Author Archive: KoMarketing Associates

As the project manager for a small company, one of my biggest responsibilities is to make sure projects are on track and that clients are satisfied with our work. I wrote a three-part blog post on using a Web-based project-management tool to organize tasks and projects. Project Insight has helped us see how much time we are spending on each project and what outstanding tasks remain.

One thing it has not done for me personally is to help me organize my daily tasks. I am a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. (Here’s a link to one of my favorite overviews of GTD). Since we use Outlook as an organization, I have been looking for the best way to integrate Outlook with GTD.

“What is the ROI?”

If I had a penny for every time I hear that question a day, my ROI would be quite good. (Okay, that makes little sense unless you consider my time to be the investment…).

But seriously, the Web is its own worst enemy when it comes to marketing. Because you CAN measure so many metrics, people do. But then they make (sometimes) foolish conclusions based on those numbers. It’s sort of like in baseball when people overly value stats at the expense of what impact someone like Big Papi has on a team–his value is more than just his substantial RBI count.

In my last post, I told you about some of the project-management tools we looked at, and their shortcomings… After months of searching, I was about to give up. Then I did another Google search and stumbled across a company called Project Insight.

My heart started racing…this looked great! But there had to be a catch. I spent weeks peppering the representative assigned to us with questions. I re-entered entire projects and all the tasks into Project Insight. It became an extremely time-consuming project in itself, but I was determined that the next tool we bought would do exactly what we needed it to do.

This is the second of a three-part posting on how my firm, KoMarketing Associates, LLC, chose a project-management tool. In the first post, I outlined the key features we were looking for. This post explains why it was so difficult to find the right product.

I looked at a number of different tools (there’s a handy-dandy chart in this post, but you probably already saw that…).

Links to articles and information we found interesting this week.

• Search Industry News
  On Monday, Marketing Pilgrim reported on iCrossing’s acquisition of web development firm Proxicom, the latest in a string of purchases by the company this year. The article points to some key ideas on where the SEM industry is going and why the acquisition is a signal for shifting patterns in the marketplace.
• Keyword Research
  SEOBook provides a list of solid recommendations for understanding the breadth of keyword opportunities available or possible in association with core keyword strategies.

In one sense, it seems kind of odd that finding a project management tool is a project in itself.

But, the KoMarketing team has faced a challenge many small businesses would love to have: how to deal with too much business.

Quite simply, we’ve been busy…getting new clients from referrals and word of mouth.

Not too busy though to write a three-part blog post on how we selected a project-management tool. This is the first part…

We’ll post the next two in the coming weeks (I hope the anticipation does not keep you from actually working…).

Here’s a look at some articles this week that may be of value to your own search engine marketing strategies:

• Web Address Management
  Here’s a recap of Matt Cutt’s presentation at WordCamp 2007. Matt talks about the use of underscores in web addresses, folder structure and dynamic URL’s among other topics related to Google and how Google interprets website URL’s.
• Business Blogging
  A checklist of 10 easy steps to consider when looking to get a blog up and running successfully for a company or business.
• Web Directories
  Rand Fishkin offers personal recommendations for determining the value of a web directory as it relates to link building and search engine optimization strategy

Here is a look at some of the interesting news and posts that we found this week, related to the worlds of online marketing, social media and search engine optimization.

• Search Shortcuts
  I missed this post last week when I was compiling resources, so I wanted to add Seth Worby’s nice reference list of Google Search Shortcuts, from Search Industry News
• Web Analytics
  Avinash Kaushik takes a look at how to measure the success of a website that is not in directly in the e-commerce or direct lead generation business, such as news organizations, blogs and portals.

It’s been a busy week for certain! Here is a look at some of the key articles and blog posts we found this week, related to the world of online marketing.

• Keyword Research
  Doing keyword research? Search Engine Land takes a look at various tools webmasters can use for keyword research.
• Wikipedia
  SEO by the Sea highlights a recent paper that explores the idea of using pages like those found in Wikipedia results to try to resolve confusion in reference when someone performs a search for a person or place in a search engine.