Category / Blogging

by peter

Bankruptcy: The Road to Recovery

shutterstock_164995307

It was a perfect storm of personal and professional misfortunes.

Bryan was a successful independent marketing communications consultant, well respected in the business with a good network of friends. But in his late 50s he discovered that he had adult attention deficit disorder (ADD), with a host of problems, ranging from an inability to focus to poor organization skills and depression. After years of laboured compensation for the symptoms, he felt the copying structure he had carefully built begin to fall apart.

Continue reading →

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
by peter

Discover the Art of Easy Living

image-348

I wrote the following post while serving as community manager of Applied Artworks, a site selling limited-edition art prints, as well as the assignment services of photographers and illustrators:

If summertime is about easy living, then the art of enjoying it should be simple, beautiful and affordable.

Applied Arts has launched its ArtWorks site to provide a gorgeous variety of art at summer sale prices. Whether you have a cottage, a home or an office that you want to decorate with prints of original images, you should visit the three ArtWorks Galleries:

Continue reading →

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
by peter

Surviving the End of the World

fear\

The fear is eating away your stomach lining. You can’t sleep. You can’t concentrate. You feel like a failure in the eyes of the world.

The envelopes of the unopened bills have changed to new ominous colours. The days you could juggle minimum payments between credit cards is coming to an end as you reach your limits.

You stop answering the phone calls for fear of bill collectors . . . and then the phone stops working altogether.

Many people come to Toronto bankruptcy trustees gripped by the worst fear of their lives. They are looking at the end of their world, and who could be complacent in the face of that?

Continue reading →

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
by peter

Tail Wags Content Dog

13231998241851913211Cartoon Dog Wagging Tail.svg.med

OK, the case for companies to produce constant streams of online content is something like this:

More and more businesses and organizations depend on the Internet to connect with customers and audiences. This means that getting high page rankings in search engines, particularly Google, is a priority.

Universally organizations turn to search engine optimization (SEO) experts to tinker under the hood and do what they can to improve rankings. As Google changes its algorithms, gets wise to the latest SEO tricks and penalizes those it deems to have used inappropriate methods to get high search rankings, content has become increasingly important.

A steady stream of content is what the SEO experts recommend to get noticed and improve placement. It can’t be any old content, acting as a placeholder for keywords, but it has to be “rich”—i.e., stuff that people actually want to read and repost and link to.

Every blog post, for example, is treated by search engines as a separate web page, and if keyword-optimized can help a site get more weight and reach in its ranking assessment.

The regular blog posts can also be used to drive content to the other increasingly important part of organizations’ online presences: their social media.

So companies are open to having good writing on an ongoing bases to fulfill the requirements set out by their SEO experts. The tail may be wagging the dog, but  the dog is happy and that’s a good thing for content developers who want to scratch his head . . . Sorry, I’m getting lost in this metaphor. Time for bed.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email