Is Speed Affecting Your Business?

For humans this is what happens when you have too much speed over time - for your website, it’s just the opposite!

I’m not going to go through all the reasons here, but site speed is having an increasingly important impact on your site’s visibility in search.

Go Look...

https://gtmetrix.com/

Click on the link and put your home page URL in the speed test.

How did you do?

Change Required?

Anything above 2.5 seconds and you probably need to do something.

Got questions, concerns?

Get in touch.

Written while listening to: Music to Create Flow to by music2work2

Image credit: The plight of a lady on meth - Don Hankins on Flickr

Marketing Advice from Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

As Chief of staff of the Prussian army and architect of Germany’s wars of reunification in the 1860’s, Helmuth was clearly an experienced and successful dude.

One of his most paraphrased quotes is

“No plan survives contact with the enemy”

He could have been talking about digital marketing!

It’s The Humans...

Digital marketing is not static, it’s not traditional push marketing like a billboard or an ad.  Great marketing gets human recipients to interact with and amplify the message.

As Helmuth knew, you can’t control how human beings are going to behave. 

The skill in digital marketing is less about the planning and more about how you respond to its execution.

You & Your Humans Are Different

There are so many ways to slice up the digital marketing pie - from video to articles, from photos to info-graphics, from daily tweets to monthly emails.  Just because something works for a competitor does not mean it’s going to work for you and your business.

It is the combination of your personal skills, your business’ attributes and how you react to and interact with your marketing outreach that will define success.

Plan to Move Quickly

Sure start with a plan, an initial outline of what you are going to do and how you’re going to do it, but plan to change everything as soon as you see how the market reacts.

Written while listening to: Breathe New Tone & Image by music2work2

Image Credit: Bismarck, Roon, Moltke - Wikipedia

How To Create Better Content Faster

Burbn was a fairly popular app - a location based social network with an option that allowed people to upload a photo with a filter.  When growth slowed the founders took a hard look at the data and saw that the only part of the app that people really used was in fact the photo and filters.

They got rid of the social element, re-tooled the app as a way to post mobile pics with filters, called it Instagram and 18 months later sold to Facebook for $1billion

Not quite instant success

Back in ‘07 a couple of guys created airbedandbreakfast.com, they reckoned they could build a social network around people who wanted to crash on a sofa and get breakfast for cheap.  

8 years later airbnb.com has a $10billion valuation, offers appartments for a kings ransom and nobody really talks about breakfast.

Takeaways for content marketers

• Startups don’t know what is going to resonate with the public until they take it to market.
• You don’t know what content is going to resonate with the public until you publish

• Startups focus on data to tell them what is working and what isn’t
• Your KPIs are essential if you want to be successful in the future

• Startups ruthlessly cut that which isn’t working and focus on what is
• If you’re not seeing traction with one type of content or on one network, do something else

• Startups focus all day everyday to iterate, yet success still takes years
• No matter how fast you produce content, it can take years before you see results

Your big advantage

Unlike startups, you aren’t depending on revenue from your “content product.”   This means you don’t have to move and iterate as quickly as they do in order to survive. 

If however you apply the startup mindset to your content production, you will find the quality of your output improves more rapidly.  This is turn drives the visibility of your business in search, which is where the new customers are.

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Written while listening to: C Major Theme Dev 4 on music2work2

Image credit: Startup by Dennis Skley on Flickr