Standing Out From the Crowd With Compelling Visuals If you want your small business to exist in the digital era, it almost certainly needs an online presence. If you want it to grow in the digital era, that presence needs to be exceptional. Whether it’s a web page, social media feed, blog, or even something as simple as a Yelp listing, using professional photography has huge potential to increase consumer interest and to make your business stand out among competitors. Here’s why. Images Get Attention Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than other types ..read more

… And How to Get Started (A Guidebook for Good Things to Come) Portland, Oregon has some of the most forward-thinking and creative entrepreneurs in the country, and you can see this clearly represented by exceptional branding and graphic design across PDX businesses of all sizes. You’re never too small for great branding, and there’s nowhere that this is more evident than here in Portland. In fact, the sooner that you can get your visual branding elements where you need them to be (such that they resonate with your vision for the brand and its values), the further along you’ll be on your journ ..read more

Capturing Your Brand’s Story, One Square at a Time There are few platforms that can grow an organic audience as quickly and effectively as Instagram. Everyday, hundreds of millions of users log into Instagram and actively search for new content to consume. Putting your brand’s content within reach is the first step toward getting those users engaged, and fostering relationships that result in new leads, customers, and/or clients. The vast majority of small business owners (especially here in Portland) fully understand the marketing potential of a killer Instagram feed. The problem is that unle ..read more

Feeding the News Beast (and Why You Need to Do It) Your blog is a major part of your business; it attracts and keeps followers, gives your customers information and immediate updates about your products, and serves as a social media stream for your customers. For this reason, it is necessary to get important blog updates into Google News, which is meant to keep the world updated on current events. On one side, Google News is primarily a news source, meant to promote quality journalism. On the other side, your blog should probably do more than just promote your products. So why not use it to of ..read more

Congratulations! Your Blog Is a Baby Boy! Having a blog is like having a baby – you have to watch over it, feed it, and monitor its needs. Feeding your blog baby means generating interesting and relevant content fairly frequently, which can be downright exhausting. Of course, you could hire a babysitter, or you could try any one of these ten ways to generate your blog content easily. And you won’t have to buy a baby monitor at all! Read on for some super creative ways to maximize the ease with which you get those corporate blog posts up and out into the world, representing your brand and exten ..read more

Why Do I Need to Grow My Google+ Followers? In this day and age, social media platforms are a must — that’s not news. Within the new marketing landscape, Google+ has become one of the more essential platforms to utilize, especially for a business. Why, you may ask? The answer is simple: because it’s a part of Google and Google is a major search engine, with near-total control over what businesses show up in the SERPs. Keeping that logic in mind, a better Business Google+ page will likely help brands to rank better in search results — at the very least, their brand page on Google+ will rank! Si ..read more

How Convincing Is Your Story? By trade, I’m a writer. Check that. Really, when it all comes down to it, I’m a novelist. I labor away, slaving over the keyboard every day that I possibly can, trying to create music out of language. That’s the art of it. Storytelling, the broader brushstrokes that comprise a narrative arc, well, that’s another story. But you’d have to think — if I can just make every single sentence sing the way I want it too, then the larger project will also sing, won’t it? Not necessarily. Whatever form I’m trying to shape my words into, and what’s at stake underneath all the ..read more

We Live in the Age of Social… for Now For businesses that are brand new, getting established online can be a daunting experience. And it doesn’t get that much easier for older businesses that are only just beginning to engage with an audience online. And last, if you’ve had an active presence but you don’t quite know how to take your brand to the next level, yet again, social media looks a lot like a puzzle that’s really tough to figure out. But it isn’t. After all, the real world analogues are there to be learned from, and well worth paying attention to. For example, if there are several diff ..read more

Understanding Keywords in Context When you’ve learned what you need to know about keyword optimization, and you have a pretty solid grasp of how to navigate keyword research tools, you’re ready to take a look at how the keywords actually impact the search engine’s “reading” of a blog or an article on your site. To start, let’s take a look at how you actually use those high-value keyword phrases within the body of an article. The context in which you place your keywords is also very important, because using a keyword phrase in various contexts will enable it to be more widely searchable, and by ..read more

Keyword Research Tools Search Engine Optimization by nature is a finicky beast, and the parameters of SEO change rapidly, so constant experimentation and improvement are often necessary. You can collect data via search ads, and from relevant content that major search engines suggest on various sidebars. When you collect data via search ads, you access what the customer is actively searching for. This means you improve your searchability based upon hard numbers and customer preference. By collecting data from sidebar content analysis, you can see the type of content your customers are searching ..read more