Here at Web Gnomes, we stay on top of the ever-changing world of Internet Marketing so you don’t have to. We enjoy learning new tricks of the trade and putting them to practice in the work that we do for our esteemed clients.
In honor of International Women’s Day, we are posting our Gnome Likes a day early and our three top picks are all written by women!
Small Business SEO: Bridging the SMB/Vendor Gap
This article by Emily Cote is actually over a month old, but I just stumbled across it today and really liked it.
The moral of the story is that many SEOs are not equipped adequately to serve small businesses. They either don’t have the right pricing structure or have created packages that don’t always work for a given business.
What we’ve found in working with small businesses is that we have two general categories of clients:
- The “Just Do It For Me” Client: If you fall into this category, you don’t even want to know what SEO issues your site has or what we are going to do to fix it. You just want to know what it’s going to cost and what benefits you may expect. We can work with that!
- The Webmaster/Techie Client: This client has some level of technical understanding either of SEO or website management or both. In this case, we provide an SEO audit (and perhaps a UX review) that explains in detail the issues that need to be resolved. This gives the client a choice to do it themselves or have us help. Or perhaps a combination of both!
We’ve learned to be flexible in our offerings in order to meet the need of each individual client.
If you are a small business, do check out the latter part of the article for “3 Ways Small Businesses Can Make Their SEO Efforts More Effective.”
The 10-Minute Technique to Becoming a More Productive Writer
This article by Georgina Laidlaw really struck a chord with me. The point of the article is to think about how you want your audience to feel after they read something you wrote. I.e. what is the desired “resulting audience sentiment?”
Before you begin to write that sales page (or email autoresponder, or Facebook update), ask yourself how you want the readers to feel after they read it. ~Georgina Laidlaw
As a former product manager, I can relate to the concept of creating “personas” to understand your audience. However, I never really thought about it as it relates to online writing. At least not in those terms.
It makes sense though! For this blog post, I envision the audience to think:
Wow, those were some really great tips and ideas! I can really use that in my business.
Next time you sit down to write anything for the web, take those 10 minutes to think about the desired resulting sentiment. Then go to town!
So Are YOU Spamming Your Favorite Social Media Site?
Knowing how to behave on various social media sites can at times be more difficult than navigating a fancy cocktail party. How much self-promotion is appropriate vs. highlighting others in your industry vs. posting pictures of cute kittens (please don’t…)?
Ann Smarty of My Blog Guest shares her experience with not so graceful navigation in the past and how she eventually figured out what works where.
Here is a great infographic on what some of the top social media sites consider spam:
