We hear it all the time from clients and prospective clients. Why should they blog? Blogs work. That’s why ECP’s that blog regularly have more inbound links and generate more leads than practices who do not. This infographic from Ignite Spot shows us how important and powerful blogging is. If you don’t have the time to blog, hire someone to do it for you…maybe someone from The Visionaries Group. What is your excuse for not blogging now?
![The-blogconomy-infographic[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-blogconomy-infographic1.png)
How many emails do you get every week from people claiming to be search engine optimization (SEO) experts? How many of you even know what to look for when exploring having someone help you with your SEO? We know many a company who have been taken in by the fast talking SEO sales experts of the world only to be disappointed the magic beans never bore fruit. Even Google gets SPAM emails from companies claiming they can help raise the website in search rankings.No one is safe. We delete the vast majority of those emails. A few we look at the rankings of their companies online. Funny how the majority of these firms who claim to be experts in search rankings have very low or no rankings of their own. Perhaps this is the moment to bring up the old bible quote of “Physician, heal thyself”. If these companies can’t build their own search rankings, why on earth should you pay them money to build yours?
Google is no small hapless company. They have thousands of engineers working on how to provide the best answers to your search queries. If they are manipulated by firms to the benefit of their clients instead of the benefit of providing the best search results, you and millions of others are likely to look elsewhere and there goes billions of dollars in advertising revenue. Google is always refining search engine optimization (SEO) to more align how we as humans think and to try and stay ahead of those who would manipulate the system for their own benefit. Fresh and quality content count today more than ever. So too does social sharing. Here is an updated study from the folks at
Where do people receive their news today? Long gone are the days of Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, and Edward R Murrow. Half of us get our news today through social media. Here is an infographic from the folks at My Life showing how social media has changed the world and why you should be a participant in it.
![social-media-world1[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/social-media-world11.jpg)
“Language is a virus from outer space’ said William S Burroughs. Performance artist Laurie Anderson brought this saying to a wider audience with her 1986 song Language is a Virus. Language is always evolving. We certainly don’t speak the same English as did Chaucer or Shakespeare. We don’t even use words in the same way as we did a decade ago. This about it. When we say “tablet”, “piracy”, “spam, “thread”, and a host of other words, what pictures form in your mind? Probably not the same pictures that did when you were a child. Even the terms we use in the industry such as “contact”, “glass”, and “progressive” have evolved over our lifetime…no? Here is an infographic from the folks at Lebara that take a look at how the digital online world has changed our language.
![tech-language[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/tech-language1.png)
We’ve said it before and probably will a few hundred more times as we write and share with this blog and others, The only thing constant in this world, is change. Just as we get used to whatever we get used to, something changes. Sometimes that change is wonderful, sometimes not, but the world is always changing around us, mo matter how much we might like things just the way they are. Retail is changing just as fast. The mom and pop store gave way to the big box chains and now that trend is starting to reverse itself as the family owned business starts to better specialize in whatever it is they do as the big box stores try to homogenize at the same time. Retail is no longer just who has the best location or the best prices or even the best trained sales staff. Retail is an impulse as much as it is a need, and the combination of selection, convenience, pricing, atmosphere and enjoyment are what drives sales these days.The mobile web is a big part of that. How you present your business online will have a huge impact in how customers see you and want to interact with you. The folks at ExactTarget have put together this infographic on how the future of retail will look in the coming years. What are you doing to prepare your business?
![future_of_digital_retail_2_w640-e1371841271658[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/future_of_digital_retail_2_w640-e13718412716581.jpeg)
Does your practice email customers and patients? If not, you most certainly should. In a world of virtually unlimited choices, customers have the flexibility to shop wherever and whenever they want. If you aren’t reaching out to them on a regular basis, rest assured, someone else is. At the same time our in-boxes are inundated with more email than ever. It is estimated that nearly 300 billion email messages are sent out every single day. That is roughly 3 million email messages every second. So, with that mountain of emails out there, how do you get your message opened and read? According to a recent study by email marketing firm, Adestra, here are the most and the least effective keywords to consider in composing your email subject lines. What has worked for your email campaigns?
![overall-keyword-effectiveness-large-adestra-20131[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/overall-keyword-effectiveness-large-adestra-201311.jpg)
Teenagers have almost always been early adopters of most technologies. Let’s face it, they are not as stuck in their ways as those of us who have teenagers of our own. So, savvy business people look at what teens are doing to help predict what the rest of us will soon be doing and to position their companies for what those teens will be stuck in their ways of doing as they grow older. How teens are using social media is the subject of today’s infographic, courtesy of the folks at PhoneSheriff.
![Teens-changing-online-social-networking1[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Teens-changing-online-social-networking11.png)
There are still a lot of people and practices who are just entering the world of social media. At the same time, it’s always nice to re-look at the networks we have all chosen to participate in and make sure our time and energy is well spent choosing the right networks for the right audience. As with all marketing, targeting the right people with the right medium and the right time is key to getting our message across. The folks at SuretyBonds put together this infographic for that very purpose. How are you using social media for your practice?
![social-media-branding[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/social-media-branding1.png)
I know, most of hate rules….and here we are sharing 80 of them for social media. Yet, as you spend time looking through them, you will find each one a useful bit of information to help us all perform better using social media to help our practices succeed. Thanks to Jeremy Waite of Adobe for his work on this. Which of these do you already do and which might you now institute?
![80-rules-social-media[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/80-rules-social-media1.jpg)
The bigger a business gets, the easier it is to afford someone dedicated to full time tasks. For most of us however, we all wear a dozen different hats a day, from optometrist to accountant, from marketeer to sales manager, from lens fitter to contact fitter. Did you know the over 25% of small business marketers spend at least an hour a day on social media marketing? With so many people interacting with various social media platforms all day long it only makes sense. Here is an infographic from the folks at MarketMeSuite and Placester showing how we interact with various social media sites and when are the right times in which to achieve maximum effectiveness doing so. What has worked for your small business?
![small-business-social-media-mastery1[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/small-business-social-media-mastery11.jpg)
