“Without a solid marketing plan, too much is left to chance. When you rely on “hope based marketing” you’re at very high risk of losing money, time, and traction, because nothing is strategic and everything is reactive.”
Shopify has a blog that’s always worthwhile read for small business owners (Shopify is a content management system that excels at allowing for the easy setup of a site for selling products). This pretty extensive walk through of some basic marketing plan tips is worth your read if you’re a business owner (or want to be one) and need some guidelines for marketing.
As always, get in touch if you need more help with your marketing plan or next steps!
“The U.S. Web Design Standards are the U.S. government’s very own set of common UI components and visual styles for websites. It’s a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences.”
Interesting move by our government, and definitely something that needed to be done. The four goals they worked towards are fairly close to the ones I lay out with clients when we’re working on a new site design or build as well:
Make the best thing, the easiest thing. We believe that making tools that align with the values and needs of digital workers in the federal government will drive adoption.
Be accessible out of the box. We created tools that seamlessly meet the standards of 508 accessibility, from colors to code.
Design for flexibility. We aim to give the American people a sense of familiarity when using government services, while allowing agencies to customize these tools to fit their unique needs.
Reuse, reuse, reuse. We reviewed, tested, evaluated, and repurposed existing patterns, code, and designs from dozens of government and private sector style guides to make use of tried-and-true best practices.
Add “Your tastes are not everyone’s tastes (i.e. the client is not always right)” and that’s pretty much my approach.
One of the things Thomas and I try to do with Thinking Religion, as well as Elisabeth and Merianna on Thinking Out Loud (and all of our Thinking.FM podcasts) is sound different by sounding like ourselves.
“My Wife Quit Her Job podcaster Steve Chou is, like Nick Loper, another savvy online marketer who realizes the algorithm might be his most important audience member. Subscribers are another key piece of landing in the iTunes New & Noteworthy section, and without it, a podcast might fall off the radar.”
I never want to do a podcast where we have to beg for ratings or use the same 5 generic ads that every other podcast uses.
However, I’ll be the first to tell you that’s not a very lucrative way to do podcasting. It’s definitely a losing proposition when you consider time, hosting costs, bandwidth etc. But, I think we’ll stick to our donation model for now (despite its poor performance in terms of actual revenue). As the hosts of No Agenda frequently remind us, “Value for Value” is a much more authentic and enjoyable stream of revenue for a medium such as podcasting.
“Maddon doesn’t care what you think of his lineup. He doesn’t care what you think of where or when he plays his veterans and rookies. He doesn’t care that your uncle was buried having never witnessed a Cubs World Series championship.
It’s a trait we rarely see in Cubs managers.”
Source: Cure for Cubs? Joe Maddon doesn’t care
Stop caring what you think others will think and take your team to the post-season.
Elisabeth and Merianna talk about developing the place as you write a manuscript and the dilemma of floating characters. They also discuss the stalling or need to take a break that comes after pressing send and how to overcome that and continue to write!
“Conversely some of the earliest adopters of LTE — like the U.S., Japan, Sweden and Germany — are starting to fall behind in terms of data performance. In part, these older networks are suffering from their own success. In the U.S., for instance, LTE’s introduction in 2010 resulted in a huge base of LTE subscribers in the country today. Those subscribers are all competing for the same network resources, slowing down average speeds. In comparison, newer networks in South America and Europe are more lightly loaded. But the U.S. has also failed to keep up with the rest world in both spectrum and technology. All of the four major U.S. operators have been expanding into more frequency bands, but none have been able to match the capacity countries like South Korea and Singapore have plowed into their networks. The U.S. has also been much slower in moving to LTE-Advanced.”
During my first few weeks at Wofford College in the Fall of 1996, I stumped the campus IT team by asking for the TCP / IP details or a way to get an internet connection in my dorm room. “Why do you want to have the internet in your dorm room?” one of the IT team asked me. Two years later, the whole campus had a high speed fiber connection.
We’re undergoing a transition from laptops to mobile devices as a primary mode of computing for many people, young and old. However, as Thomas Whitley and I talked about on Thinking Religion yesterday, the transition is happening quickly on university campuses.
I’ve talked to young people who said that mobile service was a factor in where they wanted or decided to go to college. It wasn’t a primary factor, but it did make into the equation. I hear the same from businesses and clients I work with today when deciding on where to have meetings (“We can’t meet in that part of town…the Verizon coverage is terrible.”).
I wonder when / if we’ll, as a country, insist on investing in more development of LTE and mobile in both urban and rural parts of our country as the mobile revolution continues? Or has our political mood changed so much in twenty years that the government stepping in and working with an industry to improve what is potentially seen as a necessary service an impossibility?
“We’re here to tell you we believe that in rural North Carolina and in rural America, Internet access ought to be just as likely as telephone access…You ought to be able to use it in the fastest possible way…And if you can, it’ll mean more jobs, more businesses, higher incomes and more opportunity.”
“Feedly connects you to the information and knowledge you care about. We help you get more out of you work, education, hobbies and interests. The feedly platform lets you discover sources of quality content, follow and read everything those sources publish with ease and organize everything in one place.”
I use Feedly as my RSS reader and go through a good many blog and website stories everyday on topics ranging from art to religion to marketing to tech to science.
Over the years, I’ve had people ask for a way to see what blogs and sites I’m reading… Feedly has made it possible now to share those (along with the standard but nerdier OPML files that did the trick 10 years ago).
So, here’s my public “collection” or groups of sites that I read throughout the day on the topics of Arts & Science, Marketing, and Religion / History / Archaeology.
We too easily understand the differences between “conservative” and “progressive” but our churches have taught us very little about what being “pastoral” actually means…
“Americans are often tempted to read Francis as a “progressive” pope who has tossed out the conservative playbook of Church leaders past. After all, he’s thrown down scathing critiques of global capitalism, pushed for radical reform on climate change, and shifted the Church’s tone on issues like homosexuality, divorce, and abortion. So as pundits map his views, many conclude that he’s pushing the church into uncharted territory. But as a 15th-century Vatican cartographer might have put it: hic sunt dracones.”
“If you are arguing against climate change, vaccines, evolution, etc. you do not get to invoke Galileo because in any accurate analogy, you are the religious fanatics (or the astronomers who blindly clung to Aristotle).”
If only I had a dime for every time I’ve encountered the “Yeah? Well, everyone thought Columbus was nuts too!” or “Yeah? Well, Galileo was right despite what all the scientists of his day said!” in a conversation.
“Another benefit of the SEP’s not being crowdsourced is that minority views get more exposure. Wikipedia’s overview of feminist philosophy is hopelessly short. The SEP has dozens of meticulously researched entries. A 2012 survey by Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent organization, found that about 90% of its volunteers were men. “Its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy,” said the MIT Technology Review in its article The Decline of Wikipedia, which criticizes its byzantine editing hierarchy. The same goes for an important idea in philosophy: feminism.”
