Pick your best blog posts

I’ve been inspired by my fellow blogger and marketer Danny Iny at Firepole Marketing and taken up his challenge to curate seven of my blog posts for my readers.

These will be my own selection of seven posts that I’ve written: the most beautiful post, the most popular post, the most controversial post, the most helpful post, the post whose success surprised me, the post I didn’t feel got the attention it deserved, and the post I am most proud of.

Danny, in turn, got the idea from Stuart Mills at Unlock the Door who borrowed the idea from…you get the idea. Hey, viral marketing at it’s best.  So, here goes.

7 Posts in 7 Categories

My most beautiful post. There is actually a tie for the posts I wrote about my wonderful late husband Charles. What I Learned From My Husband About Having a Passion for Life and Do People Write Love Letters Anymore? These are written from the heart and I hope you enjoy them. Tip: don’t be afraid to show your emotions in your writing.

My most popular post. I wrote Profile of a Social Media Director over a year ago and it still regularly tops the charts or is close to it, depending on what I’ve written that week. It’s not surprising. I simply went through the job boards and wrote a list of what I found most often. Hmm. I need to go back and see if it needs an update. Tip: know what’s being searched and write about it.

My most controversial post. This has to be “Connect by Hertz” Car Sharing Deal Leaves Me Spinning My Wheels on Facebook in which I complain about Hertz forcing me to use Facebook to book a $5 car which wasn’t really a deal…well, read the post and the very long response from Hertz (guess they will never hire me). Tip: don’t be afraid to stick your neck out.

My most helpful post. I was surprised that my post How to Insert the Name of Your Website into Your LinkedIn Profile received so many comments. The default “Company Website” in a LinkedIn profile can be changed to the actual name of your website but few people even know you can do it – or how to do it. Made me feel good to help out. Tip: do not be afraid you’ll be talking down to your readers with simple how-to posts.

The post whose success most surprised me. That would be another simple how-to post entitled How to Write a LinkedIn Invitation. I had received a well-crafted invitation that so impressed me that I wrote about it. (You never use the default I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn do you?). Tip: see above.

The post I didn’t feel got the attention it deserved. Considering that I feel a lot of my posts don’t get the attention (read traffic) I want, maybe the post should have been better written. Anyway, here is one that landed with a thud. It received one comment – from my blogging coach. I still think it has a lot of good content even though it didn’t do what my advice said it should! 11 Types of Blogs To Generate Web Traffic and Please Your Readers. OK, stop laughing. Tip: don’t overestimate the power of your writing.

The post I’m most proud of. I didn’t think this post July 4th is a Day to Celebrate Life, Liberty and the Heart and Soul in Writing would generate a lot of traffic, and it didn’t. But I’m grateful to live in America. I have so much to be thankful for when I see the suffering in the rest of the world: hunger, poverty, social unrest. So I hope you don’t mind, if you live elsewhere, that I took the opportunity to celebrate the red, white and blue. Tip: write from the heart.

Which of my seven posts is your favorite?

Taking a cue from Danny at Firepole Marketing, do you want to do a 7 Links Challenge on your blog? (If you do, let me know, and I’ll link to it as Danny will link to mine).

A few weeks ago I told you about my visit to the Network Solutions Booth at Blog World New Media Expo 2011 in New York City. While I was there, a company representative set up my iPhone for mobile, or smart phone, viewing. There were a couple of kinks to fix later. But I’m happy to report that it has been working like a charm.

If you don’t have your website set up for for mobile, you should consider these statistics from a study released in July by the well-respected Pew Research Center. In its first standalone measure of smartphone ownership, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that one third of American adults — 35% — own smartphones. Mobile phones are a main source of internet access for one-quarter of the smartphone population, according to the study.

Some 87% of smartphone owners access the internet or email on their handheld, including two-thirds (68%) who do so on a typical day. When asked what device they normally use to access the internet, 25% of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer. Those are startling statistics and, I believe, will only grow over time. I see in my Google Analytics that a growing number of visitors to my blog are coming via their mobile phones.

