Content marketing is something all website owners should work to perfect.
This post will give you some pointers. It contains a few gems I picked up recently on the how-to of creating great web content.
It’s all about how to say more with less.
Last week, I heard a great talk on content marketing called “How to Write Website Content That Attracts Your Ideal Supporter” by writer and communications consultant, Rachel Kurzyp, of RK Consulting.
The world wide web – a place where you can be in a filter bubble
The term ‘filter bubble’ only entered my lexicon last week when my daughter was doing a university assignment on the topic. It is, I learnt, the phenomena where we are served up web content based on what web sites we’ve visited in the past, what searches we’ve made and what comments we’ve made on blogs such as Facebook. Of course I knew that this happened, but I didn’t realise it was called a filter bubble.
Let’s look at this a little more closely. Do you recall times that ads have popped up that related to previous searches you’ve made on the web? Or, if you’re a Facebook user, why certain news items or ads are served up to you? This is your filter bubble at work. Continue reading
Keywords have been the dominant feature of all my research into online marketing recently. It occurred to me that they are the number one driver that connects businesses to customers or audiences. This has huge implications for the creation of web content because keywords need to be at the very centre of it.
There are four main ways that a web user will find a website. People may arrive at it directly if they know the web address. Or they may be referred from another website that has a direct link. Then there’s paid search, which are search results from advertising. And finally there’s organic search. Over 90% of adults use search on the internet and thus it is the dominant director of traffic on the web. Continue reading
Web developer with gadgets
My reflections on IT gadgets, recent findings on the brains of over 50s and expected dementia trends:
It seems my fetish with data analysis and all things digital may actually be good for my health. A recent study in the UK found that the brains of people over 50 are getting sharper and younger due to the use of IT gadgets. And this is good news in the light of the so-called “grey tsunami” of ageing people. Many are expected to get alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
It appears to be de rigueur to have a go at people with lots of IT gadgets. Granted, our love affair with them can have it’s social down-side. But armed with the evidence of IT gadgets keeping our brains sharper and younger don’t you think it’s worth it? I reckon we should be actively encouraging the use of modern technology amongst the elderly. Not just to keep their brains in good health, but to aid in social engagement by keeping in touch with family and friends. Continue reading
google.com/trends graph
I’m hooked on data analysis. My journey started with my love of databases – those wonderful repositories of information on our primary audiences. Then along came Google Analytics. Or should I say, I finally caught up with it.
For those of you who are uninitiated, Google Analytics is an awesome tool that allows you to track visitor behaviour on your website. You simply place some Google code on your website and Google will collect information on what pages people visit, how long they stayed and a whole range of other useful data.
One of the things I discovered is that more than half the traffic going to websites does so through search. And what makes your site most likely to get clicked? It will if it appears on the first page of organic search results. If you’ve been playing around with websites, you’d know that something called “search engine optimisation” is the most important factor in ensuring your site has a high ranking. What this boils down to is having search terms (called “key words”) that are not only relevant to the content on your website, but popular with people doing searches. Continue reading
This article is a good reminder of what is common sense when it comes to marketing through social media. It’s all about nurturing relationships. Social media strategist, Gina Lednyak, provides an interesting angle to how it all works by comparing it to dating.
It’s heartening to think that there are processes in place that give people a right to be forgotten and that issues of online privacy are on the radar of the authorities.
Facebook and other such social media are great tools, but they tend to scare people because of privacy issues. There’s no point in throwing the baby out with the bath water though. If you know how to protect your privacy, then you can embrace them and take full advantage of the benefits they many offer. Here’s a good article with practical tips on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.
Chris on our Camino at the highest point we walked to on the Hospitalis route
Here’s a little story I wrote for John Menadue’s blog Pearls and Irritations about about my experience of the Camino, which my husband and I walked recently.
In April this year, my husband and I walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. For months leading up to the event, we both imagined how a typical day would unfold. For my part, I intended taking a sketchbook and had fantasised that we would pass through many a village and I could wander into the churches and draw the religious objects. Chris enthused about how we would set forth at day-break, arrive at our destination around 2pm, locate our accommodation for the night, clean up and attend mass. But as we found out, a number of factors came into play that gave our daily routine an all together different shape and colour.
Continue reading
This is a familiar story – applications (like Internet Explorer) becoming too clever by half and actually interfering with user experience rather than assisting it. Who wants to go to the trouble that the author of this article went to in order to get an app to behave itself?