Why use WordPress for your business website? Your website is the hub of your marketing, and it makes a big difference whether it looks good, has the functions you need, and is easy to maintain and flexible to change. WordPress provides all those things. Not that long ago business owners with not much knowledge of the web were at the mercy of their web designers. Often, they ended up with horror stores instead of websites: Expensive, overly complicated sites that no one but the original … [Read more...] about Why Use WordPress for Your Business Website
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How Blogging Makes Your Website SEO Friendly
For many business owners, having an SEO-friendly website is a goal that they never quite get around to. That’s a missed opportunity. Remember middle-school dances? The little clutch of girls sitting at one side, laughing too loud and glancing out the corner of their eye at the little clutch of boys in the other corner, laughing too loud and looking at the girls who are already dancing? The web is like that. Millions of websites waiting for visitors and a relative few getting all the … [Read more...] about How Blogging Makes Your Website SEO Friendly
Blogging Is Not Dead: Benefits of Blogging for Business
Big businesses are discovering the benefits of blogging for business. The amount of their marketing budget spent on blogs climbed from 9 percent to more than 20 percent in just three years. Smaller businesses and one-person shops are taking longer to adopt the practice, partly because it's easy to see that blogging is an investment in time and/or money, and partly because they don'tunderstand the benefits of blogging for business. Is Business Blogging Dead? Add to the mix the many articles … [Read more...] about Blogging Is Not Dead: Benefits of Blogging for Business
Create Target Marketing Strategies Based on Clients’ Life Events
Developing effective target marketing strategies is the foundation of your marketing. The reason is simple: If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t know what to say. Knowing and reaching the right people will Save time and money on your marketing efforts Communicate with the people who need and want what you do Attract the clients you love to work for Whenever I find a target marketing strategy that helps me reach “my people,” I count it a big win. My ears pricked … [Read more...] about Create Target Marketing Strategies Based on Clients’ Life Events
Pleasing the Google Gods: Off-Site SEO
In this, the third of a 3-part series on practical SEO for your website, I talk about off-site SEO — sending Google signals from outside your own website, to serve as testimonials to your web content. Here are links to the first two parts in the series: Part 1: SEO Good Practices: Pleasing the Google Gods Part 2: Pleasing the Google Gods 2: How to Do Onpage SEO The SEO of Boasting We all know that guy who says he climbed Everest, went drinking with Keith Richards, wrote a NYT best-selling … [Read more...] about Pleasing the Google Gods: Off-Site SEO
Pleasing the Google Gods 2: How to Do Onpage SEO
Second in a series on practical SEO for non-experts. Part 1 covered SEO good practices. Here you are, with a nice, shiny new website. Looks so beautiful you could hang it over your sofa. But no one comes to visit. Google can help you get visitors, but you have to speak Google, so that its bots know what's on offer. You have to know how to do onpage SEO. In my prior article about SEO good practices, I explained something about the way Google thinks. The important thing to know for how … [Read more...] about Pleasing the Google Gods 2: How to Do Onpage SEO
AppSumo: Juicy Deals for Businesspeople
I was talking to a friend the other day and mentioned that I save a lot of time with a tool I got through AppSumo. See, I got a lifetime membership for $39 and now find myself unable to imagine getting along without it. She said, "Who?" AppSumo. In some places I hang out, people just say, "Yeah, I got another deal on AppSumo," and everybody knows exactly what they're talking about. But my friend didn't, and maybe you don't either. In that case, you might be missing out. If you get on … [Read more...] about AppSumo: Juicy Deals for Businesspeople
SEO Good Practices: Pleasing the Google Gods
People are searching for you on Google (and the other search engines). Using SEO good practices will help them find you. Clawing Your Way to the Top of the Heap Every second there are more than 40,000 Google inquiries. That adds up to more than 3.5 billion per day. Most of them aren't your people. They're looking for something else. Or maybe they want your hard work for free, or they're someplace you don't serve, or they don't speak your language, or they're just jerks. Let's leave them out … [Read more...] about SEO Good Practices: Pleasing the Google Gods
How to Plan Your Content Strategy for the Web
Creating your content strategy for the web is the key to making the most of content marketing without getting overwhelmed, losing focus, and giving up. Last week I explained why it's worth the trouble to create a content plan for your website. Today I'm going to explain the basics of getting the content strategy for your website up and running. 1. Where Do You Want to Go? Your business is taking you on a journey. Where it's going is mostly up to you. What's the kind of life you … [Read more...] about How to Plan Your Content Strategy for the Web
10 Content Planning Tips to Keep Your Audience Engaged
My theme for May, as I get this blog up and running, is content planning. Planning makes everything easier, from writing a book to running a marathon to taking a vacation. Your content plan is not a rigid box that locks you in. Instead it gives structure and direction, so that you know where you're going and how you intend to get there. Changes happen, and that's good. But a plan will help you avoid costly and futile "random acts of marketing" (not my original phrase, but I love it). 10 … [Read more...] about 10 Content Planning Tips to Keep Your Audience Engaged
