Hang on to your hats. I’m going meta on you today, blogging about blogging. And I may even mention some bloggers who blog about blogging, so it could get pretty deep around here.
My last post on the importance of a strategic approach to internet marketing immediately elicited a long and thoughtful comment from an associate of the guy whose presentation I had written about. I loved this development for a number of reasons:
1. Keith’s comment is a great set-up for a future post on reputation management. I can only assume that Keith is a smart, proactive internet marketer who understands the importance of keeping track of what people are saying about you and your company online. (This is easy to do, by the way. To get started, go to Google and create alerts for your name, your employees’ names, your company and product names, etc. More on this in future posts.)
2. I just watched the blogging segment of Rand Fishkin’s excellent SEO training video a couple of nights ago. Rand recommends that you open your blog to comments only after you have a critical mass of regular readers (I think he said 300); otherwise you run the risk of having virtual tumbleweeds rolling across your comment-less blog for months on end. I thought about that but decided that getting any interaction with my readers would be worth the risk, so I have enabled comments here right from the start - and I’m glad I did.
3. I also got some insight into writing for a blog. As you’ve probably already noticed, I can ramble. Believe it or not, I actually published less than half of the words I wrote Thursday. Some of the dregs turned out to be useful in my reply to Keith’s comment. So I’ll save for a while the text files in which I draft my blog posts.
If you want to learn more about blogging, a couple of good sites to start with are ProBlogger and my friend Karen Anderson’s blog, Writer Way. These are both general blogs about blogging. As I find better examples of blogs related to massage education, massage practice, etc. I’ll post them here.
I went to a web-design talk presented by Refresh Seattle last night. I had heard good things about their previous events and was looking forward to seeing what the presenter had to say.
Kevin Tamura of Blue Flavor gave a good talk on the design process, using a case study of his redesign of the Refresh Seattle website. Kevin seems like a nice guy and certainly knows his stuff when it comes to HTML, CSS, the graphic design process, typography, color, design tools like Photoshop, and web-page layout. But I’ve got to admit that I was put off by the lack of a strategic vision and/or an explicit business rationale for the redesign.
As a business strategist, I was put off by the lack of a clearly stated business intention for the site and its redesign. Granted, this is a small site for a small audience and was done pro bono. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to think through your business intentions (announce events? promote events? showcase prior speakers? link to presenters’ websites? link to related content? demonstrate content-area expertise? articulate the organization’s mission?) before undertaking any design project.
As a content strategist, I was put off by the fact that the redesign called for a one-page site. How about archiving info on old events so that folks know what you’re about and so that search engines have more content to index so that they can infer what your organization does?
As a web usability advocate, I was put off by the lack of consideration for sight-impaired users. Web usability best practices call for fonts that the user can resize, but the design he showed uses fixed-pixel-size text sizes. It also uses unconventional “navigation” (if one can navigate a one-page site), including a confusing, albeit clever, block of text that flips back and forth between presentation info and the presenter’s bio.
Anyhow, this event got me thinking about the importance of taking a strategic approach to internet marketing. I’ll write more about this soon because I’m tired of seeing friends and colleagues waste their hard-earned money on sites that show off the skills of the designer or programmer that built them rather than helping them achieve their business goals. I want to make it clear that I don’t think that folks like Kevin are malicious or poorly motivated; they are simply ignorant of, or indifferent to, internet marketing best practices, which is what this blog is all about.
So what can you as a bodywork professional do with this information? Well, I strongly suggest that you always keep your business objectives at the forefront when you undertake any design or technical project. It’s very easy to succumb to the esthetic vision of a designer or the leading-edge technical prowess of a programmer, but always ensure that those whiz-bang factors take a back seat to your business priorities.
