• content planning
• content creation
• content optimization
• content testing
• content performance

Planning: In the planning stages, a marketing agency will work with you to understand your company’s vision and mission. Like the foundation of a house, this crucial step forms the basis for the entire marketing plan. We’ll set goals and pinpoint the best technology to measure results.

Creation: Our experienced team of writers quickly and efficiently to develop the marketing content you need.

Optimization: Well-placed, relevant keywords in the right density improve your SEO rankings. We can track results immediately, so there’s no guesswork.

Testing: A crucial part of our process, we test the photos, headlines and copy in your SEO-optimized content to continuously improve results. Our marketing agency is a Google Website Optimizer consultant, which means we guarantee better conversions — and we keep working until we get them.

Performance: None of this matters unless you see the results you want. We place the greatest emphasis on performance — is your optimized SEO content giving you the conversions you need to grow your business?

It’s reasonable to enter a contract with a marketing agency with certain expectations. We’ll work with you every step of the way to exceed those expectations.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

Image from danskerhverv.dk

We’ve often grappled with the question, “What is great content?” At last month’s Content Marketing Meetup, people said that great content is engaging, emotional, persuasive, unique, funny, is represented with imagery, comes in video format and, once you put it in your Google Reader, is as addictive as your morning coffee.  While “great content” may mean different things to different people, how do you develop great marketing content for your website?

If you’re attending next week’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York, be sure to drop by Byron’s presentation, “Developing Great Content,” on Tuesday, Mach 23 at 4:45 p.m. He joins Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks, Jonathan Allen of SearchEngineWatch, and Wendi Sturgis of Partner Management and Yahoo! in a one-hour discussion about the best content development strategies and innovative techniques for making your content reach its target audience and engaging them once they’re on your site.  It’s all about tactful SEO writing that speaks to both readers and search engines, and developing a content plan that turns browsers into people who will open up their wallet and type in that magical sequence of numbers that equals cash flow for you.

Make sure to stop by booth 202 to meet the ideaLaunch team in person!

The mob rules Twitter. The rabble is Twitter’s prevailing guiding force. At least, that’s the gist of an extremely interesting and insightful article in this month’s Wired Magazine.

In Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter, author Steven Levy recants the tale of Twitter’s attempt to incorporate retweeting into its architecture. You see, the “RT” and @twitterhandle that signified a retweet (that is, a repost of someone else’s tweet) was entirely user created. The suits at Twitter had nothing to do with it.

So, when the suits tried to integrate retweeting into Twitter’s functionality, the users rebelled and began a grassroots campaign (complete with #saveretweets hashtag) to eliminate Twitter’s meddling because Twitter “didn’t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.”

This is not a wholly unpredictable event. Its users have long defined Twitter’s purpose. Users figured out what to do with it (as Twitter’s Biz Stone explained when announcing the retweeting function, “This is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.”), users built the apps that make it better, and users have refined leetspeak to cram as much information in the 140 character limits. As the article states, “Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.”

So how will those users feel when Twitter stops being social media’s answer to socialism and starts behaving like a business? Will Twitter alienate its user base once they focus in on a business plan and perhaps take more contfrol over their offerings and service? And how do you control all those outside developers making apps and Twitter clients? How do you ensure they play ball with your new money-making methods? As the article points out, many user-created Twitter clients completely bypass the homepage.

It all reminds me of something Mark Cuban wrote on his blog earlier in the summer, in a posting titled, When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free.

The more important remaining successful is to management, the more money they will spend, the more chances they will take, the more infrastructure they will build, the more people they will hire. All of the things that will prevent them from staying lean , mean and flexible. All of the things that distract them from innovating within their core competency.

So what hope does Twitter have of making money when the users define its core competencies?  Shouldn’t said users be entitled to a piece of the profit pie? And when they don’t receive their cut, or are limited by a increasingly rigid, profit-driven service, what then?

But this plebeian had it all wrong.

