by Joseph Graves | Jan 1, 2014 | Workshed News
Week 1
- Ask a question
- Who is someone you admire?
- Why did you get into business?
- What is your favorite quote and why?
- One thing that you wish your customers knew
- Review a book, movie, product or service
- What is your favorite thing to do?
Week 2
- What makes your business unique?
- How do you handle mistakes?
- Who’s someone you admire?
- List your favorite websites or resources
- Ask a question
- Profile an employee or charity you support
- Write about a favorite quote and tell why
Week 3
- What’s one thing your competition does wrong?
- Make a prediction for 2014
- What do you think about….(politics, economics, philosophy)
- A day in the life (break down a typical day for your business)
- FAQ post that saves people time
- Write about a favorite quote and tell why
- Profile and employee or tell about a specific product or service
Week 4
- Create an infographic
- Post a video blog
- FAQ post that saves people time
- Case study (describe how you helped a customer solve a problem)
- List of favorite websites or resources
- Guest post from an employee or affiliate
- What do you think about….(politics, economics, philosophy)
Week 5
- Who should be using your services but isn’t?
- What do you do and how does it benefit your customers?
- Post about what you learned during the 30 Day Blog Fitness Challenge
by Joseph Graves | Dec 30, 2013 | 30 Day Blog Challenge, Workshed News
Ah, the new year is almost here. If you’re like us, you’re feeling a little bit guilty about all that merriment from the holidays that added to the ol’ mid-section. Time to get back in shape, maybe join a gym, take up jogging again, or try out that newfangled CrossFit thing.
Sounds like a plan. Fitness is important to a happy, healthy, productive human being. But what about your business fitness? Is it time start exercising your marketing and content creation muscle?
Of course it is! Content creation is the oft-neglected, but important part of your business that can resemble a treadmill collecting dust in the basement. Like any piece of exercise equipment, it’s no good unless you actually use it.
For many, creating content (just like exercise) is hard at first. But after the initial pain it gets easier. Once you’re in the habit of creating content and start to see results (more customer engagement), you know it’s all worth it.
Misery loves company so we invite you to share in the pain.
30-day Blogging Challenge
To show that we at Workshed practice what we preach, we’re accepting Hubspot’s 30-day Blog Challenge and invite you to join us. Why blog more? Because it’s an effective method of marketing. Hubspot says customers that write just 3-4 blog post per month attract 800 more website visits, 60 more Twitter followers, and 50 more Facebook likes than those who only write 2 blog posts. Visits and fans are great, but this also led to 20 more lead submissions as well!
Yeah, this stuff really works.
Our Blogging Goal
The challenge is to publish a blog post once a day from January 2 to January 31. We’ll track our site stats and report them daily on our Facebook, Google +, and LinkedIn pages (make sure you’re following us to stay updated). We invite each of you to share your stats, ask questions and help push us through to the finish line.
Not sure if you can post everyday? All is not lost, just post more than you are now. The point is to start…and do it regularly.
Are you up to the challenge?
Sorry, the form is closed.
by Joseph Graves | Dec 17, 2013 | Technology, Workshed News
An out of date version of WordPress is one of the primary ways malicious hackers gain access to websites. Updating your site to the latest release is essential, but depending on how your website was built, upgrading to a newer version can come with it’s own set of risks.
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by Joseph Graves | Dec 13, 2013 | Articles, Marketing, Technology
Custom WordPress Themes Are a Bad Idea…
Just because you can do something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. There are many things in life we can make from scratch, but don’t simply because it’s not necessary or practical. For example, if I wanted to bake a loaf of bread, I could plant wheat, harvest it a few months later, thresh it, mill it, and mix it with the other ingredients I had to grow. Or, I could just buy freshly milled flour and other quality ingredients from a reputable company and get 99% of the benefit for a fraction of the cost. The same is true of building websites. Sure, we could code every line of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and php from scratch, but do we really need to? At Workshed, we think not.
It’s been our experience that custom themes for WordPress are expensive…at best. Most of the time they end up being problematic maintenance nightmares, wasting time and money for the duration of their existence. This is not to say that websites should be templates or even that customization isn’t worthwhile, just that it’s what and where you spend your time customizing that matters most.
We prefer to start with a premium framework like Genesis or Thesis and customize from there. Doing this allows us to focus our customization time on things like SEO, content, images and graphics (we are not fans of stock photos), as well as layout and functionality. All of the security, maintenance, and updating is expertly handled by the teams of developers at the theme framework companies; software engineers that focus exclusively on writing excellent code. This delegation of the core functionality means we can focus on the stuff that leads to more sales; things like creating content that makes your phone ring with new orders.
A full custom, built from scratch website is fine too, just know it’ll come with a few idiosyncrasies…kind of like owning a vintage British sportscar.
Contact us if you want to discuss how we use websites, social media, and our business perspective to grow your business.
Contact Us
![Custom WordPress Themes Are a Bad Idea]()
by Joseph Graves | Dec 12, 2013 | Articles, Marketing
Is your marketing working? Is it bringing in the right customers and helping you achieve your business goals?
If not, why?
From what we’ve seen, many small business people are too busy running their businesses to spend time defining their goals. They come to us and ask for a new a website and help with social media. Then hope this new website and some facebook posts will magically bring in more customers and all will be well.
We think there’s more to it than that.
Yes, we can build a great looking website. We can optimize it for search engines and help get your social media infrastructure in place. But none of it will matter much if it isn’t helping you achieve your real business goals.
This is where Workshed is a little different. We don’t just build websites for the sake of it. A website and social media strategy is an outcome of knowing where you want to go. Before we work with you, we get to know your business on a deep level. Marketing is about communication and we can’t effectively communicate your message to the customer you want without knowing who you are, who they are and where you want to go.
How do we define the goals?
First we ask lots of questions. We try not to take anything for granted. We help our clients develop tangible, quantifiable goals. Then we put it all down in writing along with a plan for achieving them. Once we’re in agreement on the plan and the goals, we’re ready to start creating.
Measure, report, adjust. Rinse and repeat.
With the infrastructure created it’s time to execute. Then we measure, report and adjust. We love data. Digital marketing is awesome because you get incredible real time information. This allows us to quickly assess the effectiveness of each component of our marketing and make necessary adjustments promptly.
By continually measuring, reporting and acting on the data you can hit your business goals.
Ready for your marketing to get together with your business goals?
Contact Us
