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The 5 Most Useful Marketing Resources for Your Marketing Team By Brian Miller on 2014-08-28 Today’s marketers have to stay current with the evolving marketing landscape. The four Ps (product, price, promotion and place) has been replaced by the seven Ps (add physical evidence, people and process), which has been replaced by the four Cs (consumer, cost, communication, convenience). It’s no wonder marketers spend an average of 12% of their work hours staying on top of marketing trends. Want to keep informed about the changes in the marketing industry? We’ve found five of the best marketing sites – in no particular order – you should bookmark and share with each of your team members. 1. AdAge.com Advertising Age magazine has been around for 80-plus years (founded as a newspaper in 1930). It now has a strong web presence, covering media and digital channels, advertising, agency topics, data trends and more. There is a focus on brand profiles, sharing success stories as well as fail...

by György Fekete Comment forms are an essential part of our blogs, social networks and websites. Comment forms are our websites’ communication channel. Through these forms we get feedback on our content; therefore, it’s necessary to design them in such a way that they are easy to understand by our user base. A good comment form should align with our website’s main design, but at the same time it should be interesting enough to encourage easy commenting. It must be usable and accessible if we want to capture all of our visitors’ feedback. We searched for some examples and found original and creative ones. Below we present these examples along with a few guidelines that a designer should follow to make a great comment form. Guidelines And Best Practices Even a relatively simple-looking comment form can hide a very complex design behind it. There are many variables that a designer should take in consideration. The ones presented in this article are the most important and c...

The  Google Fonts  service has been immensely popular with web designers ever since it  first launched  in May of 2010. And for good reason. There are no accounts to sign up for and no monthly fees like there are with other web font services. Just add a single line of code to your website and you have at your disposal a  huge selection of free fonts  that display beautifully on screen. But all of this begs the question: why is Google in the fonts game? What do they have to gain by hosting fonts for millions of websites for free? Is Google in this for the long haul or will Google Fonts eventually end up in the dreaded  Google Graveyard ? Will Google Fonts end up in the  Google Graveyard ? What’s in it for Google? It can’t be cheap to serve fonts on this kind of scale. To date there have been over  2.6  trillion  pageviews  using Google Fonts. Sure, the fonts are oftentimes cached in the user’s browser but that is s...

January 31, 2014  by  Sonja Hegman Bad writing frustrates me. And l ately, while watching movies especially, my inner monologue goes something like, “Man, I could’ve written something so much better than this.” Do you ever have that thought? Chances are, you can distinguish good dialogue from bad dialogue. That’s why some television shows make it and some don’t. Now, take that dialogue tool and apply it to business.  People tend to underestimate the power of good writing. For business owners, it’s easy to think, “I can’t afford to hire a writer,” or “My (insert relative) was a good writer in school. They should be able to do this.” That is not necessarily true. With social media and content marketing now at the forefront, it’s even more crucial to have someone on your team who can write well. Why? You need someone develop useful and consistent content for your website and blog. While many writers have a niche — business, fashion, politics — there are also wr...

July 30, 2013 2 minutes Is email marketing dead? I think not. Even though many are calling email marketing old fashioned and ineffective, it is still one of the top sources for lead nurturing and management. Consumers enjoy receiving emails. And  at least 91% of consumers check their email everyday . Which makes email the leading communication channel. Everything from the content within the body of the email to the length of your subject line to the ratio of pictures to text can effect the open and click through rates of your messages. Before you decrease your  email marketing  budget, we've highlighted 25 compelling statistics that will convince you to continue using email. The truth is email marketing is here to stay. Email Marketing Statistics: Are you Using Email? 1.  33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Source:  Convince and Convert )  Tweet this Stat! 2.  Emails that include social shar...

By  Merlin U Ward Published  January 30, 2014  Are you looking for a way to analyze the impact of your content? Do you need a simple system that works? If you don’t have the budget for expensive software, spreadsheets and a little of your time can produce some useful data. In this article I’ll show you  how to analyze the engagement and impact of your social media posts using Excel . Why Analyze? No matter the size of your business, when it comes to social media you want to build two things:  engagement  and  community . To ensure that you deliver  great content  that resonates with your fans and followers, you need to track, test and measure the posts you put on your social networks. It’s really that simple. Here’s how: #1: Build Your Spreadsheet To begin,  open Excel and create 14 columns that will contain the following categories  to incorporate all of the information you need on your social media updates an...

http://www.danheller.com/model-release.html#4 This page contains material from my book, Digital Photographer's Guide to Model Releases . This 288 page, fully-illustrated volume is the most comprehensive book available on the subject, covering everything you ever wanted to know about model releases for photos people, places and things. You may  buy a copy here . Introduction   You're at your kids soccer match at school and you're taking pictures. Being the photo buff that you are, you get everything—kids scoring goals, parents screaming from the sidelines, the popcorn vendor, and fans in the stands. Later, you show the pictures to some of the people, and find that some want to buy a print for themselves. This becomes a popular event, and over time, your reputation grows. The local newspaper gets wind of your talent and wants to license a few photos so it can put some in the paper for an article on the school's sports curriculum. Perhaps some shots are so good th...