Controlling Bylines in WordPress

Your WordPress website may show the name of the author on your blog posts, as in the screenshot from our lab site at left. Some do and some don’t, and it depends on the theme.

This means you should talk with your designer when you’re having your site built, to ensure that the author either shows or does not show, depending on your preference.

However, adjusting your theme later for this feature is not usually a difficult job, so you don’t need to despair if you didn’t plan ahead. It’s not a DIY task unless it’s an option in your theme. If not, then you’ll need to get into the code, which means you should call your webmaster or designer for help.

Should you show authors’ names or not? In general, a blog or article that shows the author’s name is considered more trustworthy than one that does not. Google’s patent for its news search function specifically mentions that users are more confident about articles with bylines, and that sites which identify their authors are therefore given higher rankings than those that do not.

There are reasons you might not want to do this. For example, you might be using posts for another purpose than for a blog — for product pages, say –  where a byline makes no sense. Company blogs often prefer the impersonality of having no author identified, so it’s just the company talking. You might not like how a byline looks on your page. You might also want anonymity or have no one at your company who feels like having his or her name out there for the public to see.

Have a look at a few alternatives we use for our clients:

 

You can see that we sometimes use the company’s name, “admin,” the name of a fictional character chosen by the client, or no name at all — in addition to our own names or the name of someone at the company that owns the site.

So how can you control the name that’s shown as the author for your posts? When you sign into your WordPress website to create a post, your username will be shown by default as the author of the post. You can change that, though.

First, you’ll need to make sure that the author button shows on your page when you edit your post. Find the screen options button in the upper right hand corner:

Choose and check “Author,” as shown below:

Now your post will show a drop-down menu listing all the authors. You may have to search for this item, depending how you have set up your post page. Just scroll down till you see it.

Once you’ve chosen the author for the post, update or publish your post, and the author you have chosen will show up.

How do you handle bylines at your company blog? Have we left out a great option? If so, please share it with us in the comments!

Is Google De-Indexing Blogs?

No.

We heard this rumor and checked it out right away. After all, blogs are not only an important source of information and entertainment on the web, but also an important marketing tool.

In fact, Google is de-indexing “private blog networks.” These are networks of blogs that allow you to post a single piece of content at hundreds or thousands of different blogs. A truly private blog network might be set up by one individual, but many of these are paid networks. They’re generally set up as a subscription or membership service, and they offer various features:

• They’ll use content you write, or write content for you.
• They’ll “spin” content for you — that is, change up some words to make it look a little bit as though you have a number of different posts instead of just one.
• They’ll post your content gradually rather than at all 3,000 blogs at once.
• They’ll keep all their client information secret so it won’t be as obvious that you’re using the service.
• They’ll find blog posts in their network that happen to contain your preferred anchor text and use the existing posts to link to your website.

Back when I wrote blog posts for all sorts of blogs all over the world, I often found my posts — scraped, stolen, or perhaps intentionally spread by the clients, whom I didn’t necessarily know very well — on these networks. Usually they had been spun but sometimes a whole blog post would be strewn all across the internet, supposedly as part of a blog but in fact in a collection of unrelated articles at a generic looking blog. Usually they’d turn up during linkbuilding work, and cause me a moment of confusion.

If you’re curious to see what this looks like, SEOMoz has an interesting article which will also give you steps to take to clean up your act if you have been using this technique.

Now let’s suppose that you haven’t been using private blog networks. In that case, this can be good news for you.

First, it means that you are less likely to have to wade through poor quality junk next time you are searching for information. That’s the main point of this update (and most Google algorithm updates).

Second, it means that your high quality, informative blog posts have less competition.

It has been suggested that this might mean that Google is planning to be stricter on blogs generally, and that this is therefore some kind of danger sign for blogging.

