I saw this question posed in a LinkedIn discussion, but I hear it all the time: Should I have an email newsletter or a blog? The answer is: it’s the wrong question. Most small businesses should have both, and the question should be: What kinds of email newsletter and blog should I have? By “email newsletter” I mean something […]
Convert Almost Any File Type For Free
The other day a client sent me a video in MOV format. Now you can use this on the web, but MP4 is much more flexible because programs like WordPress will automatically generate a player for MP4s. So I needed to convert my client’s file. Luckily there are numerous free online converters for video files, […]
Check Your Site For Outdated Content
If you’re not visiting your own website regularly, you could end up with outdated content, and the consequences can be serious: from visitors trying a phone number that no longer works, to visitors seeing your company as lazy because there’s a signup link for an event that took place last year. Here are some key types of […]
The Question And Answer Post
Answering questions from your customers and clients is a great source of material for your website’s blog. Not only are you providing valuable information, but you know that this is information people are looking for, so it will really help your search engine visibility. Even if you already have a Frequently Asked Questions page, you can […]
Make Embedded YouTube Videos Start Wherever You Want
Want an embedded YouTube video to begin at a certain point? For example, you don’t want people to sit through an entire interview to hear a particular point that’s made. Making the video start at that point is easy to do. Just stop the video where you want people to begin viewing. In this case I’ve stopped […]
Your Smartphone’s Orientation Matters For Website Photos
I had a client send me photos from their smartphone the other day, to use in a slideshow on their website. Problem was, the slideshow is wide and not very tall, while the images were narrow and really tall. We had to crop the photos and several of them really didn’t work at all when […]
How To Remove Suggested Videos From Embedded YouTube Videos
If you embed a YouTube video on your site, you may not want visitors seeing the suggested videos that YouTube pulls up when the video is over. In particular, it can be frustrating to have YouTube encouraging visitors to look at competitors’ videos. So how do you stop screens like this from showing up? If you’re […]
Write Descriptive Anchor Text For Your Links
Anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see in a hyperlink; text that’s usually uniquely coloured, underlined, or both. Best practice is to make this anchor text descriptive of what visitors are going to get when they click the link. The other day I came across this example of weak anchor text: In this […]
Finding New Material In Old Reports
No new studies you can report on in your field? Time to start mining past studies and reviving some old material or finding new twists on old figures. Pick any topic relating to your business – I’m sure you’ll find many if not dozens of recent studies on that topic. Your task is to extract the […]
Cool Effects For Your Website Photos
Online image editors like PicMonkey or Canva make it easy to spice up the photos you use on your website. Take this image of a door bolt from my collection of free downloadable photos (yes, indeed, take it!): I like the angle of the shot and the narrow depth of field. And the colours are nice too, […]
The Old Patent Post
In every field there’s a long history of invention, some of it quite… unusual. Finding these unusual inventions and blogging about them can be a great source of both entertainment and sometimes education. A client of mine – a singing teacher – was looking for something fun to blog about and I suggested she try Google […]
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