Have you created your own Marketing Technology Stack? If you haven't, I strongly encourage you to not only do so, but also to submit a visual depiction of your stack to the 2018 Stackies.

In this article I share with you my 2018 stack and my journey to submitting my very first one in 2016, as well as references from 2016 and 2017 to inspire you to think about your marketing technology stack and how you might visually represent it.

Note: You have until Friday, April 6th, 2018 to submit your own entry to the Stackies. Details in this article: Share your marketing tech stack, and we’ll donate up to $10,000 to Girls in Tech.

Have you not yet launched a blog for your business? What are you waiting for? If it's justification you need, then look no further. Here are 31 updated benefits associated with blogging for business.

(This article was originally published in October 2015.)

Are you considering blogging for your business and wondering what you can expect? These 79 blogging statistics will help.

Especially since business blogging represents the single most effective investment you can make to ensure your business remains relevant and visible to potential customers over time. It's a serious tool with SEO (search engine optimization) implications. It offers serious content repurposing possibilities, not to mention that it can be a magnet for generating leads and having something to contribute to social networks.

As with anything worth doing, though, it takes effort and commitment.

If you're a business marketer and wondering about email marketing best practices, here are 119 facts worth exploring captured in an infographic.

Email remains particularly effective. Yes, that's right. Email hasn't disappeared and isn't about to. Think of all the applications and social networks which depend on email for verification, interaction [think notifications] and even as reminders to return to individual networks.

From a business perspective, emails are the most valuable customer asset available - when obtained legitimately and respected - for engagement, loyalty, relationship building and even sales.

Did you know that consumers who make purchases through marketing emails wind up spending 138% more than those who don't receive email offers?

In nature, clusters of fruit, flowers, plants, ice crystals, even constellations stand out. The individual units take on more importance by being associated or grouped with like-units.

The same goes for content. In fact, content topic clusters represent a better way to organize your website content so it stands out, given changes in search behavior. 

According to the definition Google kindly offered me (see image below), a cluster is "a group of similar things or people positioned or occurring closely together." The term has application in astronomy, linguistics, chemistry.... and also inbound marketing. The concepts that matter here are similarity and grouping.