If you sell clothes, talk about clothing. If you sell hardware, teach people how to build things.

Hint: It’s about finding the cool stuff, and making cult favorites out of the mundane
Everyone has to brand these days. It started with product brands, then service brands. Now we all have to have a personal brand. And cities now talk about “branding” themselves. Good earth. Can’t we just go to work?
In the old days, [...]

Does it load quickly? Do you have analytic software installed so you know where your traffic originates and what they are looking for? Do you have all the pages up that you need?

FALLS CHURCH – When a leading Washington, D.C.-area non-profit needed help building a site for its new greenhouse gas emissions analytic program, it looked to us.
We developed a news headline service for them, as well as a content plan to help position their research work in this new era of social media.
The addition of content [...]

Building an association between you and idea is as simple as, well, ideas. You just have to put them down.
In the fall of 2008, Black Cow’s Garland Pollard decided he wanted to launch a publication on branding as an extension of his small branding blog. He wanted a publication that wrote about brands that he [...]

SARASOTA – When a Florida apartment complex needed an image on the web, Black Cow Press gave them a simple solution. The apartment complex, just a stone’s throw from Siesta Key, only had about a dozen units, and didn’t have the size or scale to afford a big, e-commerce site.
The solution? A five-page guide to [...]

SARASOTA – When Black Cow Press editor Garland Pollard left his position editing Florida tourism publications, he kept getting bombarded with Florida press releases and story ideas.
While he turned some of them into stories for his freelance writing, he realized that there were hundreds more story ideas that ought to be posted.
He wondered if there [...]

So many companies are mystified by Twitter.  What should I do with Twitter? Who should be the appointed Twitter person? How often should they Twitter?
Frankly, there is no right answer and if someone says they have the perfect answer, run the other way because they want you to spend WAY too much money.
Twitter is imperfect. [...]

Most small and medium-sized businesses are now thinking about SEO, or search engine optimization. Some still don’t know the basics. Many firms will tell you that they have the magic answer.
There is no magic answer. SEO is not a science. Google changes its methods all the time; Search Engine Optimization, while it has a fancy [...]

If you are trying to tell your company’s story on the web, it is less important where the information appears than what the information is.
That’s the thesis behind web syndication, and if your company is not doing it, you are missing out. At right, the syndicated version of BrandlandUSA, which appears on the Chicago Sun-Times [...]