Marketing content strategy is changing everyday and in today’s marketing the visual content is the biggest component. Here are three facts supporting the importance of graphics and images that every digital marketer should to know.
-Over 90% of communication is non-verbal.
-Infographics are shared and liked x3 times more than other content formats
-More than half of website visitors spend less than 15 seconds actively reading text on the page.
According to the infographic below from HubSpot, the average number of Facebook shares of posts without images is 28. With images, the average number of shares jumps to 65. Without images, the average Twitter shares is 10. With images, it jumps to 20.
The following amazing juicing recipe came from my friends Shaun Ketterman and Crystalina, who currently live with their beautiful two children in San Diego, CA. Shaun and Crystalina live a healthy life style and inspired me to look deeper into juicing.
“Mean Green”
This is pretty much just a massive combination of greens. The taste is a little weird… I didn’t like it at first, but eventually it became my breakfast every single day. Amazingly good for you!
1 cucumber (bigger the better!)
2 green apple (medium)
3-4 stalks of celery
½ lime (peeled)
1 handful fresh parsley
2 handfulls fresh baby spinach
1 small piece of fresh ginger root
Juice all of it and drink. Also, a few ways to modify this is you can add 3 or 4 carrots, or 2 small beets. I usually did everything. (by Shaun Ketterman)
What’s Uber? Uber, in simple terms, is your private driver and it evolved the way the world moves by seamlessly connecting riders to their smart phone at affordable rate. Unlike traditional taxi, you do not need to use cash to pay for your ride. All you need is your credit card (or PayPal) and a smart phone. By allowing the transactions strictly between the rider and their smart phone Uber simplified the idea of taxi.
At first, I’m going to admit, I was not moved by the idea of Uber and did not really pay attention to the mass hype about Uber; but after taking my first ride to Tech Week Chicago I absolutely “got the concept” and now use it whenever possible. I own a car but after doing the math for “owning a car” vs “using Uber” – I figured out that Uber is more economical. If you live in big cities such as Chicago or New York, it is better not to have a car. The cost of ownership, maintenance, gas, parking fees add up and it really becomes a hassle.
If you haven’t tried Uber, your first ride is free, and it is on me. I am giving you a $30 and to redeem it visit this page.
Today, LinkedIn announces the companies with the best presence on LinkedIn company pages. The ones I recommend following are HubSpot, Mashable, and NPR.
1. Adobe
2. AppleOne
3. CommonWealth Bank
4. Dell 5. HubSpot
6. Four Seasons Hotel & Resorts
7. Kelogg Company
8. Marketplace Home Mortgage 9. Mashable 10. NPR
Personally, I am a big fan of WordPress. The CSS/ PHP/ HTML combination allows for flexibility in design and responsiveness, while the user-friendly back-end of WordPress makes it easy to edit content. However, despite its easy-use from a business owner perspective, it is not always the best content management system or CMS for a website.
There are two major instances where I would explicitly NOT recommend WordPress for your brand:
1. Is your site E-Commerce?
In the case of an E-Commerce site, WordPress would not be your best choice. There are WordPress themes and plugins to drive E-Commerce capability, but if the major function of your site is E-Commerce and your sales, WordPress would not be my first choice. Joomla and especially, Magento, are much better platforms in this case. Magento (formerly OSCommerce) is designed specifically for E-Commerce and the major admin panel functionalities are controlling your sales, inventory, and promotions. You can even manage your customer base from this portal.
2. Is your site more of a web application than a website?
Dynamic, user interactive sites are the new trend. There is a certain element of this that can be covered in WordPress, again through plugins, but this interactivity and networking capability is better handled through more development intense platforms such as Joomla, Drupal, and Ruby on Rails.
A web application would be more suited to the youngest of the three, Ruby, or Drupal. These two are the most dynamic and developer based. Ruby has a very friendly coding language that can be picked up fairly easily. Drupal is the elder and deeply-rooted CMS, sworn by for many old-school developers.
Something like an intranet of a site based in networking would often be more suited to Joomla. It is very flexible and easy to use. It serves mainly as a middle ground between the ease-of-use found in WordPress and the development-intensive flexibility of Drupal.
Aside from these two cases, the second of which could be quite broad, I would point you towards WordPress as the way to go. From the increasingly important Search Engine Optimization perspective, it simply cannot be beat. As content becomes increasingly important to search engines, a system originally built for easily managing the content of a blog can’t be beat.
Particularly for small and medium sized businesses looking to gain traction in the ultra-competitive internet marketplace, the ability to quickly add and edit content that WordPress provides is invaluable. Once a site has been built, it is easy to give the business owner, however inexperienced, the reigns to the site without too much worry of catastrophe.
As a web developer, I find what is considered to be the least development-friendly CMS to be perfectly flexible. Functionality is easily added and controlled through plugins, custom or sourced. Design is very subjective, and with the wealth of themes available on sites like ThemeForest, you are sure to find one you like.
In summary, with the increasing importance of web presence, regardless of the business, an affordable, modern, good-looking, and flexible website is of necessity. WordPress meets, and exceeds all of these requirements, producing a site that you can easily manage and in turn leverage to enhance your business.
This week Amazon.com unveiled its vision for 2015: the air drone that delivers packages up to 5 lbs within 30 minutes from the order. Jeff Bezos claims that the air drone can deliver within 10 mile radius from the Amazon fulfillment center(s); however, there are some prerequisite action items, such as approval from FAA, quality assurance, quality control, etc. before the air drone can be utilized. These new flying robots can be seen as early as 2015, and as a big fan of Amazon and Amazon Prime Member, I cannot wait to see them. Yes, for the drones. It’s innovative, and makes logistics more fun. You have my approval.