I don’t think that’s the case. Here’s why:

• This is a Penguin update. Penguin updates are about unnatural linking. Building a bunch of poor quality blogs filled with duplicate content is obviously an unnatural activity undertaken just for the sake of links. That’s irrelevant to the high quality blog on your company website.
• Google is already strict with blogs. Higher quality content performs better than poor quality content. If you’ve been cherishing the notion that you could slap any old thing up at your blog and get search engine love for doing so, you were being unrealistic.

If you’ve been following the general principles of good SEO — providing a valuable web experience for your customers — you have nothing to worry about.

The Power of Why, By C. Richard Weylman: A Review

The Power of Why: Breaking Out in a Competitive Marketplace, is a new book from C. Richard Weylman. There’s a lot in this book, and I’ll be reviewing it at Amazon if you want to learn about all of it. However, there are two aspects of the book that I want to share with you here.

First, there is a section about online marketing in particular. There’s nothing new here. Weylman points out the value of a good, usable website, social media, and compelling emails. You’re not going to find anything startling there if you read what we write here or talk with us. However, Weylman integrates your web presence into his broader discussion of marketing. It’s readable, completely nontechnical, and inspiring.

Who else is telling you to “Go forth as a digital optimist and be there so that buyers can find your promise and your business every day”?

If you sometimes have trouble seeing how online marketing fits into your overall marketing strategy or feel alienated by the idea that you have no choice but to embrace the web, you might find that this section speaks to you more than most of the books I review here. This section is in Chapter 7, under “Little Things That Make a Big Difference.” Yes, your online marketing is included as a “little thing.”

I’ll give you a minute to get over that idea.

The thing that really struck me, though, is Weylman’s big idea. We’ve seen quite a few examples lately of web marketing that is all about the company. Each time, we search for a way to say, “Hey, your customers really aren’t that into you” in a more diplomatic way. When your customer wants to buy a cage for his pet, he honestly doesn’t care whether you’re the top pet cage maker, whether you’ve won awards, or whether you are passionate about pet cages. He cares whether his pet will be happy in your cage, whether the cage will keep his pet safe, how easy it will be for him to clean the cage, whether he can trust you to send him the cage in the way that he wants — it’s all about him. Not about you.

“Most websites,” says Weylman, “have…lots of text about who they are and how well they do things.”

When people are shopping, though, or researching products and services online, they aren’t thinking about you. They don’t even know you. Later, they might come to love you or at least to be big fans of your company. Right now — as web visitors — they want to know what they’re going to get out of the deal, and that’s completely appropriate.

The Power of Why: Breaking Out in a Competitive Marketplace is about taking a customer-centric approach. Your website, as well as all the rest of your marketing and delivery, should be based on the answer to the question, “Why should your customers do business with you?” Not, “What makes you so great that people should do business with you?” or “What are the benefits of doing business with you?” but why the customer will be better off with you than with your competition. Why will they be better off if they buy your pet cage (or whatever it might be)?

The book goes into detail on how to formulate this question and related questions, how to find the answer, and how to apply your results. It discusses how to get your team on board with the idea, how to incorporate it into your sales, delivery, and service processes, and an intriguing set of case studies. It’s an enjoyable read and has thought-provoking questions following each chapter that might make this a great summer study group book.

Even if you don’t read this book, though, I hope you’ll think about the Power of Why and how you might apply it to your website and social media.

I received an advance copy of this book for review. I was not paid for this review, and I always tell you the truth.

How’s Your Website Doing?

Here’s the myth: you get a great idea, you launch a website, and in a month or so you have a million visitors and you’re coining money. This rarely happens. So if that’s not the most realistic measure of success with your business website, what is?

The average website gets something like three visits a day. If you do any of the things I suggest in this blog, you’ll have more than that. But probably not a million visits in your first month, so how can you tell whether you’re successful?

This actually caused me a lot of trouble back in 2006 when I started out as an in-house SEO. You can’t  find out how much traffic other websites get, and in those days you couldn’t even get the highly inaccurate estimates you can find today. It was difficult to tell whether we were making progress or not.

