Categories
Business development content marketing SEO

4 reasons content matters for growing your business online in 2021

In 2021 quality content looks set to take on even greater importance for SEO and the performance of your business online.

Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most, and in 2021 plans to roll out a major algorithm update that focuses on page experience.

What is page experience? Some aspects are technical, such as site speed and broken links. But others are all about content – the extent to which you, or your competitors, are delighting the people searching for answers in your niche.

Google tracks how long people spend on your website, what they do, and the pages they visit. And these factors contribute to Google’s understanding of whether your website is providing a good user experience.

Here’s four ways quality content can help your business grow, and help to improve your search engine rankings, right now:

1. Good content helps to generate leads

When visitors like the content on your website, and it provides what they are looking for, there’s a good chance they will explore more pages on the site, and subscribe to your newsletter or otherwise leave their contact details.

They may subscribe in the hope and expectation of getting more useful content, and/or to learn more about a particular product.

2. And increase reach and brand recognition

High-quality content will generally engage, directly or indirectly, with current or evergreen issues that are also in circulation on social media.

Appearance in a relevant context on social media will help any company increase visibility, as well as reaching a wider audience and potential new customers.

3. Good content helps to establish authority and trust

By creating and posting high quality, timely content, you can help to establish your company as a thought leader and trusted source of information and opinion in your field.

This helps to increase your visibility in your niche or industry and attract more engaged readers to your website.

4. And build relationships

In addition, content marketing helps you develop relationships with customers.

When your content helps readers, when readers find your content useful and valuable, they will likely return to your website and, in time, are more likely to become customers. And not only customers – but fans who feel confident in recommending you, and your products or services, to their friends or followers.

Good content will get you noticed, draw visitors to your site, and help you establish an ongoing relationship so that, in time, your readers can become your customers.

For SEO, and for visitor conversion, good content matters

By posting helpful, quality content, you can begin to create brand awareness, loyalty and, most importantly, trust. And as readers begin to comment on your content, you can gradually build a tightly connected community, loyal to your products or services.

The most important job of SEO is to get good ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). And for this, good content matters: it’s a long time since search engines ranked websites based on keywords alone.

Quality content that is unique, well-structured, and focused on the needs of your target audience will deliver a great page experience for your visitors – and, in turn, help to gain a better ranking for your page in search engine results.

Like to talk about content for your business? Just hit me up, right here.

Categories
Business development Work life

Why marketing muscle matters for going virtual-only

An article in Marketing Week flags up the tendency in the online world for the larger players to edge out smaller competitors, resulting in a ‘concentration of power among a small number of brands.’

Over the last months we have all learned to participate in events online – online meetings, fitness classes, teaching, virtual pilates, etc. The list goes on.

As we emerge from lockdown, many of those who used to provide an in-person service, fitness coaches for example, are thinking of staying virtual. This promises the advantage of potentially serving more clients, in more places, more of the time. With none of the extra hassle and costs of travel, venues, and so on.

However, going virtual-only also has the effect of drastically lowering the barriers to entry. No longer are you one of a few local providers in your niche, providing your service to a fairly captive local market. 

You can provide your service to anyone, anywhere – but so can the big guys, with their ability to ruthlessly cut costs and amp up their marketing.

In short, the move online suddenly introduces a ‘drastic and permanent increase in competition from bigger, less expensive, more famous alternative suppliers.’

Ouch.

To make the long tail work for the local supplier – in other words, to leverage the potential of a small niche – will require developing and nurturing a strong brand: Good marketing will be critical for survival.

There are some who are smashing it. For example, take a look at https://www.instagram.com/lynseysuzanne86/ for example. Though Lynsey combines virtual with in-person sessions, which I think is probably a better, more sustainable model that going totally virtual. 

You can read the full Marketing Week post here.

Thank you Mark Masters of You Are The Media for drawing my attention to this article. Top image by Scott Beck on Unsplash

Categories
Business development Life Personal development

Commitment, leadership and paths not taken

Out of the blue, two very interesting quotes on commitment dropped into my inbox last week. Though coming from different angles, both illuminate the nature of commitment and our understanding and appreciation of what is gained when we commit to a specific path of action.

