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I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be appearing on Courage Cocktail today, on WCOM FM 103.5 today at noon (in about….15 minutes!) and later on their podcast (I’ll try to link that up when it’s available). I’ll be following up the lovely Jackie Houston, a style and image consultant, talking about how her wardrobe consulting can help young professionals. I’m super excited about this opportunity! Update: here’s the podcast! I come in at about 39 minutes, but if you’re interested in image consulting, I highly recommend listening to Jackie too. I’m just there to support her.

I have an idea for a piece of content and I want to maximize the likelyhood that people using Google will find it. I don’t plan to create an ongoing blog, and I don’t currently have an outlet that this content is appropriate for–I just want to write about this topic! I considered setting up a WordPress, but it looks complicated for my purposes. How about tumblr? Other ideas?-Wants Right Internet Tool Sometimes you have a piece of content just banging around in your head and you want to have people read it, but you lack a good place to…

I recently launched my business and I’m working on building social media profiles. I don’t have a lot of time and I’m worried that having many profiles will spread me too thin. I sell mostly to business professionals. Does my brand need to be on Facebook? –Facebook Is Necessary? Let me preface this with the following: I’m a product of the Facebook generation. I got a profile back when you had to have a college email to join. Social media helped shape my college experience, and therefore has had no small influence on my career. I love Facebook. That said,…

“[Good] bosses consider coaching to be top priority and trust that investing in people will cause the numbers to improve.” I have seen several variations on this advice in recent business-management articles (the quote is from an Inc.com slideshow on the habits of ineffective managers). The sum takeaway is “People, not numbers, make your business; focus on relationships for long term success.” Which I agree with whole-heartedly.

In a company of any size, it is your employees who make or break your business–they are the ones who speak to your clients and potential clients, the ones whose motivation and rewards will determine the efficiency of your business. Clients are important, of course, but it can be easy to forget that word of mouth marketing comes not ONLY from clients, but ALSO from employees, and in many cases a good or bad word from “the inside” can count a whole lot more than the word of one customer. What are your employees saying about you?

This is the view out my window last week. ENORMOUS icicles.

WordPress is a wonderful, open source, flexible, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, SEO-friendly way to build a website. It’s what this site is running on, and it’s one of the most popular platforms on the web. However, this very user-friendliness comes with a price. The downfall of many things which are user-modifiable is that they are also readily user-breakable. Many people like to fault Apple for being a very closed system–and they are right, to a point. However, it is this closed system that lets Apple provide a highly functional and dependable computer with excellent customer service should you have problems. When building…

I’ve decided to start answering occasional website management questions on the blog! I’ve always kind of wanted to be an advice columnist, so why not? Here, a business founder wonders how best to manage her website and a related off-site blog: So, I have my official web site, which provides all the info people need about my organization. But then, because I absolutely love blogging, I also have my blog that details the process of starting my organization. So, here’s the thing. They’re two different websites. Now, my initial thinking on this was to make the blog a separate site…

When you hire me to do SEO, online marketing, UX optimization, advertising, social media, or anything else: Consultations are always free. Marketing services will always come with education. I bring you new marketing ideas not because I want to make more money from you, but because I think that my ideas will help you do more business, and you will want to keep hiring me and referring your friends. While there is a lot of SEO and marketing information freely available on the internet, it seems to me that a lot of SEO companies are in the business of not…

Do you know what SOPA is? You should. It’s a piece of legislation moving through Congress right now that, if it passes, may change the internet drastically. Here’s CNN’s overview if you’re not familiar. In short, SOPA would force sites to go dark for US visitors if they were accused of infringing copyrights. Google has said that YouTube would “have to go dark immediately”. But possibly more alarmingly, the language of the bill is muddled enough that it really allows for sites to get shut down (not actually shut down, but dark for US visitors) on the whim of anyone…