One of the most interesting courses I took during my MBA was called Judgment and Decision Making, given by Dr. Varda Liberman who had worked with prof. Daniel Kahneman, nobel prize winner for his studies on how irationality affects human economic behaviour .

1. Your average time between visits to Google Analytics is 12 seconds
2. Your average time between visits to Web Master Tools is 30 seconds (even though it only updates once every couple of days)
3. You're using three different 3rd-party tracking tools for your website, plus a system you developed yourself.
   

If you've been running your online business for a while you probably noticed that most marketing channels available for novice businesses follow a pattern: a large almighty network servising a large number of small startup businesses. This always puts you at a disadvantage. You can't negociate terms and in most cases won't even get a personal rep. All you can do is accept the terms, pay the fees and hope you're not getting screwed. Think of Adwords, Commision Junction, Facebook ads or any other large ad network and you'll see what I mean.

One of the biggest problems with search engine marketing is the difficulty in determining the cause for changes in your SE traffic. Whas it the press release that did it? Or the change in URL structure? Maybe some of your competitors ran out of budget?

The same applies to traffic plunges. Was it that "financialy supported" link? Or some of your old links vanishing? Google algorythm update? Or maybe your competitors started to play dirty.

Imagine the following scenario: an entrepreneur starts a brick-and-mortar business in a city governed by a mad mayor. The mayor changes the street structure of the city on a whim, and therefore the business owner doesn't know what to expect. His business starts in a side street with medium traffic, then suddenly the street becomes a busy avenue and a month later turns into an inaccessible alley. obviously this puts our business owner in a managerial problem. How much should he invest in his business? How many employees should he hire? How much stock should he keep?

The 'Original Content' mantra has been advocated by Google since the company's early days. SEO consultants repeat this mantra to customers with religious awe on a daily basis, and urge their customers to fill their websites with as much original content as possible. This, ofcourse, refers to those websites that don't produce much textual content by nature, such as company image websites or e-commerce sites. (Obviously for bloggers or large scale publishers original content is a given).

Understanding your site visitors' loyalty is crucial to planning your online strategy. Some websites are loyalty-driven by nature (such as news websites or blogs that offer regularly updated information) while others are "single-encounter" (i.e. e-commerce sites that offer products not purchased often). It's up to you to understand your goals and expectations from your site visitors, but whatever they may be, you need to understand your visitor behavior to meet these goals.

Much has been said and written about optimizing ad positions on content sites to maximize click through rates and consequently - ROI. The temptation to increase income (sometimes twofold) with the simple action of changing an ad's position sparks up the creative side of many web publishers who stretch the limits of visual perception, psychology and user experience to generate an extra CTR percentile. These tactics however, can backfire, as this post explains.

I recently came across an online debate from 2009, stirred by the marketing efforts of Netprospex, a start-up that sells opt-out prospect lists. One of the most common points raised against using the service was the conceived inferiority of opt-out email marketing lists as opposed to opt-in lists. while realizing I am a bit late to join this discussion I'd still like to clarify some of the misconceptions regarding opt-in, opt-out and how they affect the value of email lists.