Reading Time: < 1 min If you own a small business, you’ve likely gone through at least a few “feast or famine” cycles. They’re easy to get into. Sales are solid, and you’re too busy for marketing. As a result, things slow down so then you start marketing more. Now sales are solid again, and you’re too busy for marketing. […]
Show people their super power
Reading Time: < 1 min In his book “Nothing you don’t already know“, author Alexander den Heijer shares a simple but powerful statement: You don’t inspire people by revealing your super powers; you inspire people by helping them reveal their own super powers. This applies to inspiration, but I also think it can apply to your website and marketing. As […]
Full site editing is coming to WordPress
Reading Time: < 1 min Ever since WordPress unveiled the drag-and-drop “Gutenberg” editor a few years ago, which I use on here (and my first post with it was three years ago today), there has been talk of when it might be extended to help edit your entire site. That time is coming very soon. As of today, you can […]
Some good news on robocalls
Reading Time: < 1 min We all get them, and we all hate them. Robocalls. Fortunately, the FCC is finally going to do something about it. More accurately, they’re going to force wireless carriers to do something about it, and it’s good news for us. The FCC has created a new database that all voice providers need to use to […]
Naive Realism
Reading Time: 2 min When listening to a recent episode of the excellent Hidden Brain podcast (this one was titled “Useful Delusions”), host Shankar Vedantam brought up the concept of “naive realism”. The basic idea is our tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, so if anyone disagrees with us they must be biased or […]
The best use of hashtags
Reading Time: 2 min Hashtags show up all over the place in social media; sometimes used well, sometimes not so much. Here are some quick thoughts on them. They started for groups Chris Messina first proposed using a hashtag back in 2007. They weren’t linked to each other, but the idea was that users of his group could search […]
Your website should bring value to your users
Reading Time: < 1 min The title seems obvious, but is often overlooked. We can get focused on other things that are indeed important, like speed, security and SEO, but at the end of the day it’s all about what kind of value your site brings to your users. Headline, headlines, text headline, headline The common issue we see is […]
GreenMellen is a Cobb Chamber Top 30 Small Business for 2021
Reading Time: < 1 min There are a lot of awards given out to companies and websites that are various levels of scam. It can be a pretty lucrative business to “sell” awards to other companies, and it’s frustrating. However, there are many awards out there that are legitimate and merit-based, and I’m thrilled that GreenMellen was chosen as one […]
Brandolini’s Law
Reading Time: 2 min This is something we’ve all seen before, but I never knew what it was called. When someone posts false or misleading information online, the effort to refute it is generally an order of magnitude larger than to produce it. Coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, it’s known as Brandolini’s Law, sometimes known as the “bullshit […]
I’ve been around since 1976
Reading Time: < 1 min When a visitor first arrives on your website, they want to know three basic things (sometimes known as “the grunt test“): What do you offer? How will it make my life better? What do I need to do to buy it? Something that isn’t on that initial list? The age of your company. That information […]