Last week was a big week — my company acquired one of our competitors, the team successfully hit a milestone that was critical to the business and general moral, and I’m excitedly preparing for the Inbound conference next week.

In the time between work and life, I had the opportunity to hear, read, and see some really interesting content and within it, there seemed to be a theme — change. If you’re dealing with change in your career or in your life, check out the resources below.

It’s been over a month since HubSpot’s Inbound 2014 event and I’m still riding high on the energy and inspiration I experienced at what I’m calling “Marketing Camp”

There were hundreds of sessions, featuring incredible speakers from a variety of industries. While marketing was the focus, those who were invited to speak at the event were from a diverse range of backgrounds. This was more than just a marketing conference, it was an inspiring gathering of incredible people like Simon Sinek, Malcolm Gladwell, Ann Handley, Rand Fishkin, and tons of other professionals who are known for “killing it” at life and business.

Given the overwhelming number of topics and presenters, I decided to narrow my options by focusing on sessions covering email, content, and search.

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a powerful resource for site managers and SEOs. It provides a look at how Google indexes your site and provides insight into site performance. If you are serious about improving your site and its rank in search engines, this tool is a must. Below, I discuss five ways I use GWT to improve search performance.

We’re only four weeks away from HubSpot’s INBOUND conference in Boston. The conference takes place September 15 – 18 and features an incredible line-up of speakers, including Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Martha Stewart, David Meerman Scott, and more. As the days pass, more details are released and my excitement level increases.

I’ve created a collection of resources and announcements about the event and want to share them with all of my fellow attendees. Let me know if I’ve missed something! 

I recently discussed how to diagnose inconsistent performance across devices. If you performed this exercise and determined that your site is under-performing on certain devices, now is the time to figure out which elements are failing and how you can fix them in order to improve the site experience. There are a couple of tools you can use to do this and the best news is…THEY ARE FREE!

With the increase in mobile device use comes a few challenges for web developers and marketers. Because visitors are coming to your site from a variety of devices, businesses have to accommodate an increasing number of user experience scenarios. This isn’t news — I’m sure your website is responsive and you’ve made all of the adjustments required for a good user experience across devices. However, unexpected problems arise and it’s possible that your visitors / customers might get hung up on an issue occurring in the checkout process on mobile or a page that is failing on tablet devices.

This is a situation where Google Analytics (GA) segments are useful. By applying segments to your reports in GA that compares performance across devices, you can examine where browsing or conversion experiences are interrupted. Here’s how:

Recently, I’ve had a few conversations with clients about the value of running a branded paid search campaign.

Often, when considering this type of paid search campaign, I hear the question, “Why would we pay for a first position ad placement if we’re already in the first position of organic results?”

Obviously, the benefits of investing in a brand campaign depends on the client and their goals and my response is usually within that vein.

I communicate to the client that there are a few different variables to examine when determining whether or not to run a brand campaign:

1. Is your company in the first position on the SERP for all variations of your brand name? If not, bid on the brand name phrases that you don’t display in the first position in Organic results.
2. Are competitors bidding on your brand? If so, run a brand campaign to ensure a top spot.
3. What are your goals? Do you want to build awareness? Drive conversions? Both?

While these client-specific questions help to decide whether or not to invest in a brand campaign, it doesn’t offer any answers as to the benefits that a client might expect from a branded ad campaign. When I feel strongly that the client should run a brand campaign, I need more data to communicate the reasons why. So, I went in search for more information and found a couple of interesting studies that provide data about the value of paid search for brand terms.

I primarily work on my own. This means that I am developing and executing marketing plans on my own, all the while, patting myself on the back and thinking, “Killing. It.” This situation is great some days, when I want to be heads-down, getting things done. But, other days, when I want and need feedback, it becomes difficult.

The time when I experience the pains of this most is when I’m working on strategic planning for my organization. I have gone through so many iterations of the strategy — changing formatting, presentation, plans, and measurement metrics. Each version is an improvement on the last. I recently put together a quarterly marketing strategy that I feel pretty good about. I’ve decided to share it as a template, in hopes that people might use it for their own planning and maybe even provide me with the much desired feedback I’m seeking.

To provide context, I’ll walk through the components of the plan and the intention for each area.