I don’t have Catholic guilt, but I’m starting to think I have grammatical guilt. I try to avoid using the comma if at all possible.

Check out the following sentence:

Knowing John rarely checks his email during the week she didn’t expect to hear back from him so quickly.

I think one could easily insert a comma after week but it doesn’t seem absolutely necessary so I leave it out.

But is there a general rule regarding when to use a comma?

Here’s what the Chicago Manual of Style says about commas:

The comma…indicates the smallest break in sentence structure. Especially in spoken contexts, it usually denotes a slight pause. In formal prose, however, logical considerations come first. Effective use of the comma involves good judgement, with ease of reading the end in view.

So this makes me believe that there is a certain level of subjectivity, by the writer, in when to use the comma. It’s a personal choice. There are some circumstances when commas are required (if you want to conform to style).

For example, when commas are used to set off a date or a location a second comma is required after the set off element:

June 4th, 1945, was the date of the largest land invasion in history.

Chicago, Illinois, has been considered a town with corrupt politicians.

Serial Commas

The same Catholic schoolteacher also taught me that the last comma in a series of three or more elements should be omitted. For example:

Neither James, John or William brought their textbooks to class.

But the Manual of Style says differently.

When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more, a comma…should appear before the conjunction.

So the sentence above would be in error.

This usage, known as the serial comma or the Oxford comma, prevents ambiguity. This makes sense when you examine the following sentence:

I dedicate this song to my parents, Julie and Jeff.

Reading this it’s reasonable to assume that the writer’s parents are Julie and Jeff. A comma after the last conjunction clears up any errors in understanding the intention in meaning.

It’s important to note that this rule applies to a series of three or more elements where a conjunction is used to set off the last element. In that case, use the comma.

If you are setting off every item in a series of three elements or more with a conjunction no comma is necessary.

Neither Joe or Jeff or Tom won their matches today.

Parenthetical Phrases

Commas should be used to show a slight break in a sentence where a thought or comment is inserted explain or comment.

Jason’s first at bat, despite his nervousness, resulted in a two run double.

Commas and Two or More Adjectives

When two or more adjectives are used to describe a noun there is a simple rule (which seems obvious) to decide when to use a comma. If the adjectives are coordinate, meaning they can be set apart by the conjunction and and switched around, use a comma.

Derek has trained hard and become a tough, aggressive Jiu-Jitsu fighter.

The adjectives tough and aggressive can be placed in any order or be replaced by and. Comma required.

Susan decided on a chocolate Labrador Retriever

In this case the two adjectives, Labrador and Retriever cannot be switched around, and Labrador forms a unit with the noun, Retriever. No comma.

The post The Comma appeared first on MarketFuse.

But the most important part of a well done business website is usually the most neglected: the writing.

Particularly if your business targets a more upscale and educated customer, your website’s written content gives readers a sense of your company’s professionalism, competence and the quality of what you have to offer.

The higher priced your service the more likely your customers are to research you and your competitors, online and in other ways.

As in a lot of things that relate to how human beings perceive things, little details can make a huge difference.

Good grammer is nice, but it’s not everything.

Grammar, punctuation and understandable writing is important. That goes without saying.

A more uncommon skill is the ability to communicate not only facts but feelings and nuanced meanings, and deliver those meanings in a way that connects with and influences the reader.

I was wandering through Barnes and Noble the other day and happened upon a book regarding how communication can influence decision making. Here’s a paragraph from a chapter on writing:

…effective writing depends on understanding–and most of all, empathizing with–the target reader. The more you know about how the audience thinks and responds…the more strategically you can craft a plan to persuade… Persuasive writing always sounds as if it comes from inside the audience’s allegiance, rendering new information as coaching…instead of [a] threat…

- from “360 Degrees of Influence: Get Everyone to Follow Your Lead on Your Way to the Top” by Harrison Monarth

In other words, if done with skill and empathy, well done writing can make a sales pitch, well, sound more advice from someone you trust than salesmanship.

Marketing is nothing more than influencing buying behavior. It makes sense to pay careful attention to the thing that can influence the most, the written communication in your website and business blog posts.

The post The Most Neglected Part of Web Design appeared first on MarketFuse.

You don’t want your own activity to count as a visit to your site or a conversion. Especially if you’re testing out a landing page or contact page, or whatever.

It only takes a few moments to set this filter up in GA.

Log into your Analytics account and click the Admin button on the upper right hand corner of the page.

