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Online communities have been around for years, but we now have more tools for building them. The options include Weblogs (blogs), wikis, forums (bulletin boards), email discussions and online chats. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Which one best suits your needs? Also this week, read your suggestions for the previous dilemma: How does a company determine which collateral format works best for particular activities, or to target specific decision makers?

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Marketing partnerships can be one of the cheapest, fastest and easiest ways to grow your business and test new market opportunities. It can also be a black hole for resources. During the Internet heyday, it was enough to identify a potential partner and a cool idea, sign a contract and "see what happened." But we've begun to realize that although a partnership has no up-front costs, it still can be expensive in terms of time, resources and mindshare. To maximize success, keep the following rules in mind.

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Your credit card company invites you to attend a meet-and-greet with your favorite rock band before the upcoming concert. Your financial institution offers you a private golf lesson from one of the professional golfers in a PGA tournament. Your airline offers you the chance to attend spring training for your favorite MLB team. Sound impossible? Not at all. Welcome to the new world of sponsorships.

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Services marketing efforts are moving online not because a few marketing consultants and strategists say they are—but because your clients and prospects are online, and their online experiences are influencing all buying decisions. Here are four arguments you can use to help your firm boldly enter the new world of online marketing.

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If infrastructure-focused IT departments want to stop seeing themselves cut out of the conversations with their own companies' marketing departments, they've got to start speaking the language of business. Until IT departments are willing to make changes, their power will continue the steady decline that began with the recovery from the economic downturn. And marketing departments will continue to look externally for support.

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Today's customers perceive themselves as having unique needs and interests, and they demand that businesses understand and meet those individual needs. To satisfy these customers, major marketers must shift from casting a wide marketing net over a vast crowd to selling to millions of individual customers.

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Search optimization is about getting links. The more links you get to your Web site, the more likely you are to get into the first page of search engine results. In other words: Killer Web content gets killer Web links. Here are some guidelines to follow.

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Correctly executed, the written word can be a powerful means of establishing your business in the hearts and minds of your potential customers. Many of us are inhibited, however, by popularly held—yet largely mistaken—ideas of what good business-to-business copywriting should be. Here are five of the most common and destructive myths that may be undermining the impact of your copy.

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Clients come to you every single day asking you to give them a choice. A choice between yes and yes. Instead, all you're giving them is a choice between yes and no. Your bank account would see far better days if only you'd step back and use the immense power of the choice between yes and yes. Here we explain the psychological factor of choice: how it can work for you and how it can also turn against you.

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This week, add your two pesos to the SWOT Team dilemma: When inventing brands, what works and what doesn't? Also this week, read your answers to last week's query: What approaches work best for holiday campaigns?

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No matter how much we advocate the science of marketing, its art has not disappeared. Take the balanced scorecard, for instance. In the tradition of marketing creativity, a graphical document—the balanced scorecard—translates marketing strategy to operational terms and sows the seeds for marketing accountability as measured and highlighted on the marketing dashboard.

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Any salesperson worth his or her commission check will tell you that landing worthwhile new business takes a repeated and concerted effort—and lots of contact with the decision maker. This is all the more true with salesmanship in print (or across the airwaves, phone lines and other forms of modern communication).

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This week, add your two cents to the following dilemma: What can a business do to determine which marketing tools are best for a particular project? Also this week, read your answers to the previous problem: How do you market without an advertising budget?

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Sure your Web site looks great, but are you turning enough Web visitors into leads that your sales force can target? Your answer can be the difference between a site that is a moneymaker and one that is nothing more than a glorified brochure. Your Web site can offer your company many opportunities to generate leads and cultivate new business. Here's how.

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A doorway page is content created specifically for the purpose of garnering high placements in the search engines. Search engines generally advise to avoid such pages as well as other "cookie cutter" approaches, such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. There are, however, acceptable alternatives.

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If you haven't heard of podcasting yet, I am not surprised. It's a brand new term—just invented earlier this year, in fact. Podcasting refers to the technology used to pull digital audio files from Web sites down to computers and devices such as MP3 players. It's a significant departure from traditional broadcasting because it removes the time requirement; you can listen to a podcast radio program or interview any time. How will podcasting relate to marketing?

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If you want to succeed with search engines in the long term, you should not primarily focus on how the search engine works. Rather, you should focus on how the brain of the searcher works. Because if you understand how people search, you're halfway there to getting found when they search for your content.

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Of all the slams on marketing, one of the biggest is that it is, in a word, guesswork. That distinctly pejorative view of our shared business discipline is that it is without any discipline at all. We protest that this is an uninformed, tainted view of us. We insist marketing is an occupation of knowledge and information. We strive to soundly disabuse our engineering and sales and finance cousins of the view that marketing is just a bunch of guesswork. The only problem is: it's true.

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If ever there were a perfect tool for the job hunter, blogging is it. Think of a blog as the 3D version of your resume: in it, you provide context and meaning to the work experience and educational background you've so carefully wordsmithed in your resume. So let's talk about how to blog well. Here are seven rules.

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What do Target, iPod and Hoover have in common? These brands have learned how to catch a woman's eye. I know. Enough already about Target and iPod, you say! Still, for those of you interested in the women's market in particular, the connection between increasing sales with your female customers and the rise of aesthetic value is worth a closer look.