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If you're competing on price, you'll never achieve maximum profitability. Instead, everyone's job must become value creation. But are you sure that you're providing value to your customers? Even if your answer is an emphatic yes, you might want to take a closer look.

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No business can survive, much less thrive, without building a plan that spells out revenue and earnings targets as well as the way to achieving them. An effective strategic plan requires an expression of the challenges and opportunities that the business faces. It also requires clarity on the methods and means required to meet those challenges. And there's something else that's mandatory. Without it, all the planning in the world is pointless.

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Here is a behind-the scenes story that reveals how one B2B marketer used a lot of silliness to increase its Web traffic tenfold and generate thousands of sales leads. How did this viral phenomenon go from wacky idea to revenue-generating success?

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Don't choose marketing messages based on whim or personal preference. Educate the product team about the three approaches to formulating messages. Work to identify and hone the messages. You'll find that consistently communicating these messages will help brand your product—and, if your product actually delivers its promised benefits, will increase sales over time.

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You might call it the project from hell, the death march or the one that ended up in the ditch. Most of us have at least one project horror story, though some of us have seen more than our share. If you haven't experienced a project that's gone sideways, consider yourself in the lucky minority. When a project runs aground, it's almost always avoidable—at least in hindsight.

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This week, add your thoughts to the following dilemma: If you work in a business that sells in bulk, how do customers responsible for purchases go about finding you and ordering online? Also this week, read your answers to the last problem: How do you determine whether or not a webinar makes a good addition to the marketing pool?

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Marketers everywhere are tasked with finding out about causation: "Is this advertising causing people to buy more of our lemonade?" "Is our new viral marketing effort causing our brand awareness to increase?" "Would having blonde hair cause me to have more fun?" It's virtually impossible to answer questions about causality with absolute certainty. But we can use techniques grounded in science to help us gather strong evidence of causation. Let's talk about designing an experiment to test whether blondes do, indeed, have more fun. *Please note: This article is available to paid subscribers only.*

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The columnist, author of "Writing Copy for Dummies," recently joined forces with Jon Warshawsky, coauthor of the newly published "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots." Together, the "dummy" and the "idiot" attacked their archenemy, Corporate Bull. What follows are five practical suggestions for shoveling your way out of the doublespeak and successfully into the embrace of colleagues and customers.

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Whether distributed via email or printed and snail-mailed, newsletters are a cost-effective way for businesses or organizations to keep in touch with employees, customers, prospects or association members. The trick, however, is to come up with a strategy to keep readers engaged and the publication's production and editorial adjustments in line with current budgets. Here are five tactics that you can use to make your newsletter more engaging for your intended recipients.

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Examine your press initiative. Do you know your marketplace, and know how to reach each member of it? Are you continually building trust? Are you delivering only what people need, and only in the way they want it delivered? Or are you shooting words like rock salt from a shotgun—hoping some of it will stick somewhere but resigning yourself to most of it becoming additional unread content on a Web site?

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Existing brand health measures rely almost exclusively on survey data to gather their findings. While surveys are insightful, they are also prone to collection errors through inaccurate recall and distorted response by surveyed consumers. Marketers can do better by creating more-direct and less-biased approaches. Rather than relying solely on survey data, we should find additional methods that seek to analyze consumers' relationship to brands in the field by observing real-world consumer attitudes. We can start with blogs.

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When it comes to optimizing your site for search and the search engines, it's important not to overcomplicate your design and technical approach with things such as Flash, Java, frames and dynamically built Web sites. Here are 11 tips for design that works.

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A consistent problem with the "ranking-centric" mindset is that it doesn't reflect a powerful rationale for getting involved in SEO. Where is the true business case? What tangible results are desired? More and more frequently, people are getting into SEO for the wrong reasons. Achieving high rankings for targeted keyphrases, while an admirable and worthwhile goal, is really only a small piece of the entire online marketing puzzle. Here are a few additional (and vital) pieces.

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This week, add your own two cents to the following dilemma: How do you go about promoting a product on a global scale? Also this week, read your answers to a previous week's question: What do you do when an initial marketing campaign isn't flying?

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Not since 1998 has the banking industry experienced the pace of consolidation taking place across the country today. From national mega-deals to local ones, it seems every bank is in the "great game" as a buyer, seller or interested flirt. Should merging commercial banks care about brand?

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Recently, search engine revenues have rocketed, with pay-per-click advertising providing much of the fuel for growth. The other side of the coin: advertisers have been using PPC keyword advertising to meet their marketing objectives. But even with such heightened competition, there may be untapped, hidden opportunities for online marketers interested in participating in keyword advertising. One of the greatest opportunities may be in the area of something known as keyword breadth.

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How much of our company's corporate overview presentation should you include in a demo meeting? The answer: as little as possible! Many salespeople and technical staff feel comfortable opening a demonstration meeting with a "brief" overview of their company. Most customers refer to this as "Death by PowerPoint." Instead, start the meeting with a "situation slide."

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Web sites run by small businesses far outnumber the Web sites run by large corporations. This means that most sites are produced and operated on a relatively small budget. Each dollar counts, and must be used carefully. But few small business owners are spending enough time figuring out what constitutes an effective Web site before they pour money into the project. Time and time again, small business Web sites waste their resources on the wrong Web site elements.

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Hidden away like some Cinderella before the prince discovered her, online pressrooms do not often attract much attention, much less a second look. But like the fairy tale character, online media rooms can offer a striking example of the power of Internet to transform a humble servant into an essential information hub. Indeed, the ability to harness the power of the Web to market and communicate in new ways is the new competitive advantage—and companies who ignore that fact do so at their own risk.

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There are many approaches a company can take to blogging, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses. A blog written by top management, for example, has the potential of providing news straight from the decision makers. But the downside is that CEOs and senior executives are also wary of stockholders' perceptions and don't provide the bare honesty expected of a decent blog. A blog written by those at the lower rungs of the organization also has its strengths and perils. Here are blogging tips for bloggers at every level within a company, from the top down.