At one point, being a freelance artist was basically a recipe for starvation. Art wasn’t something you did for the money, and with a few rare exceptions, most creative professionals couldn’t really pursue their passion as a day job. The Internet has changed that.

The rise of the gig economy, coupled with digital marketplaces like Etsy and Patreon, has resulted in a renaissance for artists. Provided you know how to market yourself, with a bit of hard work and luck you now can make a comfortable living for yourself. Here’s where to start.

People don’t trust marketers anymore, and I can’t say I blame them.  

From manipulative marketing campaigns to rampant spyware, the reputation of marketing firms and ad networks has never been worse. As privacy watchdogs and regulatory agencies close in on the data-driven economy, people are growing more cognizant of how their data is being bought, sold, and used. Factor in that modern consumers care more than ever about corporate values, and you have a compelling case for greater ethics across your organization, including and especially within your marketing department.

Today, we’ll discuss the three foundations of an ethical approach to marketing.

All advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising.

Confused? You aren’t the only one. To say that the difference between advertising and marketing is nebulous would be a gross understatement.

For a layperson, they’re virtually indistinguishable. To get a better understanding, let’s start with a definition of each term, before diving into the specifics of how they differ from one another.

What is Marketing?

To put it simply, marketing is everything your business does in the public eye. It’s raising brand awareness and building relationships with your target audience. It’s designing creative and writing copy on social media.

A young person wakes up, snaps a few selfies, and spends some time editing before posting one to Instagram. A businesswoman shares her thoughts on a recent merger via Twitter and her comments are quickly picked up by several major media outlets. A gamer engages with hundreds of thousands of people by live-streaming a video game.

A lot of people use the terms ‘marketing’ and ‘advertising’ interchangeably. That’s understandable, to some extent. On the surface, marketing and advertising appear much the same.

They both involve communication between a business and its customer base. About generating brand awareness. About crafting a persuasive message that will ultimately result in conversions.

It’s only when you look a little deeper that differences start to emerge. And believe me, they are significant. We’ll start with advertising, because it’s actually the easiest of the two to describe.

Quick question: what’s the most valuable commodity in marketing? It’s not money, nor is it knowledge. Not customer loyalty or brand awareness.

It’s time – and no one ever seems to have enough of it.

Every good marketing campaign has a lot of busywork. These are many repetitive and boring tasks. However, they are crucial for the success of any marketing strategy. The more time you and your team spend on these tasks, the less time you spend on your actual strengths.

On creative stuff that actually matters. There’s a reason the global marketing automation software market is predicted to reach nearly $8 billion by 2025. That the majority of top marketing professionals acknowledge its importance.

Affiliate marketing – where one business pays commission to someone else to promote its products – is an excellent way to generate both traffic and revenue for your brand. Not only does it provide your users with new products and services to try, it can help you establish lasting, valuable relationships with other vendors.

For those of you who haven’t already heard, Google in late June acquired mDialog – a video advertising firm that specializes in helping large media companies measure and deliver video content to a wide range of connected devices. The implications of this purchase seem to be quite clear. Google’s looking beyond the PC to other platforms; it’s hoping to expand its large marketing arm to smartphones, tablets, and video game consoles.

That isn’t all Google’s looking to do – there’s a bit more to this purchase. Continue reading →

As Google strives to improve its algorithms and make content more relevant to the user, social networks gain more and more importance in determining how your pages rank online. How often people talk about your brand, how often they share your articles, how often they like your posts; all of these factors play an important role in how well you’re going to do (though true to form, Google’s remained fairly tight-lipped about just how important).

One thing should be clear: if content is king, then social media is most definitely queen. There was a time when I would have argued that not every organization has something to gain from going social. I think, at least in this context, that such a time is long since passed. At this point, it’s not a question of “if” you should fit social media into your SEO strategy – it’s a question of “how.”

Since its introduction in 2011, Google+ has been hailed as a ‘Facebook-killer,’ “the biggest change in communications since the interactive website,” as well as a ghost town and a ‘complete failure.’ Whatever your thoughts on Google+ on a personal level, with 540 million active users monthly, you can’t afford to ignore its ramifications on your SEO.

Google’s Changing Strategy

In years past, Google was committed to bringing you the best search results, regardless of who owned those results. As the company has expanded beyond search, Google has increasingly promoted their own Web properties in search results. Nowhere is that change so obvious as Google+. Much more than simply another social network, Google+ has become an increasingly integral part of Google’s overall strategy, including how search results are ranked. Continue reading →