People don’t mean to diminish your work, but that’s exactly what they are doing when they use this one insidious little word. It undervalues your expertise and experience by making it sound simple – as a way to sell you on doing something, paying you less than you’re worth, or not paying you at all.
Build, Connect, Optimize: The Three Stages of Good Marketing
A solid marketing plan has three stages, depending on the growth cycle of the business. In the season finale of Marketing Without the Marketing, I take a look back at the past year and how this has influenced my most recent projects.
Growing Your Audience: Taking Your Talent to the Next Level
The best way to showcase your talent is by activating word-of-mouth marketing. Your message will travel further and faster in the hands of others. Growing your audience is not a passive process though. It requires a strategy, one that can seem counterintuitive at first glance.
SEO and the User Pathway
SEO always starts with a simple query. But it doesn’t end when the user finds your site. For SEO to be truly effective, we need to set up a pathway to serve the user more than once so we can build trust over time. And of course, this needs to be set up and ready to go before the first visit.
SEO Is More Than Keywords
Yes, keywords are important to SEO. But when you boil it down, SEO is about providing relevant, useful content to your human users. Google is able to measure what happens once the user gets to your site. Is it a good experience, or are there things you could be doing better in serving your users?
SEO: Write for Humans First, Robots Second
Google’s Web crawlers are assessing your website with every interaction. Are people getting what they need from your site? It turns out that when it comes to SEO, what’s good for humans is good for robots. Let’s look at some of the biggest factors that affect your ranking and how they are in tune with the human side of marketing.
SEO: Understanding the Google Algorithm
What is Google looking for in your content? While they are famously secretive about their search algorithms, Google reveals important clues with each major update. Let’s take a look at the key search factors and how to apply them to your SEO strategy.
SEO Is About Serving People (not Google)
People are at the heart of your SEO efforts. So let’s look past the keywords, page rank, and site traffic for a second and focus on the real point of SEO – connecting with your potential customers. SEO is about building the apparatus to find the people who are already out there asking for your help – and the pathway to deliver that help.
SEO Is a Key Part of Any Marketing Strategy
SEO helps you tackle one of the most difficult parts of any business – finding new potential customers. What’s more is that Google will help you do this for free. Episode 135 is an overview of why it’s worth the effort to learn even just a little bit of SEO so you can take advantage of its marketing power.
Creativity in Business and the Business of Creativity
There’s a myth that creativity and business don’t mix. In fact, the opposite is true: It’s never been more important to bring creativity into business, and there’s never been a better time to turn your creativity into a business. Here are 4 strategies to break down the myths that limit our potential.
What Is SEO and How to Unlock Its Power
Teaching is how we form a connection with a future customer. SEO is simply a signal that someone wants to learn – with a distinct data “signature” that offers clues about what they want to know. From there, it’s up to us to use that data to put ourselves in the best position to answer that question. Episode 134 is an overview of how to do that.
SEO: A Different Approach
SEO is one of the most important factors in any marketing strategy, so it’s worth the effort to learn the basics. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and anyone can learn it. Episode 133 is an introduction to my approach to SEO, and the start of a new series to teach you all the nuances of a good, sound SEO strategy.