How to set up your website for success
Visitors to your website are either on a mission to find information or they want to be entertained. Either way, it’s your job to make the site welcoming and easy to navigate. “Usability is the term for the art of making a site easy to use,” Andrea...
Be seen as an expert with LinkedIn
Your LinkedIn profile can help you be seen as an expert in your field. At a recent meeting of one of my freelancer groups, Communicators Connection, my colleague Carl Friesen suggested paying attention to these areas: Photo: Use a head-and-shoulders professional...
Tips for getting and using quotes
The Canadian Press Stylebook is all about practical. Yet I love that it says using quotes in your writing will “put the rosiness into the cheeks of the palest stories.” The September issue of my monthly newsletter, Wordnerdery, has a few suggestions about getting and...
8 tips to put together a great Paper.li newspaper
At a session about marketing yourself with social media (described in this post), Donna Papacosta told the group that a great way to share content that engages and attracts your target audience is by using Paper.li. This online newspaper pulls in content from the...
Are you keeping up with the adorbs new words?
You may have missed the latest crop of words welcomed (or possibly just reluctantly allowed) into the English language, but you have surely heard many of them. Binge-watch is one example, something I did with some friends catching up on Downton Abbey seasons, and...PIC session shares how to market yourself with social content
For a switch, here’s a summary of the session I attended last night with IABC/Toronto’s Professional Independent Communicators and Donna Papacosta, created with tweets. (View the link here if the text isn’t visible below.) Be sure to scroll to the...
The ultimate list of pricing resources for independents
Money is always a touchy subject, isn’t it? Equal pay for equal work done by men and women is still an issue. Companies don’t seem to want employees sharing salary info. Independents rarely share billing information either, and we’re always wondering if we’re charging...Avoid jargon monoxide with the Son Test
Newsletter articles and any other writing — speaking too! — can be improved if you cut out “hollow and meaningless” business language. This gobbledygook is also known as jargon monoxide, a wonderful term I discovered this week in a tweet by Stanford...