Digital marketing tips, views and analysis
Blog idea and headline generators make it easy to come up with content ideas. But your ideas should be more than a checklist of vacant stories – they need to fulfill a human need.
Continue reading 5 ways to come up with original blog post ideas
If you write articles just to place them on third party sites, just to create links for Google to read, you should take a serious look at this practice. I won’t say you shouldn’t do it – after all, you have a right to publish anything anywhere if you see fit. If you are doing it blindly though, or if you are paying someone else to do it and they are doing it badly, you could soon be seeing a drop in the traffic you get from search results.
I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, mainly because I have been busy writing elsewhere. One of my projects recently was a five-part series entitled “How to write a blog” for the Red Rocket Media blog. I’m going to share a summary of the series here, so you can dive in and read the articles in full.
Here are the articles in order. Continue reading Five detailed tips for blog writers
If something is highly shareable, publish something about it on your website and share it from there, so your website benefits from the click-throughs when you promote it on Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter.
Continue reading Posting crap on Pinterest gets results (sort of)
Some brand owners are showing some great initiative with Pinterest, gamifying their use of it. For retailers, Pinterest is a great way to build and share an online catalogue.
I worked in magazine publishing when the “world wide web” (as it was still being called) was becoming the new way to publish. At that time, magazine publishing companies, and some newspaper publishers, invested warily in the new medium because of the fear that the web would kill magazine sales and affect marketing.
Trade magazines that relied on industry advertising (especially those reliant on job ads) suddenly saw their paginations drop as the web offered a more cost effective and trackable way to reach customers. Continue reading The convergence of magazines and web
If you take the time to write what you think is an honest and well-reasoned review of a product you have paid good money for, you might understandably feel aggrieved when the company that invited you to write the review says it isn’t good enough to be published.
This happened to me recently on the Argos website after they emailed me to invite me to review a child’s bed I had bought. I wrote the review and then received an email a few days later to say, “Unfortunately we could not publish your review as it did not meet our guidelines.” Continue reading Argos wants reviews, but does it really?
If you want to quickly analyse your website to see how it’s performing on search engines like Google and Bing, here’s a quick guide to how you can do it in five minutes. These five minutes will be invaluable in setting you on the path to making improvements to your content and your site structure.
Step 1 – See how much of your website is in Google
In the Google search bar, type “site:www.yoursite.com” and hit enter. Google will then show you how many pages it has indexed from your domain name. Some of these may be Flash files and some may be PDFs. Continue reading How to analyse your website in five minutes
The Google dance is so hard to keep up with as the pace of changes to Google’s powerful search engine increases. In recent months we’ve seen the Caffeine update, the Panda update and now one that is being nicknamed Google Fresh.
I previously wrote about Google’s pledge to punish spammy content, but this latest alteration to the Google algorithm is about freshness, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a welcome change. Continue reading Google freshens up algorithm
One of the most annoying and time-consuming things about running a forum online is the constant appearance of comment spam. You can put some tools in place to prevent auto spammers, but you still get a steady stream of humans who will jump through the registration hoops in order to post their spam, just to get their links into the Google index. Continue reading Using IP blocks to prevent forum spam
When it comes to business presentations and copywriting, we commonly sneer at clichés, and you have perhaps at least once played a game of Buzzword Bingo – trying to spot business buzzwords as they are uttered in meetings.
Why are we so hard on clichés though when they often hit the nail on the head? If you want to make a clear point in business, a cliché does what it says on the tin. Continue reading Bingo buzzwords do what they say on the tin
One of the most neglected aspects of self-publishing is proofing and editing copy. The world is full of people who write and publish their own content (myself included, as is evident with this very piece) and there is a wealth of un-proofed content, full of errors and inconsistencies.
I am guilty of not re-reading my own copy before publishing it, some of the time, but even when I do, author blindness will mean I miss some problems.
Here is a checklist for writers, to help you ensure your quantity is matched by quality. Continue reading How to proof read your own content
The security of your website is a key factor in the protection of your business assets, but many companies do not close all the backdoors. While it is common for the webserver to have a firewall and the website code to contain blocks for hackers, are you protecting yourself from the internal dangers? Continue reading Is your website open to an inside job?