From your list of accounts select the account you want to filter.

If you have more than one website under your account you may have to drill down to the site you want to adjust.

When you’ve made it to the website profile, click Filters.

Click New Filter.

On the filter page, name your filter. In this case I referenced my laptop. Set the filter type to Predefined Filter.

Use the dropdown menus to display: “Exclude traffic > from the IP addresses > that are equal to”.

You can find the IP address of the device you are on at WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.

Place the IP address in the fields, then save your customizations.

Done.

Make sure to do the same from your other devices, including your desktop, iPhones or other smartphones and your client machines as well.

The post Filtering Out Your Own Traffic from Google Analytics appeared first on MarketFuse.

If you care about your product, you should care just as much about how you describe it…a company makes its first impression on would-be customers or partners with words…A snappy design might catch their attention, but it’s the words that make the real connection. Your company’s story, product descriptions, history, personality — these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline. Are they strong enough?
- Jason Fried, entrepreneur and founder of 37 Signals

Have you ever consumed a piece of really well done writing?  It’s a different experience, isn’t it?

It flows and draws you in.  The craftsmanship is simple, elegant, and undistracting. It accomplishes the honorable goal of any piece of writing: communication.

When I was an English student at the University of Illinois I was introduced to “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White.  I quickly consumed this little masterpiece and I have to say it still is doing its work, as many of its simple rules are ingrained in my memory.

It was written and published privately around the First World War by William Strunk, an English professor at Cornell.  The book was the required text for his class.  One of Strunk’s students was a kid named E.B. White, who read the book in 1919 while a student at Cornell.

40 years later, after a long career as a writer, White was commissioned to revise the book for the public.  In the introduction to the new edition, White wrote about Professor Strunk and his book:

I passed the course, graduated…and forgot the book but not the professor. The Elements of Style…seemed to contain rich deposits of gold…[Strunk's] attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size…

White won both the Pulitzer Prize and Presidential Freedom Medal and was a well known staff writer for the New York Times.

E.B. White’s stepson, who also became a well known baseball writer, ended up writing a forward for The Manual of Style. 

Each Tuesday morning [my stepfather] would close his study and sit down to write…for the New Yorker.  The task was familiar to him…but the sounds of his typewriter…came in hesitant bursts, with long silences…hours went by.  Summoned…for lunch, he was silent and preoccupied…he rarely seemed satisfied.  ”It isn’t good enough…I wish it were better.”

He went on to write:

Writing is hard, even for writers who do it all the time.

The reason good business writing is uncommon is because it really is hard.

Most business writing, whether in a brochure, in a proposal or on a website: is boring, plain, and compels us to do nothing but ignore it.

Good business writing, on the other hand, is interesting.  It’s human and has an attractive texture to it.  If you’re writing well in your business communication, the main ideas behind your business are being effectively communicated to an interested audience, and that’s a very good thing.

Strunk gets right to the point.

The post The Power of Great Business Writing appeared first on MarketFuse.

On their Google Webmaster Central blog they stated:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products, and on the web. As a part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.

Matt Cutts, the Google employee and spam and search ambassador, followed up with some posts about how people shouldn’t panic.  This is true, but the announcement was made for a reason, and it’s something that business owners should pay attention to.

Particularly if your website is a part of how you make money.  Would be a shame to lose rankings, customers and income because of site speed.

Web technology is cheaper than it’s ever been.  Server space is cheap, open source software platforms are everywhere and there’s all kinds of software as a service solutions on the cloud to handle business tasks.

But that doesn’t mean that your business website is set up in a way to take advantage of the newer technology.

Before I get started I want to mention that you should use a quality webhost and don’t use shared IP addresses when possible.  There are shared IP addresses, particularly in newer hosting setups that are “virtually” unique.  This is fine.  For more information on web hosting  contact me using the form below.

Here’s a few ways you can speed up your site(s).  This is a quick overview, and relates primarily to sites created upon the WordPress platform, but the methods can be applied on just about any website :

1. Install the Yahoo ySlow plugin.  I use Chrome as a browser.  I’m not sure if it’s available on other browsers, but Chrome is available on all operating systems.   Once you’ve installed the plugin you can run a test on your site.  It will grade your site and give you suggestions.

