Online Marketing

Let’s assume that you write good emails. They’re short, refer to a single topic, contain clear requests of the reader and include a 3-5 word subject line. (If any of this is unfamiliar to you, review the Boost Your Email Responses newsletter published a few weeks ago.) Now it’s time for the big closing, your email signature. As an efficient user of technology, you’ve saved a signature block that gets added to each email you send. But how does it come across to your reader? I suggest that the … [Read more...] about What’s In Your Email Signature?

Meet the Knowledge Graph If you own a website, you’ve probably given a lot of thought to how (and where) your site appears in Google search results. You’ve probably also noticed that the most attention grabbing part of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the large block that includes images on the right side of the page. This is the Google Knowledge Graph and it operates quite differently from the listings in the body of the page. The Knowledge Graph is constructed not from Google’s … [Read more...] about Showing Up In the Google Knowledge Graph

Email is the oldest online communications tool. We’ve been using it for so long that not much thought goes into how to use it most effectively. So, if you could make some changes in your habits that resulted in more and better responses to your emails, would you do it? Last year, over 40 million emails flowed through the Boomerang service and they measured the response rate, along with several other factors, to produce this year-end report. The results were surprising (and in some cases … [Read more...] about Boost Your Email Responses

Here are a couple of tips for you to make it easier for people to review your business on Google. Google has made some changes recently to their Google My Business program, most notably doing away with Google+ Pages for Local. This is frustrating for those of us who put time and effort into creating a page but c'est la vie (that’s life) on the Internet. The good news is that the information contained on those pages is still being used by Google and is as important as ever. The place to … [Read more...] about Get More Online Reviews

I recently attended an all day conference in Fresno, as a consultant for the Small Business Development Center. In this role, I work with small businesses to help them with their website development and online presence. This service is free to business who register with the SBDC. It's is a nation-wide program, mostly funded by the Small Business Administration and ours is one of six regions within California. It was great to meet other consultants from Monterey/Salinas and San Luis Obispo, along … [Read more...] about Use the Lean Startup Model to Build Better Products

Design trends have to keep changing, otherwise they wouldn’t be trends. The current trend towards minimalism in website design is partly in response to the jam-packed designs of recent years, which often tried to visually assault site visitors into taking some type of action. According to the article The Characteristics of Minimalism in Web Design, from the Nielsen Norman Group, minimalist design has the following characteristics: Flat patterns and textures Limited or monochromatic … [Read more...] about No More Wood Grain Background Images