Let’s start with a premise: Medium is not the best choice for your company’s blog platform if you are looking to have your website benefit from your blog content, have full control over the success or failure of your blog, and truly own your content in the fullest sense of the word. [Read more…] about Why You Shouldn’t Build Your Company’s Blog On Medium
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How Will Blockchain Affect Digital Marketing?
With the advent of cryptocurrencies such as the famous Bitcoin (I’m still waiting to recoup my losses), Etherium (I’m still waiting to recoup my losses), Litecoin (I’m still waiting to recoup my losses), and hundreds more, the general public has been made aware of a far more interesting (in my humble opinion) invention: blockchain. How will this new technology affect the internet and for the purposes of this blog post, the work of digital marketers?
What is Blockchain?
A relatively new concept developed in 2008, blockchain is the reason cryptocurrencies are able to exist. This technology is essentially a digital ledger of economic transactions, where everyone part of a transaction has an immutable record, rather than through a centralized platform. Basically, blockchain is a fancy, incorruptible Google Sheet with its sharing settings set to public.
This technology makes it almost impossible to falsify data, while also creating a permanent record from start to finish. Cryptocurrencies are just the beginning, blockchain can also be used to record virtually anything of value, not just money, which calls for endless possibilities across various industries. This includes healthcare, banking, internet privacy, manufacturing and can even change the way we vote. So how does this new technology relate to digital marketing and how will it affect the way marketers do their jobs in the future?
Why You Should Build Your Custom Website on a Self-Hosted Platform
A business without a website is a business that is substantially losing out on opportunities to be discovered. However, building a website can be a daunting task. These days, it seems as though there are a million and one different ways that a person can build a website, and all of the options can become overwhelming. Read more
Diving Into Entity Search Results
Recently I was inspired by Mike’s post, ‘Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity ID’s for SEO’, which if you haven’t checked out already you definitely should. Mike’s post shines a light on MREID’s (described as a canonical URI for an entity, issued and used by Google) and how we can look to using them for SEO. To quote Mike’s post:
A machine-readable entity ID is, in essence, a string of characters used to exclusively refer to a single entity.
According to Bill Slawski — and thanks to his tireless work analyzing Google Patents, plus, generally paying more attention than anyone else — we know that Google is using MREID across many services like Google Trends, Google Lens, and Google Reverse Image Search (to keep track of entities within images).
Once I understood what machine-readable entity IDs were (here’s an example of the one for Seattle: /m/0d9jr), I had to know more.
How Color Contrast Affects Conversions
I have very little aesthetic ability, but I can tell when something is too hard to read.
For example, here is “dimgray” font on a black background:
Not the easiest thing to read, is it?
We usually talk about optimizations and strategies that help improve your website’s ability to attract traffic or increase conversions but sometimes an optimization doesn’t need to have a measurable effect on the bottom line to make it worth doing. We should do them because it is the right thing to do. While we’re optimizing our sites for business-driven motivations we should also be making the web a better place. This includes making sure our sites adhere to privacy laws, treat our users with respect, and are usable by users of all types, even those with disabilities.
Today we’re going to discuss a site’s contrast and how to determine how easy a site is to read for users of all types. [Read more…] about How Color Contrast Affects Conversions