2. Use a caching plugin.  If your website uses a database to access content on a page it normally has to make a database call (request) to grab that info.  Those calls are time and performance stealers.  A caching plugin stores those calls in memory and eliminates the need to call the database.  A nice solution. There are a few plugins available for WordPress but I prefer W3 Total Cache.

3. Minify Javascript and CSS code. Minification reduces the file size of Javascript and CSS files by removing unnecessary characters and white space.  Smaller file size = less load time.

4. Optimize your database.  There’s a cool plugin called WP-DBmanager that does a nice job.  Particularly on large sites, databases can get mess and under optimized.  Running a plugin like this can correct any errors and make the db a lot easier for your website to communicate with.

5. Use CSS Sprites whenever possible.  Regardless of the size of an image, in order for a browser to show it to a viewer, it requires what’s called an HTTP request from the browser to the server (“server, please give me the logo…”).  So, your site logo, those little arrows that users navigate with, the little logos that link to your social media pages – each of those is another HTTP request.  A sprite is all of those images combined into one image.  Using CSS we can show only the button you’re looking for.  Combining ten images into one equals a 10x savings in requests.   Not bad.

6. Optimize your images.  Large images on a site drag down your site speed.  Use the smallest image possible on your pages. Don’t use CSS to resize a large image to a smaller container. Beginner web designers sometimes make this mistake.  Also, whenever possible optimize the images for the web.  Choosing “save for web and devices” from Photoshop is one way to optimize an image (I reduced the image for this post from 2mb to 75k).  Another more comprehensive way is to use an application like ImageOptim to remove unnecessary color profiles from images – reducing size but not noticeable quality.

7. Use Gzip. Those HTTP requests I mentioned above: this compresses the size of those requests.  More information here.

8. Update. It’s very important to consistently update WordPress, its themes and plugins as new revisions become available.  Not updating in a timely manner can leave your site vulnerable to security threats such as viruses, bots, SQL injection attacks, brute force attacks and individual hackers.  The other outcome from being lazy about updating is site performance and speed can suffer.  This can happen as new features, database structures or other optimizations are ignored and your website starts to lose performance.  Sometimes it pays to have a company take care of your maintenance for you.

Last one! Use Google libraries for jQuery and other open source JavaScript libraries.  These are popular libraries and used by many websites.  The advantage of linking to the Google library is that there is a good chance that the file has already been accessed by the browser and is stored in the browser cache.  Good stuff, no need to pull it again from your website’s server.  There’s no security risk, because it’s Google.

The post Site Speed and Search Rankings, and Business appeared first on MarketFuse.

This article assumes your theme has post thumbnail support.  For more info on post thumbnails read the Codex page on thumbnails.

When uploading images it’s important for a couple of reasons to select both a title and alternate text.

The title is important because it will show as a tooltip on most browsers when you hover over the image.  Having the filename show (IMG-234) is distracting to users.  Better to replace that with some relevant text.

The alternate text is important for SEO and for screen readers for visually disabled site visitors, which goes to accessibility.  Alt text is read aloud on screen readers and Google and other search engines use the text as a part of their algorithm.

Although it works for regular images, when uploading a thumbnail image into a post both the title and alt fields are not automatically saved with the image.

Make sure to click “Save all changes” on thumbnails before clicking “Use as thumbnail image”.

If you don’t want to hassle with filling in those two fields every time you upload an image you can check out a plugin like SEO Friendly Images.  Make sure you adjust the settings correctly.

The post WordPress Image Uploader Tip appeared first on MarketFuse.

Of course, it helps to rank well for the right terms on Google and other search engines.  Search engine optimization gets you invited to the party, but it certainly does not make you any money.

This is especially true in marketing today, because the volume of messages is getting higher and higher.  We’re all very used to the internet and many of us cannot remember a time without the internet, but the internet is only about 17 years old.

Like Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, we’re in the middle of the biggest social evolution in history.  Kids today, and adults like you and me, are ingesting (being force-fed, really) more information in one day than previous generations ingested in months.

This also means that more people than ever are looking to the internet for solutions to their problems.  How many people are grabbing a Yellow Pages to search for a dentist when they get a toothache?  Not many.

I don’t have to explain why.  This is obvious.  But it’s important to realize that people today are desensitized to marketing messages.

This is also true in local marketing.

Although I think great writing has become one of the most valuable tools a business can have, making a visual connection is usually more powerful.  One way I like to think about it is that a visual connection is “mammalian”.  It’s how mammals connect and interact and mate.  We’ve all experienced this; a beautiful woman walking into a room can captivate the attention of men without saying a word.

Getting away from sexuality, there’s dozens of other ways that mammals connect visually.

How can a website make this connection?  By connecting visually through the use of photographs.  By using layouts and design that display images in a style that makes a human bond with an audience. By giving marketing customers the tools to generate content on their business websites and publish photographs in real time. And by avoiding the typical dry marketing messages that most businesses are pushing to bored and disinterested audiences.

“What about social media?”, you might ask.  ”I post pictures to my Facebook and my Pinterest and my Instagram all the time.”  That’s great, but the problem is that those places don’t drive people to your website. In most cases they keep people from your site.

Most social media activity involves clicking through and past content, including the images you might post on your Facebook page.  Users are there for the Facebook or Pinterest experience, not hot to solve a problem, like the example of the customer looking for a dentist.  Nobody heads to Facebook to look for a dentist.  They are there to check out pictures of their friends and relatives.

Your website is where the business is done.  It’s where site visitors become leads and lead become customers.

The post Connecting Visually With Your Web Design and Marketing appeared first on MarketFuse.

Yourself To Blame by Mayme White Miller

If things go bad for you
And make you a bit ashamed
Often you will find out that
You have yourself to blame

Swiftly we ran to mischief
And then the bad luck came
Why do we fault others?
We have ourselves to blame

Whatever happens to us,
Here is what we say
“Had it not been for so-and-so
Things wouldn’t have gone that way.”

And if you are short of friends,
I’ll tell you what to do
Make an examination,
You’ll find the faults in you…

You’re the captain of your ship,
So agree with the same
If you travel downward
You have yourself to blame

-from “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story”

The post The Captain of Your Own Ship appeared first on MarketFuse.

I asked her who these followers were, and she said she didn’t know but that her social media person used a program to automatically add followers “while she slept”.

I think this is crazy.  But I see it all the time.  What’s the true value of anything your social media expert is doing for you?  Sales.  Profit.  Customers.  Not friends, likes or followers.

If I approached you and told you that in your personal life I could make it so when you woke the next day you had twenty new friends, you might have some interest.  But that’s before you read the fine print:

These friends are people you will never actually meet.  These friends have no actual interest in you or much of what you do in your personal life.  In some cases these friends may not exist at all or live in foreign countries or be 13 years old.  If you find yourself in trouble these friends will not respond to you or give you any support.

What would you say?

The only friends or followers that you should want on your business Facebook page are real people.  If you only have 5 followers, fine.  Focus on creating great content, focus on reaching out to the followers that you have now and keep plugging along.

This way you’ll know exactly where your social media campaign is right now and where it’s heading.  Your marketing team should know how to create your content on your website, where your money making transactions take place, push that content to social media and pull customers back to your site.  They should also know how to configure analytics software to tell you not how many “likes” you have but how much traffic from social media actually bought something from you.

That’s the right way to handle social media  Likes, friends or followers are the outcome from great content and shouldn’t be the first step in your social media strategy.

If your social media guru talks likes and friends and not conversions and sales and profit you should ask for your money back.

The post Fake Friends: No Good In Real Life But Ok For Business? appeared first on MarketFuse.

Being from the city I thought I was pretty street smart and pretty tough.  What I didn’t realize was that at this job I was really a kid working with grown men supporting their families; grown men who knew a lot more about surviving and hustling than I did.

Most of the guys I worked with were black, from the South Side and about ten years or more older than me.  They really intimidated me and made me realize how sheltered I was.  They had this swagger and confidence that I just couldn’t put together and they weren’t afraid to let me know where I stood in the pecking order: dead last.

They would push past me to grab guests who they somehow knew were tippers or pushed me ahead to grab the cars of those they knew were not.  For the most part I was too scared to say anything.  That didn’t help.  A few times these guys would get into fist fights in the garages over things like this.

It wasn’t just the valets who were supporting their families at the Hyatt.  The doormen were the big money earners and had the toughest job to get in the hotel.  These guys would make 4-5-6 hundred dollars a night working the front door, depending on the night and the time of year.  They made that money a few dollars at a time, blowing their whistles to hail cabs for guests making their way into the city or by loading bags for arriving or departing travelers.

