A Blog About Accessibility, Digital, Marketing, and AI
Here's a great summary of how to build a winning landing page:
You’re about to launch a big online marketing campaign complete with media buys, search engine placement, banner ads and blog buzz. You’ve tested your creative and your clickthrough rate is strong. You know once you go live, tons of targeted traffic will be hitting your site. Time to sit back and relax, right? Not quite yet.
Read full article: 11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages
My daughter Rebecca entered a Dallas Morning News writing contest, and didn't win, but did get her story published (est. circulation 200,000) 🙂
There were three winners, and she was in the top five runners-up (i.e. coming in in the top eight overall), out of 2300 entries! Rebecca was 8 when she wrote the story, and was the youngest of the eight stories the paper printed. Other authors that were printed ranged from ages 9 to 11.
Here’s her story online at dallasnews.com (may require you to register). It's also in todays paper.
I also reprinted the story below.
?
Kids Day Story Contest: 'There's a tarantula in my hair!'
03:44 PM CDT on Tuesday, May 24, 2005
By REBECCA SHINN, 8, Wylie
The beginning of the story the newspaper gave us:
Joey Freeman sat on the side of the bed dressed, stalling, staring blankly at the inching caterpillar on the windowsill. After yesterday's incident in Ms. May's science class, he wondered how he could ever face his friends again, especially Jamal and Brianna.
"Talk about lousy timing," he muttered to himself and headed out the door for school. Thanks to his wacky presentation, Cherry Street Elementary will never be the same.
Rebecca’s submission for the ending:
It all started yesterday when Joey and his friends Jamal and Brianna presented their group science project to their class. It was Jamal's idea to showcase a bug collection. Jamal always had a critter collection, and Brianna and Joey helped assemble the creepy crawly insects into one aquarium.
They each wanted to do a good job presenting their insect collection to their class, so they could do an even better job presenting at the National Science Fair the next week.
"If we win the Nationals we each get a free laptop!" Brianna said excitedly.
Finally the moment came for the big presentation. Jamal and Brianna explained about all the insects inside while Joey held the aquarium.
Joey's arms ached. Then his nose started to tickle.
Brianna explained, "Look how this praying mantis holds its claws up."
Joey couldn't keep from sneezing. He dropped the cage!
No one was hurt by the shattered glass, but the bugs scampered out of the cage.
Amelia Jones shrieked as seven crickets jumped into her dress. John Pendleton was brave on the playground, but screamed like a 2-year-old when a centipede crawled over his foot.
But worst of all was when a tarantula landed in Elizabeth Perkin's hair.
Jamal shouted, "Don't worry; it's not the poisonous kind!" The way Elizabeth went screaming down the hallway, Jamal didn't think she believed him.
Joey did manage to save a caterpillar, but most of the other insects escaped. For the rest of the day, terror filled the school as students nervously looked around wondering when the next creature would appear!
What a disaster!
His teacher asked Joey to stay in from recess. She told him the bad news – he and his friends couldn't enter insects into the National Science Fair!
"Oh no!" moaned Joey.
All because Joey broke the cage.
That was yesterday. Now, as Joey walked to the bus stop, he wished he could crawl under a rock. The teacher had left it up to him to break the bad news. He hung his head until Jamal showed up.
"So how's Mr. Slippery Fingers?" asked Jamal.
"Jamal," Joey started to say.
"Hi, guys!" interrupted Brianna as she appeared behind Jamal.
Joey told them the news.
"No insects!" shouted Brianna. They hung their heads in disappointment.
Jamal started to giggle. Something was moving underneath his coat. Brianna wrinkled up her nose. Probably something else from his critter collection, she thought.
"But they didn't say anything about reptiles!" said Jamal with a humongous grin on his face, as he pulled a lizard from his coat.
More about the contest:
One starter, thousands of endings
The Blue Team
The Fiasco
The Explosion
There's a tarantula in my hair!
A tiny bit of trouble
Sauce etiquette
Oops!