What’s more, the quantity of traffic received by a successful website in one business is quite different from the amount of traffic a successful website in another business might get. Different kinds of businesses need different amounts of traffic — and different numbers and kinds of conversions, too.

In 2006, you could tell where you were ranking, and you could get quite a bit of video game style fun out of zooming up to #1 on Google, but even that pleasure is not really available to us today.

We set up a lab site a few years ago so we could share actual data. It’s great to be able to do that.  But see above for why data from one website doesn’t necessarily provide useful benchmarks for your website.

Without benchmarks, the best you can do is look for steady improvement, right? This works well in the long run. You can compare the percentage of growth in traffic and the conversion rate over time and get a good sense of whether you’re succeeding.

Doesn’t sound fun, though, does it? Or fast. What can you do while you’re collecting that data?

Fortunately, there are other — faster — indications that your website is making some progress.

• Who’s visiting your website? Check out your Network Report and see who’s checking your website out. Universities? Government offices? Major corporations? All of these can be indications that your website is being taken seriously.
• Who’s contacting you? When you first start getting business-related spam, it means you’re gaining visibility. That gets old fast, of course. But being asked to review books in your industry, being asked for links by established websites, or being asked to provide a guest post or to post one — those are signs that you’re makking progress.
• How’s your engagement? It takes time to gain lots of visitors and to turn them into leads and customers. Engagement, however, shows much sooner. If people are visiting more pages, spending more time at your site, or signing up for your newsletter, it’s a good sign.

You should have some serious goals for your website when you get started, and those goals should be aligned with your overall business goals. However, these early signs of success can help you discover whether you’re heading in the right direction.

Using Google Trends for Keyword Research

I was sitting in this morning on an SEO Launchpad presentation Josepha is conducting for Nebraska marketing company SKAR. She demonstrated the use of Google Trends for keyword research.

Google Trends is more public now than it used to be, and it still is the best way to see overall search volume for terms over time and space. You can type in one or more keywords you’re considering (separate them with commas) and see their comparative popularity.

In the example below, we’re checking three possible keywords for a sales tax software company: “sales tax software,” “sales tax automation,” and “sales tax solutions.” We see that “sales tax software” is by far the most popular — but that its popularity as a search term fell quite a bit between 2005 and 2011 and may still be on the wane. “Sales tax solutions” is a newer term in search, but has been holding steady for the past couple of years. Our third option, “sales tax automation,” is so unpopular that even if we try to follow it on its own, there’s not enough search volume to chart.

Which of these choices would be a better option for our website’s primary keyword?

In the example below, “frozen fruit bars” is an obvious keyword for a company that makes frozen fruit bars, but search volume is increasing for that term only slightly over time. “Gluten free snacks,” on the other hand, is zooming. People looking for gluten free snacks might not think to search for frozen fruit bars, but they’d probably be happy to get that suggestion — and optimizing a page at the website of the frozen fruit bar company for that term would increase their chances.

When we use Google Trends, we often discover that the keywords clients think will be their best options actually aren’t. If you are sure that you have a terrific niche keyword that some group of people will look for, and you will be there with no competition, then good for you.  For most businesses, it’s vital that the keywords you use are things people actually search for.

You can specify web search in general or specialized searches such as those for images, YouTube videos, or news. You can choose a region or narrow yur search to specific years and categories.

You can see changes over time:

Click through to see a cool animation.

We often use the Breakout searches as inspiration for blog posts. Breakout searches are those that are rising quickly. We like to catch the wave on these. For example, within searches related to “alarm systems,” we see that “alarm system installation” is a breakout term. If we make sure to include that phrase in our blog posts, we may come to the attention of people who would not have caught our posts if we used “alarm system companies.”

