Reading Time: 2 min You’ve heard the phrase “it can’t hurt to ask”, and while that’s true in many situations, putting it out as a blanket statement can lead to some bad things. A great example is spam, whether that’s via email, phone calls, or things like LinkedIn connections. In every case, they figure “it can’t hurt to ask”, […]
Marketing
Protect your community
Reading Time: < 1 min There is a good chance you found this post through an online community that you’re a part of, possibly Facebook or Twitter. While having a community on sites like that is a great thing, it’s also incredibly fragile. Social media accounts get shut down constantly; mostly for good reasons (spammers, etc), but normal accounts can […]
What’s really the problem?
Reading Time: < 1 min When someone tells you they have a problem, there is often a deeper problem below it. Following the concepts in StoryBrand (which I’ve written about with the grunt test and first date proposals before), there are really three layers of problems. External: This is the problem people really see and share. Internal: The way that […]
The public to private bridge
Reading Time: < 1 min Social media can be great, but as I’ve said on here many times, it’s not yours. Using social media to grow your audience can be a very beneficial thing, but moving your audience from that public network to a private channel (such as an email list) is essential to your long-term growth. We saw this […]
Why most blogs should allow comments
Reading Time: 3 min Over the past decade, I’ve seen more and more blogs get rid of their comment section and simply say something like “go discuss it on Facebook”. I think that’s a bad move, at least in most cases. At a high level, it’s because I still think we need to take back our content. Taking back […]
Principles versus policies
Reading Time: 2 min All businesses should have a core set of principles, and policies should follow after that. It’s easy to conflate the two, and it can be dangerous if you do. I recently heard Adam Grant share the story of Robert Reffkin of Compass, and how this kind of overlap between principles and policies caused some problems […]
Digital marketing doesn’t need to lead to digital sales
Reading Time: 2 min If you have an online store, some degree of digital marketing is essential to drive traffic and sales. On the other hand, don’t feel like digital marketing is futile if you don’t have way for visitors to transact business online. At the end of the day, marketing isn’t just about sales, but about conversions. Not […]
The customer is always right in matters of taste
Reading Time: 2 min The idea of “the customer is always right” goes back to the early 1900’s. Among others who coined the phrase was hotelier Cesar Ritz, who said “If a diner complains about a dish or the wine, immediately remove it and replace it, no questions asked.” It’s not necessarily a bad policy, but can have a […]
The highest isn’t always the best
Reading Time: < 1 min Last year I shared some data that showed that a rating on Amazon of between 4.2-4.5 stars was generally considered more trustworthy than a product with full five-star reviews. Some bad reviews mixed in (ideally with reasonable responses from the owner) tend to make users trust the great reviews even more. It reminded me today […]
Why did that site show up in the search results?
Reading Time: 2 min Google has historically been pretty quiet about what causes site to rank well in the search results. They’ll give high-level ideas (fast loading, great content, etc), but no specifics, and you can read many of my ideas from over the years in the SEO category on this blog. They’re still not opening up a bunch, […]