“It’s the wild, wild West.” --Nonprofit leader speaking about the range of costs associated with building a new website. Customers submitting an RFP for a web redesign are often shocked at the range of pricing they receive back. How can one organization charge $30,000 and another $120,000 when they are looking at the same RFP?

Over at Business 2 Community, Felicia Savage wrote a compelling piece about Indiana University Health’s decision to live tweet a kidney transplant and what it taught her about marketing. Why would anyone do that? According the people at IU, it was fairly simple—they wanted to educate people about the process, thereby dispelling their fears, and get people to visit their kidney donation page and contribute money to research. It worked in a big way.

If you haven’t looked at USA Today’s website in the past couple weeks, you’re in for a surprising experience when you call up the page on your laptop—you’ll think you’re on your mobile device, not your laptop.

Improving the ratio of cost from lead generation to client or sale is the biggest challenge for associations today. Evidence for this can be found in two recent reports from the Center for Association Leadership (ASAE). The first puts the spotlight on the marketing problems associations are facing, while the second looks at their operating costs. Taken separately, the reports have a great deal to teach association leaders. Taken together, they show that pressure is increasing on marketers to show the connection between their departmental costs and the outcomes they deliver.

In the past year, protecting copyrighted material has inspired heated debate. In fact, since the inception of sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest, website owners have begun to question the wisdom of leaving their content open to sharing.

Selling to businesses generally means longer sales cycles. Prospective clients will need to walk through multiple approvals in their own companies before agreeing to purchase, so it’s important that you, as the seller, build multiple relationships within the prospective company.

Graphic designers know them well: the professionals needing a corporate identity yesterday and thinking that it should cost less than a dinner for two. In response, there is no shortage of web sites meeting this demand with next day “custom logo designs” for the low, low price of $99. But purchasing a preexisting logo template from an online logo factory is a big mistake. Investing in a quality logo is just good business. Here are three reasons why: