Well have we got some exciting news this week for you?!? Yes, you’ll be relieved to hear that this week’s blog is not about boring old SEO stuff this time…instead, they’re letting us all out of the office!
Next week – Thursday 26th April 2018 – the GT team (well, the larger part of it) will be de-camping down to Bramhall Lane for the Sheffield Business Show. And we’re all a little bit over-excited about it to be honest. Read More
As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m a Words Person. Not a Numbers Person – as my son is keen on reminding me – and rarely even a Pictures Person – if you’re going to stick me in an art gallery, you’re going to have to explain to me what I’m looking at. But give me words – anyone’s words; Shakespeare’s, Duffy’s, Attwood’s, hell, even Val McDermid’s – and I’m in heaven. Read More
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past 5 years, you might have noticed that there’s been a huge explosion in content marketing recently.
OK, that’s a bit of an understatement. Content marketing is everywhere now, and everyone seems to be doing it. (Which is the very reason I hope you’re doing it too, but that’s another story!) Read More
You might say I should have better things to do with my life, but for the last few years I’ve been blogging about why content is king. It’s been the mantra of we SEO copywriters and content marketers for ages now, despite the intermittent prophecies that the content bubble is about to burst (it might, by the way, but I think we’re safe for now). But is it still true that content is king?
Just because we have nothing better to do with our weekends, on Saturday just gone we had our monthly GT planning meeting. I know, we’re riotous.
Happy New Year!
Having not written a GT blog for some considerable time, I have now been given the honour of writing our first blog of 2018 – and what an honour that is! I know, you’re jealous. I would be too.
And so, as it’s the start of a shiny new year and we’re all feeling positive and looking forward to all the good things that lie ahead (come on; it’s only the second week of January…we’re still positive!), the GT team are going to take it in turns to make some predictions on what this year may have in store for each of our areas of expertise. I know, the world and his dog are doing it, just bear with us…we need the keywords! 😉
So, as copywriting – or SEO copywriting, to be more specific – is my thing, I’m going to give you my predictions for SEO copywriting and content marketing in 2018, based on the questions I’ve most been asked recently. So, whether you’ve been content marketing for years or are a content virgin, you can make sure 2018 will be the year you finally start to grow your business online. Read More
Well, I’ve had a rather exciting day today, so I thought I’d pen you a quick blog to tell you all about it. I know, I know; you don’t deserve me.
So, what have I been up to that’s been so important? I got a free lunch for one thing, and very nice it was too. Suitably vegetarian. Besides that – and possibly more importantly – I also got an incredibly useful mentoring session on how to make an impact in business. Plus, I met some lovely people too. What more can you ask for on a Wednesday in mid-March? Read More
I’m a little late in telling you about this – mainly because I forgot! – but yours truly has been featured in an infographic published by Invoice2Go. That’s right folks; fame at last!
Published on their website all the way back in December (told you I was a bit behind in telling you!), this nifty little infographic is part of a blog post entitled Supercharging Your Small Business: Top Tips For Starting Out, written by Chang Xing. The post features loads of useful hints and tips from small businesses all over the world…one of whom is GrowTraffic. Read More
For the last few years, ever since GrowTraffic moved across the beautiful county of Lancashire to settle in Bacup, in the Rossendale Valley, we’ve been members of the Valley at Work networking group. (If you’re a regular to my blog, you’ll know that I’ve mentioned Valley at Work before, most recently as part of the Rossendale Business Awards.)
On Wednesday, it was my turn once again to enter the bear pit and host the meeting’s discussion, and the subject suggested to me by Valley at Work Chairman, Rob, as one that would be useful for the other members, was social media. After a bit of discussion, we decided to make that a little bit more niche still and focus on Facebook, and specifically on how small businesses can make their Facebook efforts more effective. Read More
So last week, on 9th November, we had a rather exciting evening here at GrowTraffic. After much build up and a lot of difficult judging (some may call it arguing!), it was finally the awards dinner itself for the 2016 Rossendale Business Awards, where GT were sponsoring the Creative Business category.
Held at the impressively large and well-appointed Whitworth Riverside, the evening was the culmination of much hard work by the event’s organisers, the Valley at Work business networking group, and was the perfect opportunity for Rossendale businesses to come together, let their hair down and celebrate another year’s great work. And what a celebration it was!
But in amongst all the other impressive businesses there on the night was the one that shone out the most for us, the winner of our Creative Business award in fact, the fabulous Kidult and Co. I met up with the girls earlier this week to talk about the business, their success and what it meant to win this award. Read More
Being a freelancer has always been hard work – it requires a lot of graft and dedication to pull off being your own boss and successfully running your own business – but these days the slog is potentially even harder than it was before. Not only do you still have to do all the things that you already had to do – such as all your own sales, marketing, accounts and, obviously, the actual work – but you also now have to compete against so many other people doing exactly the same thing that you do (albeit not as well, clearly).
