Reading Time: < 1 min If you have a website, Google has long offered two great (free!) tools to help you understand the visitors on your site. Google Analytics: Shows you information about the people on your site; how they got there, a bit about them, and what they looked at. Google Search Console: This is the view of your […]
Marketing
Less is often more
Reading Time: < 1 min One of the brilliant things that Apple does with their products is not overthink the marketing, particularly the packaging. A great example of this was an excellent video produced years ago, showing what Microsoft might do with the incredibly simple iPod packaging: The idea comes back to a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Perfection is […]
Demographics vs Psychographics
Reading Time: < 1 min Finding a niche for your business is generally a major key to success. If you try to be all things to all people, you’ll likely end up being the top choice for no one. When working on that niche, people often look to demographics, or the statistical data about the population: age, race, marital status, […]
Be predictable, not polite
Reading Time: 2 min When you’re driving a car, the best thing you can do is to be predictable with your actions. If others know what you plan to do next, the odds of staying safe remain quite high. Conversely, if you do unpredictable things, even with good intentions, things can go wrong quickly. As a quick example, see […]
Perceived value is all that matters
Reading Time: < 1 min When trying to sell your product or service, the value that it provides to your customer is essential. The problem is that the true value is largely irrelevant — it’s all about the value that your customer perceives. The idea of Exchange Theory is that the perceived value of an item must be more than […]
Every web page should have a goal
Reading Time: 2 min If you have a website for your business, you almost certainly have a solid goal for the site. It might be to gain subscribers to your email list, encourage people to reach out to you for more information, or even to purchase a product directly on your site. Going a bit deeper, though, every page […]
Branding, Traffic, and Conversions
Reading Time: < 1 min At our Meetup yesterday, Jamie Howard of Hey Thunderbird gave us a great presentation about using metaphors in business. In fact, his entire presentation was about using the idea of property management (“renovations”, “foot-traffic”, “location”, etc) as it relates to digital marketing, and it was excellent! You can view his slides here. What really struck […]
Google ranks pages, not sites
Reading Time: 2 min When you’re working to improve your rankings in Google, it’s easy to slip into the idea of trying to improve the rankings for your entire website at once. While there is a bit of benefit to that, generally speaking Google looks more closely at individual pages than they do at entire sites. In fact, most […]
There is no magic bullet for your business
Reading Time: < 1 min As much as we want there to be one, there is no magic bullet for your business to make it succeed. The desire for one is what leads to all of the MLMs and online marketing sages that can give you “the secret” for just $299. A great example of that is this video from […]
Obscurity is still your biggest threat
Reading Time: 2 min There’s an old quote from Tim O’Reilly that I really love, and it seems to be getting better with age. Tim simply said: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. While you can worry about people copying your content or stealing your ideas, your far bigger concern is having […]