? Trouble is, most copywriters would rather write toilet plunger ads than [...]

As you prepare to take up yoga, learn Spanish, and start volunteering at a soup kitchen every weekend, here are ten internet habits this internet marketing company says it’s perfectly ok to keep! It’s Ok to…. Spend more time fussing with your blog wallpaper than you do with your home wallpaper. To have 200 unread [...]

Become an internet marketing creature unlike any other Times are tense, and now more than ever, you feel the burden of needing that ever-elusive advantage over the competition. If you’ve overdosed on tipping points, purple cows, and cheese-moving, it’s time to turn to the true treasure-trove of internet marketing secrets: the dating bible “The Rules” [...]

DISCLAIMER: Get over the gun analogy. It's Quentin Tarantino, so of course he's going to use incredibly violent imagery. Don't let that stop you from learning some of the best creative advice I've heard this year. First, a little stage setting. As a Creative Lead in an Internet marketing agency myself, I would venture to [...]