-
Capturing attention and building media relationships in “The New PR” environment
A client’s investor called me to check in on the status of a communications campaign. Having made it through both “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0,” he shared a perspective I hear often from media and technology leaders these days. Despite a seeming explosion of places where companies can get coverage—blogs and podcasts, along with newspapers…
-
Story Placement and “The New PR”
When I talk to business owners and company leaders about why they think their messages aren’t getting traction with public relations or earned media, I’ll cite changes in the way newscasts actually present information. Instead of just telling you the news, an anchor’s got to deliver an enticing customer experience — they’ve got to convince…
-
Five reasons to pick WordPress for your business website
Prospective clients often ask why I favor WordPress as our preferred content management system for business websites. I’ve got five reasons why I love to get our customers started on WordPress: It’s easy to publish. You don’t need to be a coder to update and add pages to your WordPress website. In addition to a…
-
Cadence counts. Cadence converts.
Stop pretending your audience has burned out on your message. That’s the message I delivered at a recent seminar on content marketing programs. And it’s a big part of the strategy I use with clients here at 2820 Press. During the first ten years of my career in radio, I learned some important lessons about…
-
Forget 140 characters.
The first 11 letters of your headline determine whether someone’s going to digest your message. Jakob Nielsen summarized some of his group’s latest findings, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been working online for the past decade. We’ve known—since at least 1997—that online readers scan information before they make the decision to round back up and…
-
Building your professional development plan.
For most of the past ten years, I’ve developed and delivered professional training courses for clients and internal teams at some of the world’s best companies. Now that I’m running 2820 Press full-time, I thought I’d convert some of that knowledge into personal development tools that you can use if you don’t have access to…
-
Three key actions we take with every new WordPress business website
Although 2820 Press still hasn’t reached its first birthday, I’ve been developing sites on WordPress since it forked from b2 almost a decade ago. Over the past few years, WordPress really proved itself as capable of delivering a quality experience for business websites, especially when paired with custom theme design. However, I still find myself…
-
This room feels familiar.
Kickstarter looks and acts just like some of the 2.0 designs for public radio pledge interfaces I built for XPN back in 2001. Except, we had plenty of research to show us that you got way higher donations if you put your biggest dollar amounts at the top of the page. That way, people scroll…
-
Fake Followers, Empty Calories
There’s a school of thought that believes you should pay about $14 to add 5,000 new Twitter followers to your account, so that your prospects and clients will think you’re more important and influential. Some folks believe you “need this” to have enough social media amplification to get started online. Ever since the mainstream news…
-
Match your website to your in-person customer experience.
64 percent of American consumers in an Oracle survey said they’d stop doing business with a company after a bad customer experience. Of those respondents, nearly all of them said they’d go ahead and purchase the same product or service from a competitor. That’s the pressure every business owner faces. Get it right, or never…
-
Good search engine optimization costs less than secret strategies.
It’s cheaper to do good search engine optimization legitimately, than it is to use “black hat” SEO. That’s a paraphrase from a talk Google’s Matt Cutts delivered to attendees at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco. If a wave of dot-com millionaire philanthropists was the first sweeping effect of Silicon Valley’s growing…
-
Lead generation, thought leadership, and brand awareness named top content marketing goals.
Lead generation tops the list of goals for content marketing programs, according to IDG Enterprise. Researchers talked to over 700 professional marketers on LinkedIn, finding that two out of three want their investment in original content to pay off in the form of new prospects, requests for proposals, and closed deals. Even though IDG’s survey…