#DanBuettner, studying happiness says people making $40-$70 are the happiest, if you measuring them real time. Higher-income people say they are happier in retrospect because they tend to forget the bad stuff and remember the good. #newtestamentdemocrat
2 weeks ago#DanBuettner, studying happiness says people making $40-$70 are the happiest, if you measuring them real time. Higher-income people say they are happier in retrospect because they tend to forget the bad stuff and remember the good. #bizville
(Source: bizville.com)
2 weeks agoMake sure you take good care of customers. A happy customer tells three people. An unhappy customer tells Google. #bizville
(Source: bizville.com)
2 weeks agoAre you pulling your hair out trying to figure out what to put in the next newsletter? Is the deadline looming like some dark storm cloud? Then just forget it.
Instead, just copy, paste and publish a digest version of your blog from the last few weeks. Why? Because a blog digest has many great advantages. Newsletters are so ominous; blogs are a lot more casual and approachable.
Here are some other advantages:
1) You are released from your slavish newsletter schedule. A collection of blog posts can be published at any time. Sure, you have a rough schedule but it need not be strictly enforced on a weekly or monthly basis.
2) There’s less hassle. You don’t need to initiate a new publishing project. Just repurpose the material that you’ve already published. A lot of the work is already done.
3) Your blog posts have likely already been vetted and proofread previously. Content errors and typos have already been corrected so proofreading isn’t as difficult.
4) A blog digest is simpler and easier than a newsletter to design and publish. Sure, it needs to be attractive but it doesn’t need to be complicated.
5) A blog digest can include responses from readers, making it more current than any new newsletter edition. The whole thing is more interactive, which makes it more readable.
6) A blog digest is more likely to get passed along than a newsletter.
7) Blog content is more easily incorporated into Twitter, Facebook, and e-mails, extending its reach.
8) A blog has better search engine attraction than a newsletter (even a newsletter published to the web).
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2 weeks agoOver at the Daily Blog Tips, there’s one of those I’ll-tell-you-what-not-to-do-so-that-you-will-do-the-opposite-thing articles on SEO.
The author lists five things you can do if you want to lower your SEO scoring. It’s pretty straighforward, but always good to review the basics.
The best thing I re-learned was that you shouldn’t optimize a bad website. Sure SEO helps draw in visitors, but then the site has to convince someone to stick around. Otherwise, this is wasted motion. Before you optimize a site for search engines, make sure the site is worth visiting. Thanks for that.
(Source: bizville.com)
2 weeks agoHere is a checklist for a successful blog site — wait, wait, stick with me. The same punch list that’s essential for a blog site is essential for your corporate or personal website.
It’s elementary. Generally, the purpose of a blog site is to make content easy to update and enable readers to respond to you. NEWSFLASH: ou need to build your corporate site with the same goals in mind.
Your shiny new website is pretty and all but it needs to do something. You need to optimize the site so that people can easily find it. So that users can provide feedback to you for product improvement. And so that you can easily update your content to reflect changing conditions (and conditions are always changing).
This article is basically a set of links to tools. Most are free. Many are part of the Google or Yahoo webmaster tool packages. All should be considered.
Yes, it is WordPress oriented, which means some of the bolt-ons won’t work on your hand-coded site. But there are plenty of alternatives to do what that widget does.
(Source: bizville.com)
2 weeks agoWikipedia defines the term marketing as “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
But this is a bit too small. The emphasis seems to be on marketing communications, which is a large, important part of it but not the only part.
I define marketing as the process of “finding out what people what and giving it to them.” This, too, is not exactly right. Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’.”
But I’d like to challenge the Wikipedia definition. My definition has to do with the four P’s of marketing, starting with product. The iPod came onto the market long after many other MP3 players were being sold. But the others were complicated and it was hard to figure out how to get music into the thing. Apple figured out how to make the iPod operation drop-dead simple, invented a means of buying and instantly downloading music, and the rest—as they say—is history. #bizville #marketing
Next is price. Very important. At what threshold is this product going to be attractive enough for me to part with my hard-earned cash to get it. The choice ranges from premium pricing that pays for features and benefits without peer in its competitors (i.e., iPhone), all the way down to commodity pricing, where other elements, such as getting the best deal, is the most important attribute (i.e., gasoline). (Of course, there are situations where the brand and the image it conveys upon the customer demands premium pricing, as in Rolex.)
Today, place, or distribution, is more important than ever. If I have a choice between instantly reading a book that I just downloaded, or driving to the mall and paying full retail, I just might prefer to stay at home in my bunny slippers. Distribution, that is, the ability to get a produce instantly or quickly delivered without the customer physically entering a brick-and-mortar building, is a powerful incentive. This is true whether we are talking downloadable items or office supplies.
Even for hard merchandise, the internet offers unimaginable opportunity for sales through just-in-time delivery and improvement in customer service.
Then we come back to promotion. Today’s emphasis on inbound marketing (so called pull marketing) makes this function a full life-cycle activity, from product mention in a blog entry to cultivating after-market sales to nurture loyal customers. Instead of buying more magazine advertising, its time to put that energy into managing your social media where people are making a buying decision long before the marketing department knows they exist.
(Source: bizville.com)
2 weeks agoI had my traditional black-eyed peas and hog jowl just now. Yum. Its a Southern tradition in my family. It comes from a belief that the pig represents prosperity—which is a view shared by many cultures.
But the jowl is definitely not eating “high” on the hog. Its a low, inexpensive cut of meat. I always assumed that eating common black-eyed peas and a cheap cut of meat was a throwback to the Depression, where having any kind of meat at all was a blessing. Its customarily Southern to celebrate defeat as well as success.
From this article, I also learned that one reason the hog was a symbol for the New Year is that he cannot look back without turning around. He is always looking ahead—a good omen for the new year.
3 weeks agoClay Johnson says we’re suffering from “information obesity:” consuming too much “junk” news and too little healthy data. He proposes a new regime for the New Year… Hear the interview at http://thekojonnamdishow.org/audio-player?nid=20568
1 month agoI don’t watch a lot of TV. Mostly Burn Notice and political stuff. But I have started having my Twitter feed on during programs (with hash tags filtered for that program). People are chattering about stuff all through the show. It’s like watching TV with a roomful of fans and critics except I can selectively read or disgard what they are saying. Its my little way of turning boring TV into interactive multimedia.
1 month ago