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Quite a lot according to 37signals. As a subscriber to cooksillustrated.com, I'm a little biased. But their continuing success is impressive. What's their secret?

They focus relentlessly on developing the best possible recipe and providing practical advice for the home cook. They take a scientific approach to food and test tons of recipes before anything ever hits the books. They taste test store brands of all types of foods and condiments; from orange juice to spaghetti sauce. In short, they've created a unique marketing position that's helped them grow with almost no advertising other than their public access television show.

They also do integration of multi channel content on their website better than almost any other magazine-based publication. Their TV show clips are re-purposed into short relevant segments related to the specific recipe your browsing on the site. Their explanatory illustrations from the publication work great on the web as well.

They've quietly created what's arguably the most informative cooking sit on the net. In the process they're charging almost $40 a year for access. And people are subscribing in big numbers (almost 1 million so far).

We're working on a new site for neboweb (you'll see it in a couple months), and one of things we're really focusing on is strengthening our copy. It's an area that we've not paid enough attention to in the past. It's never easy writing good copy, but writing good headlines is especially hard.

However, I can give you one piece of advice guaranteed to make you successful. It's advice I wish my advertising copywriting teacher would have given me in school.

For every one headline you plan to use in a campaign write 100 unique headlines.

Not all of them will be good. They don't have to be, but out of that mass of creativity you'll find a few keepers.

This is a habit I picked up from a great book about advertising copywriting by Luke Sullivan called "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads.".

It reads a little dated, but I highly recommend it to anyone looking to become a stronger copywriter.

Andre Scholten introduces a cool use for custom filters in Google Analytics. This method... while not exactly elegant... it does give you a way to see what page your most popular keywords rank on. The level of specificity leaves something to be desired. Are you ranking #1 on the first page, or #10 on the first page?

On a related point, I've never understood why Google Analytics doesn't integrate a search ranking tool. It was an integration I predicted when Google first purchased Urchin many years ago, but has yet to come to fruition.

Quick Note: You can view your custom reports in analytics in: visitors -> user defined

We've made promotion world's top 10 list of SEO companies for January, 2009.

Last week I was talking with a client who recently took a position at a new company. The new company was in the same industry that they'd worked in before. They were concerned about the lack of growth and poor revenue numbers for the product lines they managed. After some lengthy discussion it became apparent that nothing was wrong with their marketing tactics. In fact, they were implementing the tactics & programs that had previously driven growth.

The issue is a strategic one. The company wasn't positioned in a way that allowed them to differentiate from the competition. They didn't have a unique narrative that would persuade customers to choose them over the competition. They weren't the cheapest, and they weren't the biggest. They were a "me too" firm and had to work way too hard to win business. In their current incarnation, there wasn't anything unique about them.

The reality is that the only way they can succeed in their crowded marketplace is to re-orient their company. This means new messaging, but also operational changes that will re-inforce that message. And these changes are the real key to whether, or not they succeed. This is a big challenge for them. The marketing team has to drive major changes in the organization in order for their message to stick in the minds of their customers. They have to convince the internal skeptics that the risk in changing is worth it, and the risk in not changing is even greater.

Often you'll see a company re-brand and introduce a new message, but that's all that changes. This is great for the advertising company that charged for the re-brand, but it doesn't mean the company lives up to the message. And if the company doesn't meet the expectations of their messaging then consumers will see right through it.