What was in store for us was a culinary ass-whopping of Julia Child proportions. Instead of Dixie plates, paper napkins, and plastic utensils, a table draped with a gleaming white tablecloth set with polished silverware (salad fork and dessert spoon included) and the finest white china greeted us. Printed menus described the three-course regalement plus dessert with adjectives like “panko-crusted” and “spinach- and crab-stuffed ” in an elegant cursive font riddled with French words and accented vowels. Creamy aromas of lobster bisque aroused our senses; instead of Bud Light, we quenched our thirst with Domaine Salliès sauvignon blanc from the Pays d’Oc region in France. All the food, including the sole, was harvested from local New England farms and waters. It was a masterpiece executed in a kitchen fit for a Michelin chef (see photos of the salamander flame and pop-over molds) by a hostess worthy of her own show on the Food Network. Move over, Giada De Laurentiis.

I’d like to extend my gratitude to Kara and her studly partner Andy, pets Mr. Betty the Cat and Genevieve the Dog, for inviting us into their home and upping the office dinner party ante to unreachable echelons. My advice to everyone reading this is to email Kara@ideaLaunch.com right now and hire her to be the star chef of your content marketing needs … before food talent scouts get one whiff and whisk her away.

Speaking of stories, did you see the article in Print Solutions Magazine by Rebecca Trela called “Content Marketing on Promotional Products”? Trela interviews Byron about why content is “more alchemist than a regent” in a kingdom where content reigns supreme. “The key to a successful promotion,” says Trela, “is delivering a little of what the customer wants (educational information, reminders or factoids) and a little bit of what the promoter wants (visibility).” In the same vein, ideaLaunch enables our clients to give their customers what they want—tips, articles, advice, entertainment—in exchange for visibility—niche sponsorships, higher search engine listings for targeted keywords. We’re also able to follow the trail from the SEO-friendly content we created to the actual ROI of higher click-through rates and conversions on client websites with our tool WordVision. Exciting stuff.

In other news, I’m looking for three fall 2009 interns for editorial, SEO and social media positions. If you know anyone in the Boston area looking to jumpstart a career, send them my way!

Now I can say with confidence that we’re ideaLaunch. Our chief of technology has labored for several months to finally give life to a new client and writer admin found at ideaLaunch.com. Did you purchase content from us? You will now be logging into your account at ideaLaunch.com, using your same username and password, to review and approve tips and/or articles. You’ll also be able to access WordVision through this portal, making it easy for you to weight keywords, track listing positions and monitor how these keywords are appearing in your content.

Because we like to keep things interesting, you’ll still have to go to LifeTips.com to review niche sponsorship tips and links. No one does the “split-personality chic” that is so trendy this season better than us.

Microsoft announced the debut of Bing, its newest search engine to replace the cumbersome Live Search in the company’s latest attempt at undermining Google’s dominant market share of search advertising dollars. What will this mean for SEO? Will Bing’s new options for vertical search make finding just the right make, color, style and price of Marc Jacobs bag easier for me to find online? If it can pass this test, I’m sold. I’ll give it a try next Wednesday when Bing becomes available to the public.

ideaLaunch employees saw the rough cut of our first marketing video starring representatives of all departments. The creator, our new A/V intern, Addy Lifton, is a technical whiz; she worked her magic and made each one of us look great! You’re going to love what she did to document our appearance at NE XPO last week. Stay tuned for the release in early June right here on the ideaLaunch blog.

By now you may be wondering what a picture of a gold velvet Rococo-era couch is doing on this blog post. We have Byron to thank for his hi-low street-savvy sense of style. He spotted this beauty (affectionately known as “Dead Guy Couch” for its curious origins and suspicious red cushion stains) on the street outside our North End office. Like a hungry lion on the Sahara, without any hesitation he swooped in for the kill. He hauled his prize up three flights of stairs (okay, he took the elevator and Sean helped), and while no one wants to sit on it, the office has a great conversation starter.

Thursday 8 PM |
November 13^th 2008 | Rain | Palms Casino and Resort.

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