The two newsletters have nothing really in common, but share a characteristic that appeals to me – their wide-ranging approach. Whilst each is based on a specific topic, books and learning guitar, the way they talk about their subjects resonates across the wide spectrum of life and work.

The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.

Anne Morriss

Anne Morriss is managing director of the Concire Leadership Institute and I’m definitely late to the party as far as this quote is concerned. It’s even been printed on a Starbucks coffee wrapper – although perhaps only in the US which lets me off the hook a bit since I live in the UK. But, always, better late than never, especially where wisdom is concerned.

Anyway, I read this quote in this month’s Book Club Newsletter from Neil Pasricha (http://1000awesomethings.com/reading-club/). It’s free, and there’s always at least one book of interest. In this case, ‘Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You’ by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. And, of course, that quote.

You can almost feel the anxiety of hesitation, of weighing up the pros and cons, slipping away as you read the words. Decision made. 

In love, it’s perhaps what the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell had in mind when she described marriage as “the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue.” 

However, the moment of commitment is only the beginning. Perseverance is needed to see any project to fruition. And it’s crucial to put in the necessary analysis and preparation (Ready… Aim…) before you pull the trigger.

Love (or that business idea) may not always turn out to be worth the risk, but if you never roll the dice… do you ever really live?

I’m not sure where the impulse to expand and improve comes from. I have it spades for the guitar, but ironically, the more I’ve turned it upside down, narrowing the scope of what I’m trying to do, the more I’ve enjoyed being a guitarist. Presumably that’s because if you narrow your focus, you can concentrate more of your energy on fewer things, the ones you’ve decided to care about at the expense of the ones you’re letting go of. The day I decided only to fingerpick, I cut adrift any sense that “well, gee, as an acoustic guitar player and roots-music aficionado, shouldn’t I be better at flatpicking than I am?” Now, I know the answer most emphatically is: ah, nope. […]

As a result of countless decisions like that over the past decade or more – and they pick up speed and momentum, the more of them I make – I feel more focused and more adept at the things I *have* chosen, and nearly negligible regret at this point about the equally countless paths not taken. In some ways, it’s a kind of creative decluttering – you let go of the things that feel like obligations, and hold onto the ones that light you up inside.

David Hamburger

I can’t remember how I came to subscribe to roots guitar player and tutor David Hamburger’s newsletter; his lessons are way too advanced for me. I’ll put it down to aspiration. But I like his way of talking about music, the guitar, and the way that working on developing your skill (at whatever) is to contribute to your personal development. Though he would never put it this way, thankfully. You can subscribe here: https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/subscribe

The takeaway

‘The countless paths not taken…’ Of course, you can hear the echo of the Robert Frost poem, and from it know that there are times you have to choose. Making the choice may be uncomfortable, but it’s the only way to move forward.

It’s worth remembering the fuller text of the famous Helen Keller quote:

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Helen Keller

There’s no way to be sure you are making the right decision, but very often (always?) what you choose matters less than that you choose, and follow it through with commitment.

And if it doesn’t work out… Start over. 

Categories
Life Music Personal development Poetry

Tired

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two –
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

Langston Hughes
1902-1967

‘Tired’ was written in 1930 and first published in New Masses magazine, February 1931.

Because it seemed a moment, the right moment to remember how long the road, but also, surely, this time a change’s gonna come, oh yes, it will.

Incidentally, you can hear the great Langston Hughes read a different poem at: https://poetryarchive.org/poet/langston-hughes/

Categories
blogging Business development Life Personal development

A Short Note on Being Authentic

Being authentic – or, rather, the need for it, desire for it – is a modern marketing mantra.

People no longer want stuffy, corporate speak or shouty sales patter. Customers, we are told, want to know they are buying into the ‘real you’. But is this really true?

Well, copy with personality and style is certainly preferable, and more effective at building a long term relationship with customers, than tired corporate clichés or the kind of sales copy that talks at you rather than to you.

And it’s definitely a plus if your business and the way you present yourself is (in existentialist speak) ‘congruent with your beliefs’. If only because it’s so much easier if you don’t have to pretend enthusiasm. Or have to force yourself to be that outgoing, exuberant character, when really you’re the quiet, retiring type.

