Article Roundup - Feb. 3

A Scientific Guide to Writing the Perfect Tweet: How to get more clicks, retweets, and reach - This article was referred to me by Catherine of Shadow Dog Designs. It's useful if you ever want to use twitter for business.

Don't Fail Google's Mobile-Friendly Test - has 5 pitfalls to avoid. BTW, google is going to start penalizing sites for not being mobile friendly in the near-ish future. This article is useful if you run your own site.

18 Responsive Email Templates - if you use MailChimp or another email delivery solution, it can feel daunting to come up with a consistent look/template for your emails. If you would rather not fuss around with designing/testing/coding something, it might make sense to buy a template from someone else. These are all tested to be mobile friendly. Some are free while others are $15-$18.

How Long Should Your Pages Be? - This is an article written by a woman who focuses primarily on writing sales copy for landing pages. She goes into the debate of whether it's better to write more or less. (Hint: it depends.)

5 Elements of a Winning Landing Page - If you're unfamiliar with what a landing page is, it's a specific page you can direct people off of an email or pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. If you're marketing to a very specific target, it's often more effective to send them to a dedicated page rather than your homepage. This article highlights the elements that help make an effective landing page. The article is written by a company that helps businesses to improve their landing pages through critiques, A/B Testing, Heatmaps, etc., so if you click on the little buttons at the bottom of the page, you can expect they're going to try to start selling their services to you. The information they give in the article is useful though.

Article Roundup - Jan. 27

Do You Want to Get Published? Learn the "Money Shot" Layouts - these layouts work for creating advertising just as well as people who want to get published

5 Things to Watch for in Your Blog Analytics - although this is written for bloggers, it has some relevance for other small businesses

How to Influence & Persuade - has a nice infographic

New Research: See How the Top Brand Marketers Use Instagram - has a nice infographic. You can also download the full study. You can use this info to help you figure out frequency and other mundane, how-to details.

How Budgeting Money Taught Me Time Management

Article Roundup - Jan. 20

This week, I'm only posting one article because it's really long (but very worthwhile):

40 Things to Do When Business is Slow - This article is chock-full of ideas. It's not a quick read, but great for ideas.

I'm also including one tool, which should be helpful should you ship international:

Duty Calculator - even if your customers have to pay the duty fees, it's useful to give them a heads up of what it might cost them.

Article Roundup - Dec. 30

This week, I looked for articles that loosely focus around blogging. Since regular blogging may take too much time for small business DiYers, I've chosen 4 articles that have applications beyond blogging. (Mostly advertising and graphics.)

Leverage Blogging to Build Business Identity, Authority, & Credibility

Pinterest and Blogging: The Good, The Bad, and The Huh - I have to admit, I didn't expect to learn much from this article when I first clicked on it, but I was pleased to see that it had some real content to it. The author talks about how she had to start thinking about the graphics she used for her blogging business in order to have some that were blogging friendly.

Moreover, she talks about some of the mistakes she made. One of her most linked to posts was essentially her talking about a number of projects she had completed using the information from another person's furniture painting ebook, but the people clicking through from pinterest thought they were going to find the how-to instructions themselves and this caused some people to accuse her of bait-and-switch. She responded by changing her graphics to be more clear and by using an app that allows you to create a description that autofills for Pinterest when someone pins directly from her site.

If you're thinking about incorporating Pinterest into your marketing scheme, then it highlights the importance of creating clear graphics that avoid confusion.

How to Use Watermarks with Style - This article starts off with an example of what a really, really bad watermark job looks like, then gives 3 different alternative styles so you can have a watermark on your image to identify your work without making the image ugly. This does not include detailed how-to instructions for the 3 styles, but is meant to give ideas.

Creative Watermarking - How to Incorporate Your Signature into your Photos - this post is aimed at professional photographers, but it includes really good how-to instructions for using Photoshop CS3+ or Photoshop Elements to seamlessly hide a watermark into a photo.

5 CSS Tips for Creating Hierarchy - Although a lot of people will mix two or more font styles (or font faces) in their blog/written ads, using the same font style throughout makes things look clean - but then, how do you distinguish titles, headings, subheadings and other items of relative importance? This goes over 5 ways to do that (not necessarily through CSS).

I picked the CSS article because it applies to WAY more than just blogging. The advice there is solid for any written piece - be it a report, sales copy, website design, client proposal, even a business plan presented to a bank.