Breakout terms can be deceiving, though, and may not give a useful direction for the long term. We have tried to find popular alternative keywords for “manufacturing,” for example, with no good results. Checking the related breakout terms gives us results about Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which is really of no use for our manufacturing clients.

Think Like a Rock Star

Many conversations about social media and online marketing center on measurement of ROI, detailed statistical analyses of engagement, or tech tools. Mack Collier proposes a change in attitude in his new book, Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies that Turn Customers into Fans.

Rock Stars, says Collier, don’t so much market to their customers as they connect with their fans.

Companies can identify and understand their fans, embrace and empower those fans, and empower their employees to connect with the company’s fans and to be fans themselves.

Some of the specific advice in the book is standard practice in marketing. Getting to know who your most enthusiastic customers are and developing an understanding of what it is about your brand that they like is a basic. But not all companies make an effort to reach out to their most loyal fans and give them the tools to be brand ambassadors — backstage passes, if you will.

Collier talks about the difference between influencers and fans, and how and why a company might choose to reach out to both. There are plenty of examples in the book of how companies have succeeded — and failed — with making direct connections with their fans. There are also examples of how Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift use social media for marketing.

My favorite point was that rock stars “find the Bigger Idea” behind their music, and companies should find the Bigger Idea behind their brand. Do your fans buy your healthy snack because they happen to want a snack or because it makes them feel like they’re being better moms? Do your clients come to you because they need a computer network set up or because they want their companies to grow?

Unless you’re selling a basic commodity,  there is almost certainly a Bigger Idea. Consider the case of Fiskars, scissor manufacturers. Collier tells us that they discovered that their most ardent fans weren’t buying scissors to cut things — they were buying Fiskars to create. Fiskars embraced the crafting culture and focused their blogging and social media on crafting and crafters — and succeeded.

Collier shares a Facebook study which compared the results for three types of Facebook posts:

• Posts that promoted a product or company. (“Try our new annuity options!”)
• Posts that were related to a company. (“Retirement investment strategies for millennials: read more”)
• Posts that were unrelated to a company. (“Got big plans for the weekend?”)

Type 2 — things that were interesting to people who are interested in the bigger idea about the company — got the best response. Providing information that is useful to your customers, patients, and clients builds trust and loyalty.

Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies that Turn Customers into Fans is an entertaining read, and has some good lessons for you if you’re not sure how to approach social media — or if it’s clear to you that you’re not doing it right.

[Disclosure: The publisher of this book sent me a copy for review. I am not paid for reviews, and you know I always tell you the truth.]

Purchase Decision Points

Recently I wrote about optimizing your page for a product name. Sometimes, I suggested, it would be better to optimize for people who are at an earlier point in the decision making process — people who haven’t yet gotten to the stage of looking for a specific product. In the comments, Jessica said, “Interesting points! When you say ‘catch buyers at an earlier point’ – what is the earliest point beyond finding your product in a search engine? Google search?”

Good question.

While people sometimes begin with a specific brand in mind and are looking for where to buy it or comparing prices, often they begin with a problem or a desire. A good example is the Fruti Bar. We’re working with the makers of this item, but before we began working with them we had never heard of Fruti Bars.

There are all kinds of people out there who have never heard of a Fruti Bar. That doesn’t mean that they don’t want one. However, their desire won’t be phrased as “Fruti Bar.” It might instead be phrased as one of the following ideas:

• Are there healthy snacks that kids really like?
• What’s a good gluten free, dairy free dessert?
• What can I serve vegans at an ice cream social?
• I wish there was a low-fat dessert that actually tasted good.
• I’m worried about how much sugar my kids eat.
• What desserts are under 100 calories?
• Whatever happened to those delicious paletas we ate as kids?
• I’m sick of eating fruit for dessert — is there another healthy option?
• Is there something like a Popsicle that grownups would like?

This list could be a lot longer. The point is that none of those ideas has the word “fruti” in it, nor the word “bar.” A good website for the Fruti Bar makers will contain all those concepts, often in the blog.

