Website design by committee

Do you work with a non-profit group that has a board of directors to whom you report? Then perhaps your board members have ideas about how your group can accomplish their goals better, particularly in marketing. And what about web design? Everybody has their favorite colors, a design element that they saw on another group’s [...]

The secret to great headlines

The most important part of any written piece is the headline. Why? Because it’s what gets people to read your piece — or not. Headlines are even more important online than in print, because readers are skimming more quickly and are being much more picky about what they spend time reading. HubSpot has come out [...]

Marketing is dead. Long live marketing!

“The traditional marketing playbook is broken,” said HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan at a recent conference. What did he mean? In the old days, you could buy attention for your business through ads and mailing lists. Today, with so much competition for your customers’ or clients’ attention — from 500 channels of cable TV, satellite radio, [...]

Teaching courses on WordPress and social media

social media ROI

If you live near Staunton or anywhere in the central Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, we’d like to invite you to sign up for one — or both! — of the courses we’ll be teaching this fall at Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave. First, starting on the evening of Wednesday, September 21 and continuing [...]

I have a Facebook page, so I don’t need a website

What’s not to love about Facebook? It’s easy to use. Anybody can start up a page for their business in a few minutes. Lots of your customers and personal contacts are already on there, so it’s easy to get a bunch of friends right away. And best of all, it’s free. And that means no [...]

How can becoming a thought leader help your business?

Every business wants more customers or clients. And most businesses also want more word-of-mouth marketing — the most effective way to drive sales. To get both of these things, what you need is an audience, one that is ever growing. To get that audience, to keep them interested in you, and then to recruit even [...]

A 40-year trend you can’t afford to miss

You’ve no doubt heard lots of talk about Baby Boomers, Xers and Generation Y or the Millennials. People are supposed to have different values and attitudes depending on the year when they were born and the period of history in which they grew up. For example, at work, Xers expect more autonomy and consultation from [...]

The cheapest way to retain customers

customer loyalty cartoon

Too many businesses focus on attracting new customers while forgetting about the loyal folks who’ve already bought from them. That’s too bad, because research has shown that it can be five times more expensive to get a sale from a new customer than to sell something to somebody who’s already bought from you. For that [...]

More people, money and time may not help

Q: I know I could build my business if I only just had more access to financing. But the banks are so tight these days with loans and lines of credit. I really want to get into a bigger location, but I can’t seem to make it work. What can I do? A: Constraints — [...]

How to convert customers online

LandingPage-Infographic

With all the clutter out there, it’s hard enough to get people to visit your website or blog. And it’s just getting worse, with more than a million new websites added every single month. I’ve talked many times about how to cut through that clutter and to go the people who are most likely to [...]