Painful discovery
More short stories
Meet the winners who wrote the tales
Meet the Judges
More Texas Living: Family/Kids
The number one tip for naming companies is to avoid initials. Rick Jacobs, Principal of corporate branding consultancy Monigle Associates who have helped rename companies such as WorldCom, says:
It's a sure road to anonymity. We have done a substantial amount of research on it, and we have found that invented words or real words are 40% easier to remember than initialized words.
Read full article at MarketingSherpa.com.
This looks like a valuable book for web marketers:
Call To Action Provides You With the Secret Formulas You Need for Results Call to Action presents an overview of the principles and tactics of conversion rate marketing as developed and practiced by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, founders of Future Now, Inc. Since the company’s inception in 1998, Future Now, Inc. has pioneered the science and art of online conversion, focusing exclusively on helping clients persuade and convert their traffic into leads, customers and sales based on Persuasion Architecture and proven conversion rate optimization techniques. Within these pages, Bryan and Jeffrey walk you through the five phases that comprise web site development, from the critical planning phase, through developing structure, momentum and communication, to articulating value. Along the way, they offer advice and practical applications culled from their years of experience “in the trenches.” You will learn about persona-based design and persuasion scenarios, how to choose and evaluate key performance indicators, how to distinguish copy that will earn its keep.
Read more: Call To Action: How to Improve Your Conversion Rate
50 years-old may be a good age for a mid-life crisis but it is also the perfect age to publish a novel designed to become a best-seller, according to a study of best-selling novels and their authors over the past half-century. The average age of writers in the year that their novels topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955–2004 was 50.5 years — according to a study conducted by Lulu (www.lulu.com). Below is a graph of the average age of bestselling authors over the last 50 years.
You just have to check out GTDTiddlyWiki, which is a clever wiki for implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. This is one of those applications that has the potential to change your life! Tip: shutting off animations under “Options” greatly speeds things up.
GTDTiddlyWiki - all your tasks are belong to you
Call To Action, a book just released, authors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg discuss online “eye-tracking” studies. These studies show a pattern that all web visitors use (at least in the West). It's true for newbies or a long-time Internet users, whether they’ve been to a site before or not. Bryan Eisenberg says:
Here's something else that's unusual. With newspapers, people look at the pictures first. But it's the exact opposite on websites. Web visitors look at the text first. They look at graphics last...if ever.
Read more at When it Comes to Websites, People are the Same
Even the biggest sites have issues sometimes.
An undisclosed "DNS-related issue" late Saturday knocked several Google services offline, prompting widespread speculation that the Web search giant fell victim to the recent wave of DNS cache-poisoning attacks. The outage lasted for several hours and affected the Google.com home page, Gmail, Google News, Froogle, Google Images, Google Groups and Google Local. The outage also caused service failure on advertisements from Google's AdSense service.
Read full story: Google Knocked Offline by 'DNS Issue'
Here's an interesting factoid from the Hollywood scene that gives insight to the rise of CBA fiction:
Of the twenty top-grossing films of all time, not a single one is rated R. Of the top fifty films, only five are rated R. Clearly, Americans want family fare they can take the kids to. And yet, as Anschutz noted in a recent speech, since the year 2000, Hollywood has “turned out more than five times as many R-rated films as it has films rated G or PG or soft PG-13. . . . Don’t these figures make you wonder what’s wrong with Hollywood just from a business point of view?” (from "Lighting a Hollywood Candle")
Hollywood is bent on pushing rated R media down the throats of consumers, even if it goes against the grain of business sense to do so. And to a degree, mass-market (non-CBA) fiction is following a similar trend.
Why is CBA fiction's popularity rising so quickly? In part it's because there is no rating system on secular books. You pick up a random fiction novel at Barnes and Noble and you are quite possibly going to have the literary equivalent of an R-rated film in your hands.
Buy CBA fiction and you have something that is more G or PG oriented.
A nice quote from Terry Whalin's blog:
Publishers are looking for authors who take a proactive role in the marketing of their books. These types of authors understand that publishing is a business and the role of the author goes far beyond simply writing a manuscript, giving it to the publisher and counting on them to sell the book. It takes your effort and the publisher effort to give the book the best possible launch into the marketplace.
Read more here: The Writing Life: Five Star Reviews