Once the person searching becomes aware that a natural frozen fruit bar is a possible answer to their problems or desires, the phrase “natural frozen fruit bar” becomes a phrase they’re likely to search with. Naturally, we want to have that phrase on the website, too.

Ideally, we’ll have something for people at all the decision points along the path from Someone Who Would Like Our Product If They Knew About It to Customer.

Should You Give It Away?

Content marketing is becoming the norm for modern inbound marketing. A recent study claimed that 99% of software makers rely on content marketing (yeah, I want to see the raw data on that, too). Even if that’s an overestimation, most modern marketers are aware that producing and sharing useful stuff is the basis of the new marketing relationship.

As Mitch Joel puts it in his forthcoming book, Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It, “Give Me Utility (or Give Me Death).”

So we always want to provide content that is useful, interesting, entertaining — or better yet, all three. We always recommend providing this for free. If you have a great tool, a cool app, or valuable information to share with your web visitors, get it out there and prove your value.

But there are other things you can do with content. Save some good stuff and consider using it in these ways:

• Trade larger or fancier types of content for contact information and permission to contact. This lets you reach out to people who are interested in what you have to offer, rather than relying entirely on their reaching out to you.
• Use content to track conversions for more analytics insights. If your website is mostly about brand awareness, it can be hard to track the value of various traffic sources. If you give visitors something to click on, download, or otherwise take action on, you can tell which marketing efforts are providing the most value. The same is true for newsletters — if you give readers something to do, you can track your most interested recipients.
• Give away some content — but with more of a splash. If your target market responds well to giveaways and special events, make sure that some of your content is given away as a prize or a celebration.

A reminder — this doesn’t mean that you can give people low quality content most of the time and save all the good stuff for promotional use. You have to provide good stuff all the time, but save some special things for promotional use. That means you offer good blog posts regularly and longer white papers occasionally, or great content all the time and special tools or apps for people who’ll share their contact information.

Call Julianne at 479.966.9761 if you see how this would benefit your company, but need support in  implementing the idea. We’d love to work with you on putting the technique to work.

Website Content Makeover

Every semester, Tom and I bring our classes together (virtually) to create a free website for a good cause. Tom’s web design class creates the design and my writing class take on the content and the organization we work with ends up with a great new website.

Each student in Tom’s class creates a separate design and the “client” chooses among them, but our writing classes work together — honing student editing skills while working to complete the project.

I thought I’d share with you the step by step process of improving the web content.

This time around, we’re working with a recycling company. They take oil which would otherwise be dumped on the ground and recycle it into a usable product.

The company provided a paragraph of content to work with:

FSPE utilizes cutting edge technology to reclaim and recycle compressor oil for the oil and gas industry. The plant will reclaim and recycle compressor oil and provide waste oil management services for Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. The plant claims and reclaims and recycles compressor oil using a de-emulsification process and provides waste oil management services for Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma using methods that comply with all federal, state, and environmental regulatory bodies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EAP) and Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ). FSPE receives compressor oil from companies drilling throughout the Arkansas and Oklahoma River Valley Region giving them the opportunity to properly dispose of waste oil without causing damage to the environment.

I put this up on the screen Comp 2.

As it happened, we had an engineering student in the class. He told us some handy things about relative viscosity so we knew what they were talking about, but the students could still see problems.

“It’s hard to understand.”

“It’s boring.”

“It’s all about them.”

It was, in other words, exactly like the first draft most companies put together for their homepage content.

The writing class got to work identifying the mail point: what the recycling company actually wanted people to think and do when they read their homepage.

“We want oil companies to bring us their oil.”

“For free.”

“So it has to look like it’s good for them.”