Here is How My Website Looks on my iPhone

I took this picture myself so excuse the quality but here it is what my site looks like if you search for Write Speak Sell on your mobile phone. I love the functionality and how my logo pops. When you pull up my site you will see these links:

• Tell a friend. Click on this icon and you are taken to a screen with three options for sharing my site: email to a colleague, or posting to Twitter or Facebook.
  
• Call Us. Click on this icon and my phone rings.
• Full Website. Here you have two choices when you click on the icon. You can view my mobile friendly website or the standard website. If you’ve trolled the internet recently you know that viewing a standard website is difficult because the view is so small. You need to keep moving around the various parts of the site and, unless you can enlarge the view, it’s almost impossible to read the copy. The mobile friendly version takes the content from your website and delivers it in easy-to-read text along with your images.
  
• Write Speak Sell Blog. If you only want to read my latest blog post, you can click on this icon and be taken directly to the blog section of my website where you can read my latest posts in mobile format.
• Keep Me Informed. Click on this icon and you can subscribe to my blog.

If you want your website to work harder for your business, then consider making it mobile friendly. It’s easy and you will be rewarded with more traffic that may lead to more business.

If they can rebrand, so can I

[tweetmeme]If you’re a subscriber, you may have a noticed a change in the look of Write Speak Sell.  You would be right.  I have changed templates from the Red Essence to the Flexx theme, which, as it indicates, is a flexible theme with more options.

Why did I do this?  I advise clients on sharpening their brands.  But I felt my own was a little fuzzy with my old theme.  A tab in the navigation bar for “Business Writing” was just too generic.  My business has evolved over the past year and I’ve been gravitating to three focused offerings:  blog and web copy, employee engagement and branding.  Now even the term branding is a little broad, but it’s such a recognized term that I think people will get it.  The top three widgets with these services tell visitors right away what I do – and they are “above the fold.”  That is, they are visible even on the small screen of a laptop.

If I can get it working properly, I’ve also added a new podcast product called audioboo, which allows me to create podcasts on my IPhone and they are published directly to my blog.  Neat.  It’s a small technical problem that I will get worked out shortly.

My categories and blog role are now on my home page and I’ve added a search box. I still need to add content to my right sidebar on my home page because there is quite a bit of white space there.  I’m open to suggestions.

It’s a constant process – tweaking, trimming, adding to – and hopefully — improving a business.  That’s why I thought I’d share my process with you.  Any thoughts about how you’ve adapted and changed your brand or business model?  Would love to hear from you.

It’s a simple equation. Internal Branding = External Success.  Employee communications programs should embody the brand and foster a culture of communication that rallies employees around the mission and business goals of the company.  Yet many organizations neglect internal communication.  With an economy in the tank, some companies feel that employees should be happy to have a job.  But when things are bad, employees need to be hearing frequently about the true state of the company, what management is doing about it, what it means for the individual employee.

Even in bad times, smart companies are able to mobilize their employees to support the company and its brand by being twice as productive as before and in their communication with customers.   Employees want their company to succeed, so why not give them an opportunity to be part of the solution?  It works in a company that has nurtured a culture of communication that it can rely on to see it through both the good and bad times.

In communication with employees –

Trust is the core component – all communications must be reliable, truthful and contain the full story. At the heart of trust is:
Openness – there must be an unwavering commitment to and support of a healthy two-way communications environment.
Simplicity – communications must be clear, meaningful and accessible.
Consistency – messages must be strategic and integrated.
Caring – there must be concern for the individual.

The most important element in communicating with employees is speed. They need to hear news from the company — both good and bad — before they read it in online forums and news programs.

I subscribe to many (maybe too many) online newsletters, magazines, newspapers and blogs. I enjoy receiving them all and I would like to continue receiving them. But why won’t they let me change my email address? My new company name is Write Speak Sell and my new email is jpaladino@writespeaksell.com. Not surprising, of course.

But when I scroll to the bottom of most of the emails there is an unsubscribe link, but rarely a link to simply change my email settings and other contact information. Maybe it shows a lack of self-confidence in the writer that subscribers would only want the unsubscribe information.

So, please, everyone, let me change my email address! And while you’re at it, how about increasing the size of the typeface in your communiqués.

Thank you.