Write a Website, Not a Novel
Write less. Write better.
Never use ten words, when you can say it in five. Never use a ten-buck word, when a five-buck word will do.
These are old phrases that I remember from my days working as a journalist. The idea was not to dazzle people with your thesaurus, but to communicate and report your story. Save the flowery language, they used to say, for your novel.
If you’re developing your content strategy for your new brand website, be sure to include a section in the style guide about writing. Let your whole team know that the purpose of your website is to serve the needs of your users. It’s not an opportunity to stretch your legs as a writer and express yourself with brilliant prose. Read more
11 Things Worth Paying for Online
Here’s something awesome…the Internet is still (mostly) free. Despite the sometimes mammoth costs of launching and maintaining a website, social media campaign, or interactive tool, the cost has remained about the same. In same cases, it’s actually become less expensive.
As the end user, just about everything is free, even though we know darn well that it’s not free to create. There are technical people, writers, designers, marketers, and everyone else…all working together to create stuff online. Some of it is supported by advertising and some of it is paid for by the target user.
So why would you pay for anything online? Well, I guess there are just some things worth paying for. Here are 11 things I’m willing to pay for (and maybe already do) on the web.
It’s worth noting that almost all of these are freemium services. That basically means that you get the core service for free. If you really like it, you can pay for an upgrade. Freemium is the ultimate in “try before you buy” solutions for brands to market themselves and their services.
Top 11 Things I’m Willing to Pay for Online Read more
Why Klout and Social Influence Really Matter
Klout.com is a social influence measurement tool.
What’s your Klout score? It’s a question that you hear more often, particularly if you’re in the agency world.
So what is Klout and why is it important? That’s the more important question!
First off, if you haven’t tried it yet, go to Klout.com. If you’re signed into Twitter, it will ask you to connect your two accounts. Twitter has a pretty good application programming interface (API), so you can link two different services and share data. It’s pretty easy.
At first, Klout will probably give you a low score because it does not know how you interact with other Twitter users. But in time, it will give you some indication of your “influence.” You can read about how Klout scores influence, but suffice to say, it attempts to measure how many people repeat (or retweet!) what you say. It’s a modern, online version of how cool you are among your peers.
The mechanics of Klout aren’t as important as the concept behind social validation. So what is social validation and why should you care? Glad you asked! Read more
Use a Facebook Fan Page for Book Marketing
Facebook Fan Page for Comic Book School
About a year or so ago, I started to experiment with a Facebook Fan Page. It was an based in a desire to “meet” the people who were buying my books.
It was a little slow getting started, since it took some time for me to really understand how Fan Pages actually worked. As an author of very niche books, I am really excited about the passion and energy that people bring to the Fan Page.
Now that I have been running this Facebook Fan Page for a while, I thought I might share a few observations: Read more
Buying vs Earning Twitter Followers
Twitter logo as a blue square
I was an early adopter of Twitter, and yet, I’d failed to build a strong following. This was my fault, of course, since I was aware of the growing importance of the Twitter channel for social network engagement.
In fact, some of the people I’d helped to get started in Twitter were already miles ahead of me in building a strong following.
So, yeah, I was starting to feel like I needed to catch up. Fast.
I’d read a few interesting blog posts about purchasing Twitter followers, but I dismissed the concept. I mean, how good could these followers be, if they were willing to be bought and sold?
I was determined to build my followers the old fashion way: earn them. And then… Read more
3 Easy Email Marketing Tips to Improve ROI
Few things in the modern world are as ubiquitous as email. In a few short years, the medium of email went from being a small part of the online experience to a centerpiece of our professional and personal lives. And yet, oddly enough, many marketers are unsure of how to properly utilize email as part of their branding campaign.
Here are three tips for getting the most out of your email marketing efforts. (Why only three? Well, for starters, email marketing is a massive topic that is far too important to tackle in just one blog post. So let’s just start with three and see how that goes.)
1. Understand How Images Load
These days, many of your target customers have the ability to receive HTML email, which means that you can include snazzy images. But many email programs do not show images when the email is opened. That means your splashy email may not display as intended until the user clicks “load images.” Be sure to design your emails, so that key messages display on the preview mode.
This video by my friend and technical advisor Chris Cullmann details how to optimize the images in the body of an HTML email. Note how certain techniques that work well on a website (white navigational text on a black background), just doesn’t work on HTML emails. Listen to Chris. He’s smart. Read more
Viral Videos Can Launch Your Brand
Karmin is having a good year. A really good year. Don’t know who they are? First, check out this video.
This is a talented young duo doing a cover version of a song by Chris Brown featuring Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes. It’s catchy, fun, and very watchable.
As of this posting, this little video has garnered over 10 million views in less than one month. That’s a lot of views for something that’s being spread word of mouth. Read more
Google Analytics Starting….Now!
Google Analytics Logo
In marketing (and in life), timing is essential. It may be as simple as making the light before it turns red (good timing!). Or it may be something as big as when to pop the big question.
If you’re a marketer, there has never been a better time to pop the question…around site analytics. Okay, it’s not quite as sexy as “popping the question,” but it still benefits from good timing.
Google just released a major overhaul to Google Analytics, their amazing — and free — cloud-based web analytics package. Tweets are flying, especially if you follow the hashtag #googleanalytics, there are a lot of people very excited about the new Google Analytics. That makes this the perfect time to get your clients’ websites tagged and tracking.
If they are already using Google Analytics, you should dive deep into some of the new features, like custom dashboards and improved linking with Google Adwords. The Google Analytics blog outlines some of the new features. Read more
StumbleUpon Paid Discovery Fails
StumbleUpon Logo
If you’re a new blogger trying to figure out how to get more traffic to your site, then you’re not alone. Everyone wants new traffic. Yet it’s not enough to get traffic, you want to get the right traffic. Qualified readers. Right?
On Word+Pictures=Web, I am usually trying to attract readers interested in technology, marketing, photography, new media, gadgets, comic books, and fun stuff like that. Digging into my stats, I noticed that I was getting some good traffic from StumbleUpon.com.
Note: For blog analytics, I use a combination of Site Stats from WordPress and Google Analytics. Both packages are free.
StumbleUpon Paid Discovery became available in March, 2011, so I guess I am an early adopter here. It required a new sign up and some basic information, all of which was quick and easy. Paid Discovery offers three pricing teirs, which includes Light, Standard and Premium.
- Light – 5 cents per visitor
- Standard – 10 cents per visitor
- Premium – 25 cents per visitor
At this point, I selected Light because I was just getting started and there really wasn’t much information out there. There is a lot more information about how to run search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns on Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, but not much on Paid Discovery.
Read more
Cross Channel Book Marketing
Creating Comics book by Buddy Scalera
My new book Creating Comics from Start to Finish is just beginning to hit stores now. And despite the fact that I do this marketing thing every day for my clients, I’ve found it to be challenging to apply the same principals at home for my own projects. Crazy, right?
There’s an old saying, “the shoemaker’s children go barefoot.” That pretty much means the stuff you do at work is not the stuff you want to do when you get home. But a book being published is a timely event, and that time will soon pass, so I need to take the opportunity to market my book while I still can.
Initially, I was spending most of my efforts on my Facebook Fan Page, which had around 700+ followers and is now over 800. This group has been supporting my photo reference books, so they were most receptive of the new book. A good start.
Then I did a little bit of content seeding. I created a video flip through of my book, which I placed on the Facebook Fan Page, YouTube, Flickr, and even Amazon. I’m monitoring all of the channels through Google Analytics to see which drives the most qualified traffic.
Read more
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