Whether you are a business or a blogger, good SEO is important if you want to attract visitors to your website. A website can exist to serve any of several intents. A business website wants to earn customers and revenue; and to create brand awareness. A personal website aspires to create personal brand awareness and legitimacy or create engagement in a subject or cause. For either use — business or personal — a website needs a steady stream of visitors in order to fulfill any intent. The more visitors that a website earns, the more value that the website will…
Your website is a revenue earning machine that generates income for your business 24/7. Not all websites are created equal though. Many don’t return any value to the businesses that pay for them. This is especially true for any small to medium-sized business that builds its own website without a having real goal for it, or that chooses a designer who knows little about copywriting and UX.
In this article, you’ll learn 5 concepts that you can use to build your own website or inform your conversations with any agency that you choose. …
People are understandably worried about the Coronavirus (COVID-19). For the next several months, a pandemic will disrupt how we live and work. Many businesses lack the resources to design and practice a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). Unfortunately, every business could use one now. Many are faced with serious challenges. Hopefully, this article will provide some level of relief to four of them.
- How do I care for my employees, including those I can’t keep?
- My customers can visit my physical business. How do I move my business to where my customers are?
- People are spending less; my customer base is…
Whether you’re starting a company or starting a newsletter, email deliverability is important. You need your email to reach your recipient’s inbox. In this guide, you’ll learn techniques to get your email to reader inboxes and keep it out of spam folders.
Use a domain you own
Lots of businesses start small. It might be tempting to send email from a free Gmail account, but you should avoid it. Free email providers, like Gmail and Hotmail, are great for personal use. They’re inappropriate for business use though. They lack professional appeal and erode consumer confidence. …
Brand identity is how a brand looks, sounds, and behaves. When people talk about brand identity, they’re usually referring only to a brand’s appearance. This is understandable because a brand’s visual components exist in almost all brand media. Examples include a company’s website, online and television advertising, and business cards. It’s why many creative agencies limit the scope of their branding services to a subset of visual components — logos, colors, and typography — and package the visual assets as a complete brand solution. While helpful and frequently cost-effective, such packages are also incomplete. …
It was once true, only large businesses had to care about branding. Small businesses informally managed their brands through personal relationships. There was no need for a small business to formally extend or scale its brand beyond the reach of interpersonal communication. A customer visited or called a business and was greeted by a real person. The internet changed all that. Small businesses may never meet their customers. Now, businesses large and small have to manage and scale their branding equally. In this article, you’ll learn why it’s important and what it entails.
The business value of branding
No business spends money just for the…
An email marketing list is an important asset to any business. It allows brands to connect with their customers, build and maintain relationships, and generate awareness about the products and services they provide. In this guide, you’ll learn how to design emails that create value for your customers and your business.
Positioning
Email is easy to create and cheap to deliver. Because it’s so frictionless, email is prone to misuse and overuse producing undesirable effects. It can damage relationships, harm brand reputation, and hurt sales in direct contradiction to company values and business objectives.
Your customers get a lot of email…
This post was inspired by a problem we needed to solve for ourselves. We experienced some pain with the short URLs we were using to share blog articles, news, and other content with our audience. Solving our problem was a great learning experience, and we think the skills we learned about working with URL shorteners will be helpful to you. They might even save you from some future grief.
What is a short URL?
The URLs you see in your browser can get pretty long. …
A large business has several advantages over a small business. To name a few, it has a large advertising budget which it uses to widely distribute its message and create brand recognition and affinity. It has buying power, allowing it to offer lower prices than its small business competition. A big business also has scale. It can access customers through multiple concurrent channels: physical locations, websites, email, and social media.
The deck may seem stacked against your small business, but it’s not. You have some powerful levers you can pull to attract and retain customers. This is just as true…
Brand designers and business owners need to solve the same problems, but they speak different languages. Closing the gap in understanding means better branding outcomes for everyone.
Defining stakeholders
Three parties are involved in every brand design effort. This is true when branding any company or product. It’s also true for personal branding.
The brand designer
In addition to design work, the brand designer facilitates the branding effort. They partner with the client to develop, among other things, brand position and brand identity.
A brand is not a deliverable that the client directly appreciates. This may seem like an odd thing to say, but design…
