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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Focus on your business instead of on your business blog.
At two of my early journalism gigs, I encountered assignment desk editors who would crumble press releases and three-point them into the nearest trash bin if they didn’t follow accepted submission protocol. Leave out the “–30–” or the triple-hash at the end of the page? Binned. Miss the “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” at the head? Chucked.…
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Cheap web content could cost you your search engine ranking.
A prospect recently asked me why she should spend so much money for original articles on her site, when she can just copy whatever she needs from the rest of the web. It’s easy to write off a business owner who thinks that way as being cheap or as someone who doesn’t understand how the…
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Authorship and brand voice.
Ryan Smith has ignited a debate in newsrooms and marketing agencies across America, in the wake of exposing his (now former) employer, Journatic. Stressed-out newspapers have hired Journatic (and companies like it) to “mechanical turk” many of the articles that once formed the backbone of print dailies: real estate transaction summaries, obituaries, even local sports…
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On paying by the word for web copy.
For all the posturing we make about being casual and transparent online, web copywriters don’t always make their pricing clear. We’ve had good reasons to keep our rates a trade secret. Post how much you charge per word, and you’re suddenly playing a commodity game. That’s bad for both writers and their clients. Focus too…
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Surviving chaos.
Researching a freelance writing assignment for a client, I ended up on a website run by survivalists. I’m hesitant to even link to it, because there’s some crazy stuff going on over there. However, I did catch something interesting among all the fear and paranoia on that website. The authors wrote passionately about how the…