Not everyone is a creative genius—or at least, I’m not. Creating unique and compelling content over and over can be stressful, not to mention almost unsustainable. The more specific a niche, the harder it can be to create something you can truly be proud of. As the Department Head of Inbound Marketing, I am in charge of all guest posts for our clients. Below are a number of tools and websites I like to use when my creativity hits the proverbial wall.

It’s vital to have a definitive, long-term marketing goal in place for your business in order to truly achieve a greater presence and earn more business within the vertical or verticals it serves.  While virtually every brand can benefit from a solid digital strategy, it is important to remember the various components that are integral in creating your own “game plan”.

As we welcome 2013, many are not just making resolutions to lose excess weight; they are also contemplating how to reduce excess spending.  As a business owner, cutting costs without cutting the 'necessities' while still leaving room in the budget for ways to increase revenue can be a real challenge.  Subsequently, it is no surprise that over 90% of businesses utilize some type of Internet presence, either through localized optimization or social media; to gain leads, increase their customer base or simply just get their name out there.

I love Andy Cohen.

I speak with many business owners regarding their web sites, business objectives and challenges and routinely provide them solutions along the line of what an agency can do for them (or even what they can do for themselves).  These discussions are well received and provide a road map for work to be done.  A common theme I hear is that business owners know what needs to be done and have been told some of the strategies before but the drop off then happens after the consult.  So, is it a consultants responsibility to provide insights that both can and cannot be implemented?

Ken recently wrote an article for YFS Magazine discussing the core strategies of marketing and how to effectively create, monitor and adapt your marketing plan for a constantly changing environment.

Over the last few months, an interesting trend has occurred on the world’s largest video sharing network and Google subsidiary, YouTube.  While the primary ranking factor for YouTube search results used to be video view count, audience retention is now the most important component in determining a video’s position in the YouTube SERPs.

Let's be honest, the SEO industry has been marred by scams in the past. Less than reputable companies would often promise things that there was no way of honoring and use unfair measures to attempt to keep their word in order to syphon more money. These promises included getting a company on the first page of Google rankings for a keyword within a short amount of time, saying they'll submit a website to thousands of search engines and, most comically, they have cracked the Goggle algorithm. All of these are not true, involve deceitfulness or require broad interpretation of the promise in order to live up to it. These are just some of the many ways SEO has been linked with scams.

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J., Dec. 5, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — via PRWEB – Kenneth C. Wisnefski, founder and CEO of WebiMax, a leading online marketing firm, is pleased to announce the unveiling of a new website redesign for the company. The new WebiMax.com was launched Monday and includes several integrated features including the company’s proprietary website analyzer.

The folks at Nielsen are pretty good at media market research and providing extensive (and more importantly accurate) data within various verticals including entertainment, advertising and recently, a growing industry which combines both:  Social Media.

Google’s ostensible goal is to create the best corollary to how users browse the web. Without impediment, this would allow Google to eventually provide near-perfect information to the user. Whether by commission or naiveté, the SERPs are not free of the static noise that is SPAM. As such, any methods Google perceives as disruptive to this goal will eventually be devalued or penalized, in an effort to clean up the results.

On December 2nd, 2012, WebiMax Founder & CEO Kenneth Wisnefski was featured in AP.org’s “The Big Story” discussing the hot topic of healthcare and how small businesses are handling healthcare reform in the U.S.

One of the most common SEO mistakes I encounter every day is the mishandling of 404 errors. URLs that return a 404 HTTP response code are a normal part of the web; just about every site has them. 404 errors can be served for a couple of reasons. Maybe you are trying to access a page that has been moved or no longer exists on the sites server, or maybe you misspelled the URL for that particular page. Although 404 errors do not have a direct correlation to your sites rankings, it is believed that too many of these errors can act as a signal to search engines that maybe your sites content isn't the best or most up to date for the query. The most important part is understanding how to approach them correctly in order to preserve user experience and link juice. This can be accomplished by creating a customized 404 page and installing 301 redirects when appropriate.

Kenneth Wisnefski recently appeared on HuffPost Live with Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss and Hukkster Founders Erica Bell & Katie Finnegan, discussing the new startup funded by Winklevoss Capital.

WebiMax Founder & CEO Kenneth Wisnefski will be appearing on HuffPost Live momentarily with Winklevoss Capital founders Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss, HuffPost Tech Editor Bianca Bosker and Hukkster Founders Erica Bell & Katie Finnegan.

Kenneth Wisnefski was featured by The Washington Times recently, in an article in which he discussed the popularity of mobile shopping apps and their prevalence and usefulness to shoppers on Black Friday.

With the 2012 Holiday shopping season officially beginning on Black Friday, consumers have begun to seek out product reviews and price comparisons in order to find the best deals for this year’s “must have” items and according to recent market research conducted by Adobe, search engines and social media will be the most effective tools for shoppers this season.

In early 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was exploiting little-known functionality within Apple’s Safari browser which allowed the search engine to install cookies even with Safari’s privacy settings set to disallow them.  Google was quick to respond to the accusations with a company spokesman issuing the following statement to WSJ in response to their article:

Since Apple first announced plans to develop its own proprietary mapping application earlier this year, Google Maps supporters were skeptical of Apple’s ability to design a more accurate and effective global mapping solution.  Following the release of the iOS 6 mobile operating system in September, many Apple users expressed frustration with the new Maps application.  Within a matter of days, the backlash was evident in the press, as well.  Numerous technology review sites, blogs and even tech and business news outlets were discussing Apple Maps and its lackluster user experience.

Throughout this year’s Presidential campaign, Twitter played an instrumental role.  Both candidates expertly utilized the network and kept voters engaged by addressing major issues and promoting their public appearances.  As our own social media expert, Mike Stricker pointed out in a comment on one of my previous posts; Barack Obama was even responsible for generating the most re-tweets in history for a political message on Twitter.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner and I can taste it already.  Can you?

At first glance, DuckDuckGo appears to be one of the most unlikely contenders to ascend to Google’s position as the world’s top search engine, but in reality, it may actually stand a pretty good chance in due time.  The small, privately-held company based outside of Philadelphia in Paoli, PA has grown rapidly and garnered substantial attention from the public and press without a multi-billion dollar ad campaign, but instead by simply offering an interesting alternative to the competition.