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According to HubSpot, your email marketing database degrades by about 25% every year. Clients change their email addresses, buy new computers, switch jobs, opt-out of your email communications, or even use a fake address to keep themselves out of your reach, but as a marketer, it's your job to ensure that your company is constantly communicating with new prospective clients and adding new contacts to grow your email marketing campaigns. So what do you do when you can't keep your numbers above the red?

Sometimes, being a marketer means, well, being more than a just a mere marketer. One day you're a blogger, after that a social media socialite extraordinaire, and then, the next thing you know, you're a graphic designer working on mock ups and guides. Okay, maybe you won't really be creating client's website design mock ups, but truthfully, even marketers design and create visual content. For example, you could encountered situations where clients ask you to come up with infographics, CTAs, eBooks, guides, or memes for their website, and your company's true designer may not always be available.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing has become a great way to provide free content to customers in exchange for their attention. In fact content marketing has become such a popular option that 90% of organization market with content.

Basically, the goal of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and publishing relative, original, and creative content. Content can come in many different forms, like: blog articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, white papers, eBooks, and (many) more. By providing this information about your products and services to your prospective customers, they may in turn reward you with their business and loyalty.

By now, I'm sure you know about the immense power of inbound marketing. It has proven itself time and time again when it comes to increasing sales, traffic, and leads. Although inbound was designed to attract more prospects to your online presence, a great inbound marketing strategy can do so much more. With the right methods you can improve your businesses' credibility, brand awareness, engagement, and even your value to your customer.

Unlike Penguin and Panda, Google's latest update, Hummingbird, is an entire overhaul of the algorithm. Less than a couple of weeks old, it's already turning some Search Engine Optimization experts on their heads.

Marketing has evolved over the years, thanks to the internet. Now, people are turning to the web to find, research, and buy products, especially since it's all at their convenience. Even marketers are changing as they no longer have to rely solely on traditional advertising like billboards, commercials, direct mail or telemarketing to reach consumers about their products and services.

Here's something to think about: These days, A bad Website can be worse than no Website at all. Really! Think about that for just a moment. No Website at all means you might not believe in online marketing, and that's okay. Although many of my competitors (trust me, I've spoken to them...) would argue with me, even I am not convinced that every company needs a Website. However, a bad Website could mean so much more for your company.

Have you ever found yourself at the dinner table with your family totally overwhelmed by conversations about social media? As you sit there nodding as if you understand, your children - who may not even be in their teens yet - chat back and forth about hashtags and likes and statuses. What does it all mean?

Organizations and businesses who need to create an software solution to a business problem have two choices.  Purchase and "off the shelf" system that is readily available and can be implemented, or decide to have a custom software development solution built around the organizations specific needs. So how do we compare Custom Application Development Vs. Off the Shelf solutions?

CMS's (Content Management Systems) are all the rage. Wordpress has lowered the bar of entry to the CMS world, and made Web developers of us all. But what are the drawbacks? What are the hidden costs? Do you even need a Content Management System or are you asking for one because your neighbors kid told you it was the only way to go?