Substack for easier subscriptions

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

If you subscribe to this blog via email, you may have noticed a slight change in the format you receive, as I’ve recently moved the subscription part of this site to my new page at Substack.

From your end, essentially nothing should be different. However, if you have your own blog or other content that you produce, I thought I’d share a bit about why I switched. I was previously using MailerLite, and MailChimp before that, and both of those are great services. However, they’re both more powerful (and expensive) than I need, while Substack is a much better fit.

When I say “expensive”, both MailerLite and MailChimp cost <$20/mo, so it’s not like it was a big cost. Substack, though, is completely free. Substack allows you to create paid newsletters (which I don’t plan to add), and they make their money as a cut of that.

For my daily flow, after I publish a blog on my site I simply head over to Substack, copy and paste it there, and then send it out. That’ll let all of my email subscribers get a full copy, as well as keep a full copy in my Substack archive. We’ll see how it goes!

If you’ve not subscribed to get emails of my posts, you can sign up on Substack here. I’ll only send my daily posts, and the email will contain the full content of the post so you aren’t forced to click through or anything. I hope you find this helpful, and if you have your own content on Substack please leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.

Expectations Matter

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Back when I was around 12 years old, I was quite active in the Boy Scouts. We had a big luncheon that a bunch of Troops were going to, and the special guest was going to be Mr. Wizard! At the time, Don Herbert was “Mr. Wizard“, host of a fairly popular TV show on Nickelodeon. We were pretty excited about it!

The day came, and “Mr. Wizard” showed up, but it wasn’t him — it was a local guy that did similar experiments. He might have done a great job, but I don’t really remember. We were all bummed that we had seemingly been tricked, and what he did from there didn’t matter.

buy tenormin online tenormin online generic

It’s a tough thing to do with marketing; you want enough excitement to get people interested in your event or product, but being misleading can have awful consequences. This event was more than 30 years ago, and I still remember it today. Gaining trust with others is hugely important, and so easy to break. The phrase “under-promise and over-deliver” can be tough to do, but if done right it will help you gain fans for life.

Google launches “Search Console Insights”, and it’s excellent

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute
buy avodart online avodart online generic

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 site from Google’s perspective, to see how your site looks to them, if there are any bugs, how frequently your site appears in user’s searches, etc.

If you use both products, there are ways to connect them together. Those connections have always been a little help, but not a big deal. However, now with the new Search Console Insights, connecting them will provide you with a wealth of great information about your site. You can read more about how to set it up via this post from Google. If you have trouble getting it going, please feel free to reach out to us at GreenMellen and we can help you get things connected.

To see what it looks like, I’ll leave you with a very long screenshot below of what it automatically generated about recent activity regarding the GreenMellen website. It’s an excellent, automated, free report you can get, and I encourage you to check it out.

Less is often more

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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 achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away

Don’t keep adding unnecessary fluff to your blog post, video, podcast, or product packaging. Strip it down to the best stuff, and then just let it be.

Demographics vs Psychographics

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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, income, education, etc. Those things can be a fine way to start to narrow down your ideal audience, but there is a different angle you could consider.

Psychographics is grouping people by their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria. Age, income and other demographic stats don’t matter here — it’s about what people feel and who they think they are. This is an area that Apple has mastered, as they focus on emotions and work to help their consumers feel the same way.

For most companies, it’s important to pay attention to both. For example, if you’re a business coach you want people that have certain demographics (likely a fairly narrow age range, income range, etc), but also people that have goals and dreams. Or back to the example of Apple, they tend to key on certain psychographic traits, but they also need consumers that are above a modest income level.

Finding the right targets inside of both areas can pay huge dividends for all of us.

Be predictable, not polite

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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 the car in this gif stop suddenly to try to let someone merge in, nearly causing a major accident behind them:

The same goes for your business, and it’s why franchises tend to have such rigid rules for their stores. The idea is that if you visit a franchise location of something like a McDonald’s, you know what you’re going to get. If each store tried to customize everything, you’d have a hard time knowing whether the one you are stopping at will have what you need.

In other businesses, processes can be the key. If we just tried to put together a website without a plan and process, it likely wouldn’t go well. By having a predictable process, we can ensure an amazing outcome.

Process != Creativity?

To some, having a predictable process can limit creativity, but I disagree with that. It can if you’re not careful, but a solid process should help to encourage creativity along the way. Using the GreenMellen website development process as an example, it helps ensure that nothing gets overlooked, but still allows for full creative freedom at every step.

