The Real Truth about Advertising and Articles

Pick up any magazine, and browse through the ads. What do you see? Catchy slogans, free-trial or limited-time offers and wild claims. In other words, companies make use of that medium to actively promote their products or services and try to persuade readers to buy them. But sometimes this backfires. At best, readers might overlook

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Is it Time to Redesign Your Website?

As technology advances, the expectations of internet users advance with it. According to a Forbes article on top technology trends for 2014–2016, “A great digital experience is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a make-or-break point for your business as we more fully enter the digital age.” Does your site provide a “great digital experience” or

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Ten do’s and don’ts for your annual report

Annual reports can be useful documents for your stakeholders—if they’re prepared properly. All too often, an annual report is a bland, meaningless collection of buzz words, truisms that apply to any business and vague promises of growth or innovation. To make your annual report a valuable document, here are 10 do’s and don’ts for your

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Defining expectations clearly, part II

In my last post, we heard the story of an employee who had rubbed the board president and a few board members the wrong way with her overconfidence and perceived dismissiveness. The board president had given the employee’s manager instructions to solve the problem—only to immediately say that perhaps she had misjudged the employee, and

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Proofreading: a forgotten art

I’ve noticed that in today’s business world, which can best be described by the adjective “now!” (exclamation mark and all), it’s easier than ever to make typographical errors—or worse: missing words, spelling errors, improper subject-verb tense agreement and more. The pressure to respond instantaneously causes our brains to move faster than our fingers can comply.

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“The general erosion of editorial standards”

Lauren Indvik posted a piece on Mashable Business this week titled “Magazine Get Serious About Ecommerce” in which she examines the approaches a few different pubs have taken to combine editorial content with links to products in an effort to get consumers purchasing and offset declining print ad sales. In this piece, Indvik writes: It’s

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Case Studies: Just the Facts, Ma’am

Most of us don’t remember when Detective Joe Friday from television’s Dragnet series in the 1950s said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” This phrase, and its truncated version, “Just the facts, ma’am”, are pop culture buzz-phrases, surviving for more than a half-century. Ironically, the early days of television (and radio) were a time

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Sell the Sizzle

About five years ago, Copyblogger Media CEO Brian Clark posted an entry on the copyblogger.com site titled “Discover Your Hidden Remarkable Benefit.” While the wording is a little cumbersome, a “remarkable hidden benefit” is something that sets your company apart from the competition. Clark gives two real-world examples of hidden remarkable benefits, those of Schlitz beer

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