The reason for this increase in competition is simple; the age of the freelancer has arrived. In recent years, the freelance economy has grown exponentially (so much so, that the freelance economy is now an actual thing) and there are now more freelancers than the human race has ever experienced before. But far from this being a negative turn of events, we at GrowTraffic think this is brilliant. We love a freelancer, so it’s a case of ‘the more the merrier’ as far as we’re concerned. But what exactly has happened to facilitate this sudden explosion in freelancing, and how will it affect the way we all work as a result? Read More
We’re a little bit excited here at GrowTraffic this week. Judging has finally begun on the 2016 R Awards and, as GT are one of the category sponsors this year, that means it’s all stations go here at GT headquarters! We’ve got our judging hats at the ready (Simon Dalley insisted on judging hats!) and we’re raring to go, although with such a strong category full of exceptional local businesses, it’s going to be a tough call.
But I suppose I’d best wind back a little bit first and fill you in on the story so far. Read More
According to the latest search market share numbers released by ComScore on 14th August 2015, Google’s share of the US search market has dropped slightly. Before we all panic and predict the demise of the search giant though, I must qualify that statement by admitting that the fall is not significant; nevertheless, the latest figures do show a loss of ground on Google’s part, to the benefit of its two largest competitors, Bing and Yahoo.
So, let’s take a closer look at the most recent figures and statistics and see what they’re showing us about the performance of the largest search engines globally. Read More
I’ve been a little bit quiet on the old blog front recently because, to tell you the truth, I’ve just been swamped with work (which – as Simon Dalley says – is a good problem to have!) but I wanted to tell you about a fabulous event that I attended last week courtesy of Alder Grange School Sixth Form College in Rawthenstall.
As part of their Enterprise Week for Year 10 pupils, and representing GrowTraffic, I was lucky enough to be able to spend a morning with pupils as a business mentor, offering support and advice for their project on Tourism in Rossendale. Not only did I enjoy myself much more than I was expecting to, it was also really heartening to see such enthusiasm and dedication from all the students involved. Read More
(This article was originally written and published in May 2014)
OK, so you’ve paid your fancy web designer a small fortune and you’ve got the whizziest website on the World Wide Web, but your sales haven’t increased and your boss thinks you’re crazy for wasting all that money. Don’t panic! There’s one simple thing you can change to instantly improve your snazzy new website; the content.
Whether it’s content or copywriting, it needs to be good and it needs to be plentiful. Yes, a website needs to look good and it always helps to be innovative, but what you say on your website is even more important than how it looks. As the research is now proving, without well written, relevant and regularly updated content your website will fail to climb in the rankings or to produce those all important conversations. Read More
Following in the footsteps of Facebook and Instagram, Twitter announced yesterday that it will shortly be autoplaying all videos by default, meaning that we can now all look forward to many more wasted hours of our lives watching cats fall down toilets or rhinos making friends with lambs. Read More
Yesterday, I read a really interesting blog post on Search Engine Journal by Tom Demers entitled 5 Reasons Why It’s OK To Mention Competitors In Your Content. Funnily enough, this post struck an instant chord with me, as it almost word for word echoed a conversation I had with one of my clients a week or so ago. So, I thought I’d share it with you so that you can see just how right Tom Demers is about this very valid point!
As the title of the blog suggests, Tom’s post listed 5 reasons why writing about your competitors in your content marketing can be a positive thing; I obviously don’t want to go over everything again that Tom wrote, as he made his points very eloquently and you’re perfectly capable of reading it for yourself. Instead, I’ll give you Tom’s reason’s summarised and then relate them to my client and the answers I gave her. Read More
A couple of months ago, GrowTraffic were doing a little bit of networking at our local Shout! Network Group and we were fortunately enough to hear a talk by Wendy Bell from Lancashire County Council (LCC) about the council’s Sustainable Travel Grants, which had recently become available to businesses in the East Lancashire Area. We thought ‘we could do with a bit of that’, so we applied and – guess what? We were granted a Sustainable Travel Grant! Fantastic. Read More
About 6 months ago, I embarked upon my first project management of an SEO web build. As a Freelance SEO Copywriter, the building of websites is not usually my domain and that was a state of affairs that I was perfectly happy with, but the boss said project manage and so project manage I did. Well, I tried. Read More
Well I’ve been a very busy little bee over the past couple of weeks, so much so that I haven’t even found time to pen a little GrowTraffic blog post; my clients have had loads but the GT world has been woefully neglected. Fortunately, Simon Dalley’s been stepping in to fill the blogging void, so I think we’ll probably survive, however it’s about time I started to pull my blogging weight so here’s a quick little post to keep you going. Read More
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