I’ve seen it over and over again…once you find your core values, the worldview that drives you, your life begins opening in new directions to reflect it. In 2004, Your Words’ Worth began, founded on a lifetime of writing, an AWAI copywriting course, and a determination that I would never again…
You see it again and again in marketing circles: Content is King! Content drives traffic! Content draws visitors! And it’s true – it does. A website with high-quality, targeted, relevant content, does draw traffic and build trust in your prospective clientele. But from what I’m seeing these days, some beginning writers are…
So very often I see clients with wonderful visions for their business, missions that can inspire great change in their clients and communities….and a choking fear of stepping out in their power and putting that work out fully into the world. Like a beginning swimmer teetering at the edge between “shoulder high”…
Can you recognize greenwash in the making…and when you do, what do you do about it? If you’re a freelance marketing green businesses to well-meaning consumers who are vulnerable to misleading green claims, these are questions that can reshape a niche. For me, the shift started with an inquiry call…
Reading some social-marketing blogs, you’d think that hiring a ghost-blogger is rather like hiring a writer for your master’s thesis. Immoral, unethical, deceptive, and…well, you just don’t do it! Rather obviously – as ghost-blogging is one of the services we offer here at Your Words’ Worth – we take a different…
There’s a common myth afoot…a myth that has deeply embedded itself in the small business consciousness. It’s a seductively deceptive myth that appears to save you money, but is actually costing your business valuable leads and sales. It’s the myth that all you need is a great web designer (or…
I don’t normally explore new career paths because of a wrong-number voicemail, but this one shocked me into asking “Why not?” It was a man’s voice, clipped and businesslike, saying, “You have the sexiest voice – do you do voiceover?” I’m not sure what kind of voiceover he had in…
Perhaps, once upon a time, your bare-bones-basic one-page site was a perfectly fine way to represent your company on the Internet. But with just about everybody taking their business online, it’s getting tough for those bare-bones-basic sites to compete. Maybe you’ve got prospects saying they can’t find you when they…
For many small businesses, a more-or-less generic site structure works just fine. Your basic home page, an About Us profile, some pages on Services and/or Products, a number of Testimonials, perhaps an e-commerce function, and a Contact page, and you’re set. But what happens if you’ve built a career on…
So you’ve had your website up for awhile, and let’s face it, it’s showing its age. Maybe you’ve had some major changes in your life and mission…maybe you’ve moved to a new address or joined up with a partner…maybe you’ve added some great new services and completely shifted the direction…
If you’ve run a blog for any length of time, you’ve probably had at least one of those Twilight Zone experiences: receiving comments with little or relation to the topic of your posts or the focus of your blog, seemingly left by ethereal beings who enter their input without showing…
My trial by fire as a writer came from a high-wired Technical Communications professor…a moonlighting novelist who loved coffee and hated Latinate -ize and -ization suffixes with equal passion. With our latest assignments pinned on the board, he’d read the first sentence of each one aloud, confront the writer, and demand,…
Whether you’re reworking your website or building a new site from scratch, you can be sure of one thing: your audience is going to come in asking – “So what? Why does this matter? Why should I care? What does this have to do with me?” And if you can’t…
I’m really beginning to wonder if it’s in the water. Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard the questions from one business owner after another: I really need a website makeover…my site is an expense that’s not bringing me any business… I need to update my site content…it doesn’t reflect…
You know the “Oh, how…er…interesting” moment. It happens when someone at a networking mixer introduces himself saying something like this: “I’m John Doe, and I’m lead widget wizard with United Widgets International.” What is United Widgets? What do they do? What does he do? How can you connect with him?…
So you’re a loyal regular at all the networking mixers and business builder groups…you’ve handed out your cards at more events than you can count..but have you stood at a podium to offer an educational talk about your field of business to the general public, and fielded their questions? If…
How many times have new clients asked to speak to me about setting up their new website, and then asked, “Can’t you just take the content from our brochure and put it up on the website? We like the way we have the wording and we just need it online,…
Too many times, I have heard clients complaining, “I’ve set up my website – but I don’t think anyone’s visiting it!” And they begin sharing the tricks they’ve tried to jump-start their hit counter, ranging from pricey site add-ons to dubiously ethical wizards who try to outwit the search engine…
Dog eat dog. Survival of the fittest. That’s (theoretically) been the rule of the free market system…that competition improves the quality of everyone’s product, and only the strongest survive. But the other night, I attended a networking gathering that was practically an online marketers’ convention – out of the 30…
When you’re just beginning to set up your business website, the screen can gape as blank as your mind. How can you communicate your vision and mission, your products and services? What words will have the greatest impact? If you’ve never written for the web, it can seem like a…