But of course it’s not the real unedited you that people want, it’s the version of you that’s congruent with them, that strikes a chord with their beliefs, the way that they see themselves.

In a recent post on Copyblogger, Why People Don’t Want the ‘Real’ You, Brian Clark puts it very elegantly:

Very few of the things we buy are truly necessary.

Everything else we buy is used as a way of telling the story of who we are, what we believe, and what we aspire to be.

Your story absolutely matters, but only to the extent that it helps people tell the story they want to tell about themselves.

Be you, but then get out of the way.

As Seth Godin wrote (and from which Brian Clark takes his cue): ‘Authenticity in marketing is telling a story people want to hear.’

But there is a way to be authentic, a way to be true both to yourself and to your customer, your ‘tribe’. An approach that is helpful to you and to those you want to help through your business, nicely expressed in another post on Copyblogger:

When you approach your subject with curiosity, modesty, and a sincere desire to help, you’ll find raving fans.

That’s where I stand.

Postscript

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Categories
blogging Life Music Personal development Philosophy

Getting through

During lockdown I have taken the opportunity to give my small (but now a little more perfectly formed, I hope) corner of the internet a makeover after, it must be admitted, a period of inattention.

Instead of launching straight into business matters, and in particular in view of the title of the previous post in this blog (very much pre-COVID19), I wanted to give a shout out to a few publications/resources that I’ve found helpful in getting through these strange times, and are also interesting and enjoyable in their own right. In no particular order:

Newsletters

Laura Olin

Laura Olin is a ‘digital strategist with sisu’. No, I didn’t know either, but now I wish I was Finnish, although there’s no strict necessity to be Finnish in order to join her in acting with determination, even in the face of seemingly impossible odds. [See what I’m ranting on about at https://www.lauraolin.com/]

But anyway, Laura Olin compiles a weekly email of ‘lovely and/or meaningful things’. The ‘things’ are not on any specific topic or agenda, but there’s always something to be interested in, to be surprised about; something to spark and encourage your creative energy.

Gretchen Rubin

I think she’s the most interesting and insightful person writing on happiness. Each week (amongst much else) she has a different interviewee responding to the same ten or so questions about happiness, habits and relationships. Last week the interviewee was author, blogger and speaker Jen Hatmaker [https://jenhatmaker.com] who spoke vividly about the importance of connectedness to us as humans – something we have all been missing in these days of social distancing.

In my latest book Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire, I was surprised to discover how not just important but crucial connected relationships are to our well-being. It is the single factor that overrides virtually every other marker of health. It alone has the power to meet all three basic human needs outlined in Self-Determination Theory, it is the strongest predictor of physical health and lifespan, and it is permanently linked to our levels of resiliency, optimism, and productivity. In other words, the lonelier we are, the worse we are doing in every facet of life, and the more connected we are, the better we are doing in every facet of life. Connection and belonging matter almost more than anything else we put our hands to.

Read more at https://gretchenrubin.com/

And I can’t leave newsletters without mentioning writer and artist (or, artist and writer) Austin Kleon. He is a brilliant curator who always has interesting things to say and draw your attention to in art, writing music and more. You can read more and subscribe here.

Podcasts

I’m a recent convert to Podcasts, but I’m really loving and highly recommended these:

How To Fail with Elizabeth Day

A blog about failure… or rather, getting through failure to the other side. Coming to terms with the things that haven’t gone right, in business or life or both (after all, work is part of life, which is why I don’t really go for the ‘work/life balance’ shtick; but that’s another story), because to ‘learn how to fail is to learn how to succeed.’

Whether one totally buys into this overall proposition or not, Elizabeth Day is an excellent interviewer and is able to attract a lot of very interesting interviewees.

During the lockdown there have been three special editions interviews with Mo Gawdat (author of Solve for Happy, Alain de Botton (of the School of Life and much else), and also now one with fashion designer Henry Holland. All are thought-provoking and offer a lot of helpful advice and insight. And are often very moving. For me, the standout (both original interview and recent coronavirus special) is Alain de Botton.

FT Culture Call

Lively and engaging chat and interviews between two engaging FT’ers in London and New York about culture high and low – a redundant distinction, thankfully, but just to indicate we’re not simply talking opera and classics here.

