Douglas Karr's Articles on Martech Zone
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Content Marketing
The Cobblers Children Have No Shoes
Yesterday I met with a marketing professional here in town. It was a great meeting and I truly appreciated some tough feedback I received about my corporate site. Simply put, I had put up a really crappy single page site 6 months ago and never got around to changing it. I even had extensive work done with the assistance of…
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Is ChaCha Smarter than Google?
Like many folks, I underestimated the power of ChaCha. A lot of people thought that ChaCha has been a crazy experiment. People have joked about the ChaCha guides just looking stuff up on Google and responding with it. Working closely with Scott Jones and ChaCha has been quick-paced, challenging, fun… and rewarding. ChaCha is turning a corner… and people are…
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Buying Behavior Has Changed, Companies Have Not
Sometimes we do things simply because that’s the way it’s been done. No one remembers why exactly, but we keep doing it… even if it hurts us. When I view the typical sales and marketing hierarchy of modern companies, the structure hasn’t changed since we had sales people pushing pavement and dialing for dollars. In many of the companies I’ve…
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How to Fake the Numbers: Lessons from Twitter and Facebook
I once wrote a satirical post that 3.24% of Facebook users are dead. My point was pretty simple, Facebook continues to inflate their numbers by counting the number of total accounts rather than accounts with recent usage. On the Facebook advertising page, it states, “Reach over 350,000,000 active Facebook users.” Really? If I sign up for an ad, that ad…
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Marketing Blog Likes and Dislikes
Marketing Blogs are on my daily digest schedule. I follow marketing bloggers on Twitter and have a bazillion marketing blog feeds in my reader (which I never keep up with). I often read a blog and stop within a few days because of the content, others I’ve read for years. I don’t believe there’s any single #1 marketing blog on…
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Content Marketing
5 Keys to Your Successful Personal Brand
I had a conversation with one friend today and got an email from another asking my advice on how to build their personal brand… and ultimately profit from it. This may be a topic that’s better answered by friend Dan Schawbel, a personal branding expert… so keep an eye on his blog. I’ll share my thoughts on what I’ve done…
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Paid and Organic Search Marketing
Not All SEO Professionals Are Created Equal
While I was at a content management platform I cofounded, I was often confronted by SEO professionals who liked to challenge every little thing across the application. At issue was that these folks were used to working on a set number of pages with a few keywords and then maximizing the impact of those select pages. They weren’t used to…
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Paid and Organic Search Marketing
How to Move Your Blog and Retain Search Momentum
If you have an existing blog, chances are that you have search engine authority built to that domain or subdomain. Typically, companies simply start a new blog and abandon their old one. If your old content is lost, this could be a huge loss in momentum. In order to keep search engine authority, here’s how to migrate to a new…
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E-commerce and Retail
Causes: Charity + Facebook = WIN!
I’m not a fan of Facebook, that probably won’t change anytime soon. Aside from the ridiculous ads that won’t go away no matter how many times I ask (see screenshot below), Facebook is a closed system – they want all activity to happen within their platform. This is constraining… and lessons should have been learned from AOL and MySpace. In…