During peak hours these guys worked their asses off.  The guests would line up into the dozens, all in a hurry to grab a cab and get out.  The cabs would like up around the block, hoping to get a customer flying out of town at O’Hare, a pretty big fare.  This wasn’t the Ritz in Naples, it was inner city Chicago, and speed and hustle was how they made their money.  Rain, shine or blowing snow, these guys were always doing their thing and were the alpha males of the hotel.

The other thing they had was a strong charisma and charm.  They all had it. In just a few moments of contact with guests they knew how to make them feel taken care of, important and exclusive.  Over tens of thousands of repetitions doing this they really had a remarkable influence on the people they met, even for that very small period.  The end result, of course, was more tips.

In the employee locker room I started noticing the amounts of cash that all of the service staff were making on their tips.  Rolls of ones and fives and tens looked literally like rolls.  At the beginning of the night the money was folded over flat but by the end of the night you couldn’t get your hand around it.  They would wrap a thick rubber band around the cash to keep it all together.

So among this adult world I was trying to find a little spot, and believe me I wanted to make some cash.  But it just wasn’t working out for me.  Even after agreeing to work double shifts and running back to the front of the garage to get another car I couldn’t make anywhere near what the other guys were pulling down.

This didn’t do a lot for my confidence, and I was considering quitting until one of the nicer valets, a super tall and skinny black dude everyone called “Duck” took me aside and showed me his hustle.

Duck was at least 50 years old.  He had real bad teeth (might have been where his name came from).  He was always cracking jokes and always making tons of tips.  He had this CRAZY laugh; I won’t even try to describe it.  Nobody messed with him.  He had worked as a valet for over 20 years.  Rumor was he did time at Joliet.  Who knows if that was true but he put three kids through college on his income and had things down to a science.  I never saw him break a sweat.  Here’s what he told me.

“Shortie, this isn’t about running, man.  This isn’t about more shifts.  It’s about show business, brother.  It’s about making people feel like you’re doing them a favor and not doing your job.  You gotta make ‘em feel like you really can’t do what you are supposed to do, and believe me they will pay you to do it.”

He told me to follow him upstairs and watch him grab a car.  This was our job.  We would post up at the front door and wait for a guest to drive up in their car, usually rentals from the airport.  We would tag the keys, tear off the customer a receipt and usually get a tip for the effort.

What Duck did was NOT take the keys from the customer and NOT make any effort to take the car.  He actually didn’t let the guest open the front door and actually walked in front of the doorman to do so.  I was surprised to see the usually very territorial doorman just let that happen.

He would lean way into the window and tell the guest:

Welcome to the Hyatt. Listen, I’d love to take your car but the parking garage is downstairs.  You’re blocking traffic here, sir.  You’ve got to go back the way you came – watch out for the guests walking over there -ok, so you do a u-turn and head down that ramp.  Go right at the bottom of the ramp.  Don’t go left!  Left is no good, not the best area over there, especially after dark.  So go right, head down the first ramp there and you’ll see the garage entrance and they’ll take care of you from there. You need me to send someone down to get your bags?

Almost every time, and with a ten or a twenty dollar bill pushed into his palm, the guest would say something like:

Listen, buddy, we’re from out of town.  We don’t have time to drive down to the garage.  Can’t you take our car here?  What kind of a hotel doesn’t valet cars at the front door?  Listen, do me a favor (pressing the twenty into Duck’s hand), just handle it for me, would you?  We’re having dinner then going out. Can you also make sure you bring the car back here for me?

With the skill of a broadway actor, if the guest had not already paid him off, he would give just the right amount of resistance and reluctantly give the guest their ticket and take the car downstairs.

The other thing was, after ending his shift he always gave the head doorman a fifty.  That’s how he made the money he made, probably ten to fifteen times the amount I was making.

Perception versus reality.  In the right situations it can change EVERYTHING.

In marketing, there’s nothing different in the equation.  Why do people pay outrageous amounts of money for Crystal?  Because of perception.  Volvo did a study years ago to determine why their customers were not buying extended warranties for their cars.  One reason: the cars are perceived to be reliable.  The other reason? They were too inexpensive related to the cost of the cars.  Volvo raised the prices and customers started buying more warranties.

There was something dishonest about Duck’s methods, and that’s not what I’m advocating businesses do.  But it’s an object lesson in human behavior.  We usually want what we are not supposed to have, we’ll go out of our way and pay more to feel more important.  And in this case, a very clever valet managed to create this little drama again and again and put three kids through college by doing it.

The post Any Hustle is About Perception Overriding Reality appeared first on MarketFuse.