The class fired up their laptops, tablets, and phones, and began doing some research. They made a clear statement everyone could understand about what the organization does. They came up with reasons that it would be good for oil companies to take their oil to the recyclers, and made clear statements of those points:

1. FSPE reclaims and recycles compressor oil for the oil and gas industry in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
2. Good things about it
   1. Good for the environment: recycle the oil
   2. Good for the oil companies: allow to dispose of oil properly
   3. Good for the consumers:

With the main points decided, they sorted the facts they had found into groups and chose points that would be persuasive for website visitors. They polished up their sentences and created something that would be easier and more interesting to read:

FSPE reclaims and recycles compressor oil for the oil and gas industry in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Using methods that comply with all federal, state, and environmental regulatory bodies, including the EPA and ADEQ, FSPE provides a service that’s good for everyone involved.

Good for the environment

The U.S. uses 5,000,000 gallons of compressor oil every year.

• While it takes 168 quarts of crude oil to make 2.5 quarts of high quality oil, it only takes 4 quarts of used oil to make the same amount – 42 times less.
• 98% of the crude oil we take out of the ground is lost in the refining process, but only 38% of the used oil.
• If we recycled the 5,000,000 gallons we used, we would get over 3,000,000 gallons back.

Recycling oil also saves energy. It only takes one third of the energy to purify the used oil as to refine the crude oil.

Good for the oil companies

FSPE allows the region’s oil companies to dispose of oil properly — for free. In the absence of waste management services, the oil could be dumped on the land, leading to serious consequences:

• Used compressor oil contains toxic substances such as lead and benzene.
• One half gallon of dumped oil can ruin one million gallons of drinking water – a full year’s supply for 100 people.
• Oil dumped on land reduces soil productivity, while oil in water interferes with oxygen replenishment.

Good for the consumers

Only a bit more than half of the oil used in the U.S. is recycled. Avoiding costly cleanups and expensive on-site refining lets you cut the overall costs and can pass that on to consumers. By doing your part in reclaiming and recycling oil, you also help preserve local air and water quality. The benefits to consumers are clear:

• Lower costs
• Healthy environment
• Peace of mind

This is about 300 words, a bit less than the SEO perfect number for a homepage, but we assume there’s be other elements on the page. Notice the difference in effectiveness.

Can you do this for your own website content? Do you need to?

Engineers’ Website Before and After

We’ve just launched a new website for a local engineering company. You can see the new look at left, and the old site below right.

The old site was, as you can probably tell, quite old. It had a no-nonsense design based on text interspersed with glamorless photos of servomotors. I had persuaded the site owner to let me stick a photo of humans at the bottom of the homepage, but that was as far as the visual appeal went.

The site owner didn’t feel a need for visual appeal. People visit his site, he explained, because their industrial machinery is broken. They’re losing thousands of dollars a minute and they don’t care what the site looks like. All they need is a phone number and a clear list of the products serviced.

We get that. However, we’ve also seen the research showing that consumers trust a modern, professionally designed website more than a website with an outdated design. We also saw traffic at the WordPress.com blog we created for the engineering company steadily gaining organic search traffic, while the main site still relied on paid traffic.

Let’s have a look at the similarities and differences between the two websites:

• We kept the client’s color scheme, basic navigation, and overall feeling. The design is clean and modern, but not a shock to the site owner’s system.
• Knowing that the product list and phone number were the most important items, we kept them right in the “Look at me!” spot at the top left of the homepage.
• We also put contact info at the top right, where people are now accustomed to looking for it.
• We added a slider gallery with photos that help communicate the services offered and the industries the company works with.
• We had previously optimized the site’s content, so we just did some updates and moved the text into the new design.
• Since this company does have competitors, we added a scannable list of “Why choose us” points and followed them up with — once again — that all-important phone number.
• The inner pages contain the same photos of machines, but they’ve been tidied up, arranged attractively, and supported by good choices in typography. See a screenshot from an inner page below.
• We built the new site in WordPress for easy updates and imported the blog from its WordPress.com home to the company website so the main site can reap the benefits of having a blog.
• We pulled blog posts onto the homepage, in case visitors who aren’t having an emergency happen by and care to read some interesting information on motion control.