Our outcomes are predictable, but it’s the process that gets us there.

Perceived value is all that matters

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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 the perceived cost of that item. I heard David Salyers speak recently (he’s the former VP of Marketing at Chick Fil-A), and he summed it up nicely:

Customers want a value imbalance in their favor.

Value and cost are subjective

It’s easy to think of money when it comes to cost, but both value and cost can be seen in a variety of ways:

  • Time
  • Money
  • Pleasure
  • Effort
  • Power
  • Status
  • Love
  • Etc…

When we’re building a website for a client, their main cost is financial. However, it’s also going to take a good bit of time on their part, and that certainly weighs heavily into their decision as well.

The $5 bottle of Coke

Situations can matter a lot too. Years ago, our family spent a very hot day walking around parts of Stone Mountain. At some point we stumbled upon a tiny gift shop, and we were parched. They had a cooler with normal 20oz bottles of Coke, but they sold for $5/ea. That was $20 for the four of us, and it was the easiest money I ever spent. We were so hot and thirsty that the value of those Cokes was sky high.

Whatever it is that you’re trying to sell, you have two levers you can play with. You can work to make the perceived value higher, or make the perceived cost lower. As long as customers perceive things as being imbalanced in their favor, you’ll win.

Every web page should have a goal

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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 on your site should have a goal as well. Every page on your site should be leading users down some part of your marketing funnel, so take some time to think about the goal for each and every page.

buy doxycycline online doxycycline online

The goal doesn’t have to be some huge achievement; it could be as small as helping users understand one feature of your product, with a call-to-action at the end to learn the next piece. Really, simply having that call-to-action is the key to your goal on many pages.

There are too many sites that have great information, but then leave users hanging at the end of the page without a clear next step. While some users will take the initiative to find out more, it’s always wise to give a clear option for those that aren’t sure.

When we’re developing a website, one of the early phases is to write a brief content outline for each page. Even if you’re past the point of building your site, and you’re already live, taking a few minutes on each page to determine next steps for your visitors and then give them a clear way to move forward will have big dividends.

Branding, Traffic, and Conversions

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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 me, though, was the simple way he broke down digital marketing. To him, only three things really matter:

Branding – This includes your visual brand, but more important is simply the way people feel about your business.

Traffic – You can’t do much if you don’t get traffic to your website and other online properties.

Conversions – Going further, though, the traffic is useless if you don’t convert.

Digital marketing is much more complex than that, but when you boil it down to the basic elements, I think he nailed it with those three. If you can do a solid job in those three areas, you’ll thrive.

Thanks again to Jamie for leading an excellent session of A Brighter Web!

Google ranks pages, not sites

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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 of your searches on Google will lead to specific, well-optimized internal pages on websites, and not their home page.

As an example, I just searched for “best playstation games” and got the following results:

  • https://www.gamesradar.com/best-ps4-games/
  • https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/ps4/filtered
  • https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/best-ps4-games-20261
  • https://www.techradar.com/best/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.polygon.com/ps4/2018/10/12/17965856/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.ign.com/articles/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.tomsguide.com/features/best-playstation-games-of-all-time
  • https://www.tomsguide.com/round-up/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.pocket-lint.com/games/buyers-guides/131744-best-ps4-games-the-top-playstation-games-to-play-now

You’ll notice that every single one of them was for an internal page on a website. I suspect most of your searches end up that way too.

Related is the often overblown concern about how well the home page of your website ranks. While you certainly don’t want to ignore your home page, most users will indeed arrive on your site via internal pages. This is important for two reasons:

  1. You need to make sure you optimize your entire site for Google.
  2. You need to make sure you optimize your entire site for your visitors. Most visitors won’t arrive on your home page to learn how great you are; they’ll land on a random article deep in your site. Does that page provide context and links to help them learn more about you?

Case in point, in 2020 we had a total of 20,036 visits to the GreenMellen website. 4,962 of them came through the home page, which was certainly a lot. While it was our most popular page, which is generally the case, this means that over 75% of our visitors arrived on our site somewhere other than the home page! Here’s a screenshot to show you what I mean:

Notice the number in the far lower right corner – 1296. This shows that people arrived on our site through almost 1300 different pages. Google didn’t just drop people at our front door — it took them to exactly the page that best answered their question, just like the PlayStation example we saw above.

If people come through your front door, you don’t necessarily know why they’re there, so make sure your home page passes “the grunt test”. If they land elsewhere, it’s because Google thought that specific page on your site was a good answer to your question, so make sure you guide them from that page to take the next step.