by Michael O'Neill | Aug 28, 2013 | Advice, Flow, Writing
From Amahl Majack’s,
5 Ways to Liven Up Your Boring Business Blog
Screw Sexy, Be Useful
Not all web content needs to be sexy. The key to making boring industry content interesting is education. Creating helpful and useful content to serve the people who are actively looking for answers is often more important than trying to go “viral.” As business bloggers, our role is to be industry educators and to help solve problems.
by Michael O'Neill | Aug 23, 2013 | Advice, Coaching, Flow, Writing
Never trust a writing coach that says, “Writing is easy.” These simple words, intended to encourage, just foment self-doubt the moment you struggle with something.
Writing is hard. It is work. It takes time, and energy, and commitment. It will exact a toll on all your emotions and sap your energy the moment you decide, “This thing I’m working on… I want to do it well.”
Writing isn’t easy. Being lazy is easy.
by Michael O'Neill | Aug 22, 2013 | Flow, Quote
From Scott Brinker’s
3 Important Lessons for Marketers from Google’s CIO:
To produce great content, you need great people. Treating it as a craft. Bringing real passion to it. Producing fewer pieces of higher quality that are worth reading. Worth sharing. Worth loving. Because one amazing piece that impresses everyone who sees it, spreads like wildfire, and magnetizes your purchasing funnel can actually pay far greater returns than a larger, cheaper schlock brigade.
by Michael O'Neill | Aug 14, 2013 | Flow
by Michael O'Neill | Jun 29, 2013 | Flow, Quote, SEO, Today I Learned
From Jill Whalen’s
18 SEO Killers You Must Clean Up and Avoid for 2013:
Forget about old-fashioned link building. Google now really does consider it to be web spam. (Yay!) If you can add a link to your own site just by submitting it somewhere, you can assume that it won’t count for much (or anything) by Google. In other words, forget about useless directory submissions, article directories, link wheels, forum signatures and comment spam. That’s all done, kaput, a useless waste of time.
Instead, hire real writers and put them to work writing blog posts and other informational content on a regular basis. Be sure that what they’re writing is truly of interest to the people who might buy your products or services (aka your target market).
by Michael O'Neill | Jun 29, 2013 | Flow, Uncategorized
From Gerry McGovern’s article,
New Thinking: Convenience Trumps Security, in CMSWire:
Making things convenient for customers makes good business sense. It delivers tremendous return on investment. So, why don’t more organizations focus on convenience?
Organizations are generally very good at measuring costs, but they are usually very poor at measuring the value that derives from making customers’ lives easier.
