The Portent Blog

Featured

Channel Contribution 101: You want your paid search account to drive value and make money. You want to use your paid search account to help reach new customers and grow your business. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as whipping up a campaign, throwing in some keywords, and then watching the revenue come flooding in. You… Read More

Content Strategy

The links, the deck, all that stuff: Badger-Style Content – Mozcon 2017 from Ian Lurie I welcome questions. Best way to ask is on Twitter. I’m @portentint. Or, fire away on Quora and ask me to answer. Ebooks! That are free! I wrote an ebook all about this! It’s called Lean Content. It lays out… Read More

Content Strategy

I know content strategy is important. You know content strategy is important. Who doesn’t know? The people who are going to pay you to develop and implement a content strategy, that’s who. To sell content strategy to your boss and organization, you’ll have to perfect the art of pitching projects with the intention of not… Read More

SEO

(A post only an SEO or Dev could love) Not too long ago, the Portent SEO team was sitting around in a meeting when we came across a 4xx level HTTP status error and couldn’t remember the meaning. Might have been a 410 or a 418… Anyway, when you have a flock of SEOs in… Read More

Content Strategy

The longer I live in Seattle, the deeper my obsession with mountains and all the tools required to enjoy them becomes. One of the first tools I fell in love with when I started mountaineering was an ice axe. An ice axe probably doesn’t sound like something you could love. It’s certainly not warm and… Read More

Random

I got way over-caffeinated today and started scribbling down haiku about digital marketing. Then I asked my team if they had ideas. The results were, um, fascinating. Here’s what happens when 30 marketers try to write poetry: Employment Poetry Degree Find a real job? No way. Start marketing gig You demand volume “Shower the web… Read More

PPC

Ahh, the time-honored mantra of “A _____’s work is never done.” It turns out if you search for “job is never done” and pull up images, everyone is apparently busier than everyone else. A curious paradox, but we’ll leave that alone. The obvious ones include “woman, mother, man, marketer, and teacher” just to name a… Read More

Design & Development

One of my goals this year was to get portent.com set-up utilizing HTTP/2 and optimizing that configuration. Late last week I was able to accomplish that, and the results are impressive. Like, 500 milliseconds impressive. We used to top out around 1.2 seconds after going to HTTPS, so I didn’t think the results would be… Read More

Internet Marketing

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, before I was a digital marketer, I was a screenwriter. It was a period of endless coffee, erratic pay checks, and afternoons that inexplicably turned into early mornings. I learned many valuable skills as a writer that I still use to this day. For example,… Read More

Internet Marketing

If you’re not tracking your own hours as well as those of your team, I’m here to convince you to start today. Time tracking task by task isn’t fun. It can seem trivial for some and scary for others. But with effective time tracking and analysis, the payoffs in identifying bottlenecks in current work processes… Read More

Content Strategy

Before I went to school for journalism, I wanted to be a therapist. My mom is a social worker and people told me I was a good listener, so it was easy to imagine myself nodding my head while a person sitting on a couch told me about their life. That plan ended when I… Read More

Content Strategy

There’s a trend in the content world of using tools to help improve the value and quality of content (see Hemingway editor, Readability Test Tool, and Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator). One category of tools is headline analyzers. They’re simple: put in your title, get a score, and tweak to improve the score. I use them… Read More

Analytics

Let’s be honest, Google Tag Manager can be difficult to understand. I remember the first time I tried to set up GTM. I thought it would be like any other Google product I worked with in the past —straightforward and intuitive. Oh boy was I wrong! In what became a cautionary tale, long before Portent… Read More

SEO

This is cheesy but true. It takes a village of phenomenal people to “raise” and train good digital and search marketers. As SEOs, Product Managers, and Social Media strategists, our work is not created alone in a vacuum. We don’t simply apply a static set of best practices and hope for the best. We need… Read More

Internet Marketing

We’re all busy, which means we’re all occasionally guilty of relying on executive summaries and best practices guides to get things done. Give me a quick guide to optimizing landing pages? Can you send best practices for social media at events? What template should I use for our site’s metadata? How frequently should keywords be… Read More

PPC

As I contemplate the world of dedicated PPC landing pages, and who doesn’t enjoy a good PPC daydream, I can’t help but think they’re a lot like beer. A million varieties but very few really good ones exist. But here’s the thing, if you simply know and do the things that create a great beer… Read More