In a recent episode Lilah, in New York, interviewed chef Samin Nosrat, author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. You don’t need to have heard of Samin Nosrat or be interested in food to find this a fascinating listen.

Find out more here: ft.com/culture-call

Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs

Finally, for a bit of fun and escape, Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs is hard to beat. These two are fun, sassy and, as with all the best conversations (or criticism for that matter), it doesn’t really matter whether you know or care much about the particular song or artist they’re talking about. Still less whether you agree with them. I can even just about forgive them for not including Tom Waits in their episode talking about songs called ‘Hold On’. His is head and shoulders above any they chose. But no matter.

What they have to say is always entertaining and perceptive. The recent episode on Nelly Furtado is a good case in point, the conversation ranging far and wide, from reflections on the emotional power of music to a certain nostalgia for the days when you had to actually leave the house to get your hands on a new album. It’s a joy, and a regular fix for me while walking the dog.

Categories
Books Life Personal development

I’m so glad I didn’t die…

‘I’m so glad I didn’t die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather.’

Elizabeth von Arnim, in a letter.

[#quoteFriday]

Born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia on 31 August 1866, the prolific and, in her day, hugely successful author ‘Elizabeth’ von Arnim lived a remarkable life that, just for starters, included performing Bach and Liszt on the organ at Bayreuth for Cosima Wagner (Liszt’s daughter) and marrying into the Prussian aristocracy.

Rain or shine, enjoy the weather. And read more about Elizabeth von Arnim.

She is this month’s ‘Author of the Month’ at the LRB Bookshop (from whom I learned of this quote).

Categories
Technology

AI in the fight against disease

The protein folding problem and AI

The unprecedented modelling capacity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is opening up new possibilities for understanding the way diseases develop, and finding more effective ways to fight disease.

This short video of the presentation by Abigail Hing Wen at the AI O’Reilly conference in Beijing 2019 provides a fascinating glimpse into how AI, in the form of Google’s Deep Mind, is helping researchers begin to provide answers to long-standing problems which up to now have eluded scientists.

For example, the three-dimensional structure of a protein, based on a sequence of amino acids, governs a protein’s abilities to perform its functions. Inability to perform these functions can have devastating consequences, for causing diseases and allergies, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and cystic fibrosis.

Understanding how a three dimensional structure is determined can help us better predict harm to patients, design better drugs and design better proteins to fight diseases.

But the possible shapes that a string of thousands of amino acids can take is far beyond the capacity of even the most powerful computers to model …

Watch the video here:

Categories
Business development Design Technology

Who do you want your customers to become?

Interesting thinking on innovation and customer focus in this post at Harvard Business Review –

Smart companies increasingly recognize that their own futures depend on how ingeniously they invest in the future capabilities of their customers.

and transforming your innovation mindset:

Shift the focus from extracting value from customers to making customers more valuable. Simply put, this new focus redefines the purpose of innovation — which is not just designing better products and services, but designing better and more valuable customers.

Read more here: https://hbr.org/2012/07/who-do-you-want-your-customers

 

Categories
Business development Technology

The indoor farm

Plenty indoor farm

With robots picking the produce and the humans adjusting the flavour profile of the plants. A glimpse of the future arriving?

Interesting post by Adele Peters at Fast Company. Read more at: https://www.fastcompany.com/90365627/robots-are-already-farming-crops-inside-this-silicon-valley-warehouse

Categories
Book design Books

Albanian Letters by Arthur Evans

 

Arthur Evans Albanian Letters

Design for Albanian Letters, a compilation of letters and reports on Albania in the 1870s by archaeologist and journalist Sir Arthur Evans, the latest book from the Centre for Albanian Studies now in print.

From the blurb:

In Albanian Letters Evans not only explores the implications of the key political events of this period but also paints a vivid picture of the country’s complex social and cultural make-up. Albanian Letters looks at how Albanians’ views of their homeland were affected by developments taking place at the time, including increasing awareness of ethnic differences, population migration, and changes to its distinctive culture and tradition.

and the back cover testimonials:

‘These fascinating letters and reports – never previously collected – cast fresh light on one of the most vital periods of Albanian history. The crisis which began in the late 1870s would lead, eventually, to the creation of an independent Albania. But while the end-point of that process was a relatively simple solution, the starting-point was a complex problem, with many different interests competing for power. Arthur Evans was both an opinionated young man and a brilliant journalist, with a vivid pen and a keen appetite for information; his accounts of these tensions and conflicts, both internal and international, make him a very valuable witness – and a very good read.’