Business Article Roundup - Dec 23

How Etsy Gambles with Your Livelihood - 5 ways to protect yourself - this is a recent post from blogger Lisa Jacobs, who focuses on handmade and creative businesses.

How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog - although this is directed to bloggers, there's a lot of information here for developing a consistent brand across many platforms - the information you decide on using her free worksheets can help you when you are creating marketing materials for pinterest, instagram, physical print, or your own website. (She covers aspects deciding how images will look as well as how text will sound.)

How Color Can Make Your Business Successful or Not - basically: color controls 60% of people's initial decisions about a new or unfamiliar brand. The article here is really short. I've linked to it because it has a nice infographic categorizing the emotional feelings associated with each color. (Something to consider when you create a style guide for your business.)

5 Consumer Psychology Hacks - One of my favorites this week.

Build an Email List to Get More Customers - if you don't maintain an email list for marketing, you probably should start. The article talks about why and provides some resources, including a list of email marketing services (not just MailChimp).

Business Article Roundup - Dec 16

Another round of 5 articles for you from around the web. Three of them focus on the logistics of email marketing.

A Million Things to Do? Prioritize by ROI. (And Then Get a Life.) - from The Middle Finger Project, which provides snarky business advice to freelancers. Any article from The Middle Finger Project will have some amount of colorful language, but this article outlines a very useful method for how to organize and prioritize how you spend your time.

10 Ways to Use Gmail Like a Pro - features and plug-ins that can help you use your time more productively.

Making Emails Can-Spam Compliant - In a nutshell: opt-in, unsubscribe, include your postal address in the actual email, keep your email lists up-to-date, use clear subject lines.

How to Use MailChimp to Grow Your Brand - goes over 11 great features and benefits of using MailChimp to send out newsletters or marketing emails to your mailing list.

Sites to List Your Giveaways - Planning a giveaway to drum up some exposure and publicity? This article has been keeping an updated list of places to spread the word since 2010. (Of course, you can always send an email through MailChimp to your mailing list in addition to these sites.)

Weekly Article Roundup - Nov.25

Another 5 business articles that I found interesting this week:

10 Facts About the Brain that Will Help Your Marketing and Closing Rate - go read it because it's useful.

How to Create Brand Names that Stick - Alexandra Watkins has written a best-selling book on the topic, but 10 of her tips can be found here.

Hyper-local Marketing - this slide show is more of a list of resources for creating a strong local presence than anything else, but it has some useful tools that are worth looking further into.

Typography in Web Design - it's useful to know a little bit about typography whether you're working on your eCommerce site, blog, newsletter email, business cards, or signage. Typography choices can affect your brand's appearance, so it's better to think about what you plan to use.

Basic Start Up Validation 101 - This gives a list of tests to consider to make sure you're not wasting your time on something you could easily tell will fail. Your business's answers to some of the questions and tests they suggest create a good starting point for information to include in a business plan.

Weekly Article Roundup - Nov. 18

Here are the top 5 business articles that crossed my desk this past week:

Where is eCommerce Going - a look at the eCommerce trends for 2015. This is set up as a slideshow on slideshare. If you aren't interested in looking at all the slides or just want to skim, there is a transcript posted at the very bottom of the page below transcripts. My biggest take-away from this article is the importance of being mobile-friendly and offering free shipping. 

Motivate Customers to Buy Based on Their Brain Type - it makes the argument that your customers probably have 1 of 4 different ways of thinking. You need to employ different techniques to market to each type in how you write about your products. 

5 Elements of Seductive Craft Fair Booth Displays - This article is pretty comprehensive and written for craft fair booths. Don't have a crafting business? Some of the information is applicable for trade shows and general retail. Craft fair booths are portable, quick-to-setup, and often inexpensive. If you are just starting up in a retail location (even a temporary stall at the local mall for the holiday shopping season), you don't want to sink too much into permanent displays or decor. Many mall contracts have a clause that allow them to move you to another location if a larger client with a multiple-year-lease wants the space. 

12 Stats on Upcoming Holiday Spending - Don't care about mobile shoppers? Think again. There are some other nuggets of wisdom to takeaway from this slideshow.

Transactional Emails: The Marketing Tool You Didn't Know You Had - this is a good read. It's more applicable for people running their own eCommerce sites than for people selling through a venue like eBay, Amazon, Etsy, or Artfire.