The Heavy Weight of Small Dreams: Navigating Business Ownership in Uncertain Times
Small business ownership is a high-wire act performed without a safety net. Behind every neighborhood café, boutique, or local service company lies an untold story of sleepless nights, maxed-out credit cards, and kitchen tables covered with spreadsheets into the wee hours of the morning. While entrepreneurship is often glamorized as a path to independence and … Read more
Copy > Design: The Truth About What Drives Sales
Picture this: A sleek, beautifully designed website launches after months of development. The visuals are stunning, the animations are smooth, and the layout is pixel-perfect. There’s just one problem. The copy doesn’t fit. Headlines are too long, product descriptions are awkwardly truncated, and crucial messaging is buried beneath flashy design elements. The result? A costly … Read more
Everything You Wanted to Know About Starting a Podcast
There’s more to starting a successful podcast than grabbing the nearest microphone and waxing poetic. With over 4 million podcasts available, competition is fierce. It’s easy to get lost in the crowd without a well-executed strategy. Avoiding pod fade – that burnout that happens when you realize you’re in over your head – means knowing … Read more
How To Handle Sensitive Topics With Integrity
We live in an era of instant information and viral content. Digital news outlets and social media platforms have significantly accelerated the speed at which reports – including rumors and breaking news – spread. Once that bull is out of the proverbial pen, it’s difficult to rein it back in. The digital age has democratized … Read more
How Transformative Storytelling Boosts Your Brand’s Impact
Do you know where many brands go wrong with their content marketing strategies? They treat their brands as just another logo or product instead of as a living, breathing narrative that captures the hearts and minds of their ideal customers. We’re bombarded with thousands of marketing messages from the minute we get online until the … Read more
Unlocking Voice of Customer Insights to Understand Your Target Audience
Creating a content marketing strategy that drives customers to your proverbial doorstep isn’t easy. Establishing clear objectives is always the first step in the process. Once you know what you want to achieve, you must figure out who is going to help you get there. Marketing pros call it audience research. This is the step … Read more
Shining a Light on LinkedIn’s Dark Underbelly: One Man’s War on Scammers
One person is more than enough to make a difference. That’s the mantra that drives Jay Jones to expose the dark underbelly of LinkedIn filled with scammers preying on desperate job seekers. To date, his relentless pursuit of those with nefarious intentions has helped to take down 4,000 fake job ads and uncover scammers posing … Read more
Transform Your Website: How Micro-Interactions Improve User Experience
Ten to 20 seconds. That’s how quickly you must make a good first impression with website visitors. Fail to hold their attention, and you won’t get a second chance. They’ll be off to your competitors in search of more engaging content. Welcome to the fast-paced digital world, where attention spans are fleeting, and competition is … Read more
Dabbling in Gothic Horror Proves Good Fit For Author
The literary snob in Jeff Vande Zande ignored the idea brewing in his brain for most of the summer of 2020. How could he possibly think about putting those thoughts on paper when they were—gasp! —so far off from the genre he usually pursued? With five novels under his belt, most fell neatly into the literary … Read more
Fake News: How Engagement Pods Breed Disinformation
Engagement pods aren’t a new phenomenon. Social media fakefluencers have relied on them since 2016 to boost their popularity online with bought followers, likes, and comments to create the illusion of a large and captivated audience. However, these social media influencer wannabes aren’t the only ones leveraging the power of engagement pods to get noticed … Read more