Cynthia Boris Entrepreneur
Whether you have a blog for your small business or blogging is your business, WordPress has a number of plugins that can help you maintain and grow your blog with minimal effort.
Plugins are snippets of code that, once activated, automatically embed themselves into your blog. They can be installed directly from your WordPress dashboard by clicking on “plugins” in the sidebar, then choosing “add new.” From there you can search by category or type in the name of the plugin you’re looking for. Once you’ve installed a plugin, you’ll need to click “activate” and, in some cases, follow the instructions to configure the application.
From moderating comments to social sharing to raising your search engine visibility, here are four plugins that every owner should have installed on his or her small-business blog:
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Pat Walton websearchsocial.com
If your web traffic is high but people aren’t buying, reviewing, or signing up, it means you have a low conversion rate. Here are a few ideas that can help improve you website conversion rate:
1). Offer an incentive
2). Create a compelling call to action
3). Use quality images
4). Make your checkout of sign up process easy
5). Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
6). Use trust symbols
7). Build your brand
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Michael Brenner Forbes
How does a company move from becoming a promoter of their stuff to a provider of business insights? How do brands become publishers without hiring entire newsrooms full of journalists?
Turns out, the answer is simple: take the knowledge, the expertise and the passion of your employees and focus that on answering your potential customers’ key questions.
As Marcus Sheridan (aka @TheSalesLion) suggests: “They ask. You answer!”
This means your company is no longer in the business of just making and selling products. Your company is in the content businesses and needs to become a supplier of education and insights to your industry!
The Content Challenge in B2B
Content and “becoming a publisher” is a huge challenge for businesses today. Especially in Business-to-business (B2B) companies, where many of our employees are stuck on the notion that our products are so complex and our sales cycles are so long that we have to spend a majority of our time and resources explaining why we are better.
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Online Education Database OEDb
There is a myth that writing is a solitary endeavor. While it’s true that no one but the author can put words to paper, writing is certainly not a solitary practice, especially for students in creative writing workshops at some of the most prestigious writing programs in the U.S. There, writers work with other students and professors to hone their creative works through intensive writing workshops. Over the past few decades, these programs have produced some of America’s best-known and best-loved authors, and continue to train the next generation of American literary figures. While every writer has his or her own favorite when it comes to these prestigious writers’ workshops, here are a few we think are the biggest and the best in the U.S., listed in no particular order.
1. The University of Iowa: The University of Iowa is home to the most prestigious writers’ workshop in the nation. A key factor in that prestige is that the program is one of the oldest, starting nearly three decades before any other writing workshop in the U.S. It was also the first program in the country to offer an MFA in English.
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Amber Carucci ragan.com
There’s no denying that email has become a go-to form of communication in the working world—especially with the growing prevalence of email—enabled smartphones. In fact, people are increasingly likely to fire off a quick email as opposed to picking up the phone.
Although email may feel like a casual form of correspondence, it helps to keep etiquette in mind, especially if you use email for work.
Younger employees who may not have had much experience using email for professional correspondence can certainly benefit from the following tips. They’re a great refresher for more established employees, too.
Before you click send, use these six email etiquette tips as a guide to keep your messages effective and professional:
1. Meet and greet.
When you start a message, be sure to include a polite greeting. And once you’re done, include a closing sentiment, even if it’s something simple like “thanks” or “have a great day.” Those two details make emails seem more personable and less brusque.
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