Welcome! We’re so glad you’re here.

In the eleven years we’ve been in the online marketing business, similar questions keep coming up from clients and prospects all throughout the arc of our relationship.

In the early going, when companies are in their “online dating” phase, many of them are unsure how to even go about finding the right agency to work with. How should agencies best be evaluated? What are the right questions to ask? What are the pros and cons of working with small versus large agencies? What is a fair price to pay? Why do different agencies propose such widely different prices for the same RFP?

Then, once a company has picked an agency, what next? Every agency has its processes, but like most things, the devil is in the details. What are the little things you should know to increase the odds of a successful engagement or project? What can you do to help keep your costs down, but still get outstanding service? What basic technical things are realistically useful to understand?

And finally, what are some of the best strategies and tactics to achieve success online?

We decided to create this blog to help educate those that have been put in charge of their company’s online marketing on how to find a great agency to work with, and how to get the most out of that relationship. In the end, our real goal is to make the people who hire us look really, really good. We do that by helping them achieve success beyond initial expectations.

If, through this blog, we can help you to be more successful with your online marketing, we will have achieved our goal.

If this sounds like something that can be of benefit to you, please consider doing any of the following:

• Follow along on Facebook or Twitter (our blog posts will ultimately show up in your news feed or Twitter stream)
• Subscribe to our RSS feed
• Sign up for our email newsletter (coming soon)

And, please go ahead and read our “launch day” posts, including:

But Won’t You Bilk Me If I Pay By The Hour?

After a long search, you’ve finally found the perfect web designer. Her examples are beautiful, she has fantastic references, and her process looks great. But she bills by the hour, and that has you nervous. What if she takes way longer to design your site than she estimates? What happens if she gives you initial comps and you hate all of them – why should you have to pay her more money when she didn’t make you happy in the first place?

Should you insist on a fixed project price?

Be An Airline Pilot, Not An Astronaut

Is your project like sending a rocket ship to the moon, requiring even the tiniest detail to be specified exactly up front? Or is it more like a flight from Los Angeles to New York, with a general and mostly accurate flight plan but with a human pilot capable of course correction during flight?

Do You Know Whom You’re Sleeping With?

They say that choosing an agency partner is a lot like getting married after the first date. It can be awfully difficult to “date” an agency without getting serious right away. So how do you make sure you’re not going to wake up one morning and realize you don’t recognize the person on the other side of the bed?

Creating Online Grassroots Movements

On May 14, 2000, massive numbers of people, fed up with a recent string of school shootings, descended on Washington DC to rally for common sense gun laws. This movement started with practically no funding, no central organization, no TV ads, no direct mail budget, no email database, and no social media websites like Facebook yet in existence. Yet, somehow, in just nine months, the Million Mom March was able mobilize more than 850,000 people to participate nationally — with our help.

You Need A Content Management System. Why Not Open Source?

Henry Donahue, Discover Magazine’s esteemed CEO, wrote on Folio some of his impressions of using the open source content management system (CMS) we developed for them called “Plone” over the last couple of years. (disclosure: Discover is one of our clients)

Fixed Price or Hourly: Is There a Better Way?

For most clients, paying by the hour is a necessary evil. But is there a better approach?