VeriSign

Marketing technology has exploded in the past three years. According to Chief Marketing Technologist, as many as 1,876 tech companies are battling it out for your dollars in 2015, nearly doubled in number from last year. The largest single category in marketing tech is marketing automation, with no fewer than 211 solutions available today.

On Sept. 27, 2013, the following appeared in my Yahoo inbox: Network Solutions—A message from CEO David L. Brown. When the CEO of a company I do business with sends me email, I open and read it. He is an important guy in my life and maybe he has some news. Alas, David L. Brown, his copywriter and his designer know nothing about how to successfully communicate.

OK, so you've won half the battle. You're driving traffic to your site. Now what? How can you get your visitors to convert? This is a challenge that most every website that sells a product faces. The following are some tried and true tactics that, over the years, I've seen make a difference. Some may seem simplistic, but they DO most definitely impact your online conversion rate.

Landing pages are a critical tool for meeting your ever-increasing lead generation goals. Actually, only 8 percent of marketers reported that dedicated landing pages were ineffective, according to MarketingSherpa's 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. I'm not sure what those 8 percent are doing, but the effectiveness of landing pages for the other 92 percent of marketers hinges on one component that isn't often discussed—visitors have to trust you enough to give away their personal information on your landing page forms to obtain your offers. The thing is, we've all been burned too many times by companies that don't …

In part one of this article, I discussed ICANN’s new top-level domains (TLD) program and how it's a complex issue with great potential gains for those who do it right. As with any big change, we’re seeing a great deal of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Fortunately, some of the common myths are easily clarified. How do these distinct TLD types stand up to concerns about cybersquatting, exclusivity and mass confusion?

It's a go. On Jan. 12, the governing body for Internet domain names, ICANN, will open the three-month window for organizations to apply for just about any top-level domain that is core to their business. If you have not yet carefully weighed the opportunity and determined a strategy, it's time.

My last two posts, part one and part two, focused on real-life questions I've gotten from business owners, as well as my responses. Topics that were covered included free online press release distribution best practices and social marketing secrets for stronger visibility.

Problem: Clean Energy Experts (CEE), a provider of clean energy, solar power and energy audits, wanted to increase registrations to its new consumer-focused education site, MyEnergySolution.com. It also wanted to establish legitimacy for the site and demonstrate its commitment to online security.

RatePoint Inc., a provider of customer reviews, testimonials and online reputation management services, announced a program that brings the trust mark to RatePoint customers through their email marketing and customer review tools. Through an alliance with VeriSign, Inc., a provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world, RatePoint customers can develop their relationships with consumers, improve click-through rates, and increase revenue by adding the VeriSign Trust Seal to customer communications and their customer reviews, the company said. The VeriSign Trust Seal leverages the VeriSign brand to show consumers they can buy, browse and share with confidence on RatePoint

Every once in a while there's a great discussion going on over at the eM+C LinkedIn Group. A discussion that took place recently is no exception.