Partner Views Blog

In recent blogs we have been discussing whether you should redesign your website. I pointed out that if you do redesign your website you should incorporate inbound marketing because fancy websites do not attract traffic. When you redesign your website you should keep your assets safe by taking an inventory of your website to help maintain links and traffic. In my most recent blog I said that simplicity trumps flashy graphics. Remember, search engines cannot tell what color your website is and people do not link their website to yours because you have a fancy flash introduction. Search engines look for relevant content and people link to your website because there is valuable content on your site. Valuable content is the number one way to drive traffic to your website and should be your number one priority when redesigning your website. It is important to remember that getting valuable content on your website is not a onetime project but a continuing process. Your website redesign should focus on how to continue to add new content over time and the best way to add new content over time is with a blog.

Recently I added the Vocalyze widget to my web site. This is a bit of text-to-speech streaming technology that translates my written blog into an audio stream. You can see it on the right side of this page, it’s the little toucan icon under the words “Vocalyze It.” Give it a try; just click the link that says “Listen to blog articles.”

This is my centennial blog.

Actually if you read all the blogs on this site (and I think it would be so cool if someone did that) this would be blog 115. But this is the one hundredth blog since I got serious about blogging and started this website in October of 2010. (here is my very first blog) I wrote, apparently, 15 other blogs while I was trying to figure out what I was doing. Those first fifteen blogs took about a year and a half to write while the next 100 took about 9 months. (Here is where I start getting serious)  During those nine months quite a few people have read my blogs and I really appreciate that. It is great to get comments, e-mails or tweets about what I am doing. I have actually met quite a few people through the blog and that is very exciting.

I have been writing a series of blogs based on a study about the online expectations of prospective students and their parents called 2011 E-Expectations Report: Students and Parents, by Noel Levitz and the National Research Center for College and University Admissions. Based on the study’s finding that 77% of prospective students do not read the school’s blog I wrote Is Blogging necessary for a Higher Education Website? My conclusion is that blogs are necessary but I didn’t have space to write about what many schools do to entice prospective students to read blogs, recruit student bloggers.

In this week’s blogs I have been reviewing a study about the online expectations of prospective students and their parents called 2011 E-Expectations Report: Students and Parents, by Noel Levitz and the National Research Center for College and University Admissions. In in my earlier blog Marketing for Higher Education: Online Expectations I did an overview of the study and looked at the Homepage experience in Wednesday’s blog. One of the interesting statistics from the study shows that 77% of the prospective students rarely or never read college blog postings from students or faculty on a college web site. At first glance this would suggest that blogging, especially an academic blog, is a waste of time. I would disagree with that conclusion.

I usually try to post two to three blogs per week and even though I feel very strongly that the blogs are an important part of my outreach efforts I don’t always reach my goals. I’ve actually written quite a few blogs about the importance of blogging but this week things just caught up with me. I’m going to sit back for a moment and actually take some advice from Kathy Underwood, another blogger I often work with, and start having fun for your mental health.

In my last blog we met Chelsea James and Arthur Zetes and their start-up eCommerce site Sperantsa. The site is just getting started and they have a lot of work to do but the combination of a fair trade business, Roma mothers earning a living and trendy knit caps seems like a great space to be in and I am looking forward to their success. When I met with them we brainstormed about possible topics they could cover in their blog and the possibilities for Sperantsa seem almost endless. Other eCommerce websites seem to have a problem with coming up with topics other than “Buy from us!” I recently got some great dos and don’ts about eCommerece blogging from a webinar by HubSpot’s Mike Redbord and Mike Ewing, Blogging for eCommerce.

On Monday I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Zetes and Chelsea James, two-thirds of the start-up company Sperantsa. They are just finishing up their sophomore year at the University of Washington and have already started a business. Chelsea had contacted me to take advantage of our free Social Media Evaluation for Startups so we met at a coffee house near the University to talk about their website. Their business is pretty cool. They work with the Dece, a micro enterprise in Romania run by the nonprofit NetWorks. Dece works with underprivileged Roma mothers who hand-crochet hats that Sperantsa imports and sells on their website. It is a fair trade business that promotes a sustainable income for people who desperately need it while selling some cool looking hats.

The other day someone posted an article in one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to asking whether you should you be selling within your articles or blogs. It wasn’t really a discussion or even a thoughtful blog about the role of self-promotion and sales within your blog, it was a blog length ad for a blog writing template and software. Clicking one of the offers sends you to one of those impossibly long landing pages where testimonial after testimonial tells you in large red letters how using the software earned the user $25,000 or how it made blog writing “easy and effortless.”

As I sat down to write today’s blog I realized that it is my 66^th blog for this web site. Although I don’t assign any cosmic meaning to random events and associations I am often fascinated by them, especially when associated with numbers. For example I can’t see the number 66 without thinking of the song written by Bobby Troup. Then I think of the time I drove my 1962 Chevy Impala down to Las Cruces, New Mexico eleven years ago and actually crossed and drove for a few miles on Route 66. I realize that I need to write this blog but I can’t stop thinking about trips. So at the risk of sounding too philosophical in a blog, I have always intended to be practical, I’ll riff a bit on trips, journeys and, I don’t know what?….Maybe blogs.