Sir Noel Malcolm, Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford

‘Despite their biases as pointed out by the editors, Evans’ journalistic reports provide an impressive depth of detail as well as insightful analyses of events, personalities and intrigue within their cultural and historical context.’

George W. Gawrych, Professor of History, Baylor University 

Categories
Music Uncategorized

Leonard. Oh, Leonard.

You have left us.

But you have left us the music. Leonard Cohen, fare well.

Categories
Life Photography

Erwin Blumenfeld, from Dada to Vogue

Today is the last day of the office in Cavendish Square, with the advantage of the Mayfair galleries just a short step away. So very glad to have caught a great exhibition of work by Erwin Blumenfeld this lunchtime at Osborne Samuel on Bruton Street – Erwin Blumenfeld: From Dada to Vogue.

The exhibition includes some of his brilliant early work in collage as well as a wonderful selection of his experimental photography.

Erwin Blumenfeld: From Dada to Vogue

Nude, Paris, 1938

Above, Left: Nude, Paris, 1938

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Above: Hitlerfresse, Amsterdam, 1933

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Above: Shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Paris

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Born in Berlin in 1897 Blumenfeld left Germany after the First World War, settling first in Holland, where he established a Dutch arm of the Dadaist movement, then Paris, where he made some of his most famous images, including Nude Under Wet Silk (1937).

Fleeing France in 1941 he settled in New York where he became one of the most internationally sought-after portrait and fashion photographers in the 1940s and 1950s. Remember his iconic Vogue cover of 1950 (not in the exhibition):

erwin_blumenfeld_vogue_1950

For more information see http://www.erwinblumenfeld.com/

From Dada to Vogue until 29th October 2016: www.osbornesamuel.com

Categories
Photography

Wing in the clouds

Approaching Vaclav Havel Airport, Prague (Praha).

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Categories
art Photography

William Eggleston at The NPG

eggleston 1

I wish I could say I had known all about and studied ‘legendary Memphis photographer’ William Eggleston before I read about the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. But, I don’t think I had ever heard of him. And that’s a big omission because his work is extraordinary. An education for the eye.

The pin sharp focus and vivd colour of his portraits give them a stunning presence, combined with a certain mystery and, in some cases, dread. Like the shot of his friend, the strange Memphis dentist TC Boring (though on this evidence boring he most certainly wasn’t; except perhaps in his day job), standing nude in his graffitied, black and red bedroom; it’s as if the image prefigures the violent death of its subject – Boring was later murdered by locals and his house set on fire.

And this strange picture (above) of Marcia Hare in Memphis, lying on the grass and yet almost floating above the surface – an effect created by the sharp focus on just the small area of the buttons on her dress, her outstretched arm and the camera. Hanging alongside this image is another portrait of Marcia, this time dancing (as if no one’s watching) – with a very similar body configuration, as this photo of the exhibition shows, taken before I discovered no photography was allowed:

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The portraits are not portraits in the traditional sense; frozen moments in time but not character studies. Most are ‘Untitled’, the name of the subject in some of the photos revealed for the first time in this exhibition.

Another stand out image, printed in grand scale, of the artist’s uncle with his assistant who unconsciously mimics his employer’s pose; the one open door lends a strange, uneasy air to the image.

eggleston 3Whatever your knowledge or interest in photography, if you possibly can do go see this exhibition. It’s a glimpse of the work of a master.

William Eggleston, Portraits. National Portrait Gallery, 21 July – 23 October 2016.

Categories
Photography

Frame (weekly photo challenge)

Salisbury Cathedral

Stained glass windows at Salisbury Cathedral, reflected in the flowing water font by William Pye (1980).

In response to WordPress weekly photo challenge: Frame

Categories
Photography Work life

Brilliant Disorder

mde

Laura at her leaving party, in Laura mask. Brilliant Disorder in response to Paula’s Thursday Special word challenge.

Elusive profusion – 4 Lauras (reclining)

4 Lauras