This project shows that your no-nonsense business can upgrade to a more modern website without losing that no-nonsense feeling.

It’s also a good example of a migration from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. We used WordPress Importer, a simple plugin, to speed up the process. Designer Paul Fraley got the theme designed and implemented, and then just imported the files from the existing WordPress.com blog. With the blog imported, we had to do a little cleanup to suit the new theme, but it was generally simple.

The overall result is a much snazzier website. We expect that the new site will appeal to humans and search engines alike.

 

 

 

True Confessions: Being Inconsistent

It’s the beginning of a new month and a new quarter, so I’m working on reports. For our own website, I was surprised to see that we had only half as many leads in March as we had in February. We really hadn’t noticed — we were so busy in March with projects for our new and existing customers that we didn’t have time to pay attention to that.

Looking for the cause of the drop, I found that our web traffic was also lower in March — by a little more than 8%. What happened? Digging into analytics, I found some big differences in our website in March:

• Blog posts weren’t as consistent as usual — sometimes they were posted in the evening, and there were a few days that didn’t get a post at all, since clients’ websites always take precedence over our own. You know what they say about the cobbler’s children.
• Our social media was down, too. We sent 54% as many messages in March as in February, or a little more than half as many.
• While we did get a newsletter out in March, we didn’t give people anything special to click through to — and had about 20% of the clicks we normally get.

Fewer leads? No reason to be surprised.

Here’s the takeaway for you and your company website:

• You need to be consistent. I had 17 good fresh blog posts instead of 20, and posted them at random times instead of consistently, and I saw a change in my business in just one month. If you are your own blogger, are you writing regularly? If you handle your own social media, are you posting good things on a regular basis? Does your newsletter go out regularly, and does it provide value for your readers every time?
• You can’t wait and see. We didn’t notice a slow down. It depends on your business and your industry, of course, but the common rule of thumb is that you will see the results of what you do right now in 90 days. Do you want to be happy at the end of second quarter? If so, you need to take action now.

I’m sharing this true confession with you because it is so easy to overlook this. We take care of our clients, of course, but I know that a lot of you reading this are taking the DIY route. And I know that, just like me, you can get so busy providing goods and services for your customers, clients, and patients that you don’t even realize that you’re slipping up on your own online presence.

If it no longer makes sense for you to try to keep your own website consistent, call Julianne at 479.966.9761. The cobbler’s children, as the old saying goes, go barefoot, but we keep our clients consistent no matter how busy they get.

New Things to Do Online

In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman listed the people who don’t have to worry about unemployment in the new labor market. On that list were people whose jobs must be done in situ. You can’t get a haircut online, you can’t download a meal, and — with current technology — you can’t perform surgery from any serious distance.

Lawyers might have thought they were in that in situ group, but that may not be true in the future. We’re getting ready to launch a new website that allows attorneys to test their court cases in a virtual courtroom. Chris Lucas, the mastermind behind the idea, thinks that overcrowded courtrooms can be a thing of the past once attorneys get used to presenting their cases to virtual jurors. Knowing what the outcome will probably be, they can negotiate a settlement for the case and keep it out of court.

There are many more possible uses for YurJurY, but saving IRL jury trials for cases that really need it would be beneficial for a lot of people, including jurors who can fit their civic duty into their lives by deliberating online.

Think about your own field of work. Could some of the work you do be accomplished online instead? What about the forms you have patients fill out before you see them — could those be done online before the patients come in? Could you take orders for your artisan vegetable crops online and deliver them from the farm to the buyers? Could you book appointments online and free up some time in your office?

The days when a website was just like a brochure are long gone. You might be amazed at how many of your common tasks could now be done online. If you haven’t had a website update in a few years, call Julianne at 479.966.9761 and find out how much harder your website could work for you.

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