Category: Marketing
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Picking the perfect writer – not the perfect unicorn
You want to update your website, but you can’t carve out the time. You plan to update your blog, but you can’t squeeze out a post more than once every few months. You want to get engagements on social media, but you only have time to log in once a week. You need a writer.…
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5 surefire signs you need to hire a writer
It’s no longer enough to be a brand. These days, you also need to be a publisher. That means coming up with a strategy for content, writing it, and posting it on a regular basis. It helps you rise to the top of search results, provide value to could-be and current customers, crank up your…
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Stock photos you (probably) won’t ever use – and how to pick ones you will
A picture’s worth a thousand words, but some just raise a thousand questions. If you’ve spent any amount of time searching a stock photo site for an image to pair with your latest article, pamphlet, website banner, or even billboard, you know gems like this inevitably pop up. If you don’t personally search a lot…
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Yes, there’s a word for that: the literary devices that make marketing tick
I’m an English major. As such, my bookshelves are stacked with style guides, dictionaries, and technical references that most would pawn off at their next yard sale without batting an eye. Not me. Some, I consult on a monthly basis. Some, a few times a year. Others, several times a week. There’s one book…
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Using the power of emojis for 😇 (and maybe a little 😈)
Right now, there are 2,823 emojis in the Unicode Standard. The most popular emojis on Twitter as I’m posting this article are 😂, followed by ❤. Over 60 million emojis are sent each day on Facebook. It’s the way people talk in private and public messages, so it makes sense that it’s part of our everyday…
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“When everyone’s super, no one will be” and other meaningless words to avoid
You know that feeling when you repeat a word so often it loses its meaning? Try saying “fork” a lot. Look at how it’s spelled. Sound it out. Isn’t it a weird word? Who decided that it’s a proper English word, anyway? The phenomenon is called semantic satiation, and it describes what happens when…
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How do you do, fellow kids? Trends in slang and why they matter
The other night, I found myself in the middle of a chair dancing class. “Y’all are so extra!” said the instructor. “Let’s start from the top, yas?” Internally, I high-fived myself for understanding the new slang. At the same time, I realized that I was self-high-fiving because I’m about ten years older than she…
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The one where I ruin a carpet (a.k.a. why storytelling matters)
The Sunday before my internship began, I drove to St. Thomas, Ontario for the first time. Right where the highway turns into the city’s main street, I was greeted by the business end of a local landmark: a statue of Jumbo the elephant. A few turns later and I was in the empty parking…
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Laughter: the best medicine for a memorable message
“How many ways can a man tell his sweetheart, ‘I love you?’ “Nothing says ‘forever’ like up to 6.4 terabytes per second . . . and nothing says ‘I love you’ like six times the mobile backhaul capacity.” That’s part of the voice over for an ad for Cisco’s ASR 9000 router – “the…
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The cost of a broken promise
You can smell some false marketing promises from a mile away. There are singles in your city waiting for you to call! This woman figured out the secret to easy weight loss – and doctors hate her! Make $1,000 a day without leaving your house! We see messages like this all the time, on…