by Brian | Jul 5, 2018 | Building a Business, Content Marketing, Marketing
It’s a harsh truth that nobody wants to hear, but it’s true, nobody cares that you’re a vegan. Nobody wants to listen to you drone on about the fact that you don’t eat anything with a face, or that animals are your friends and you don’t eat friends.
I totally understand, I eat two vegetarian meals a day right now, and I plan out a vegetarian dinner once a week. I don’t do it because of ethical reasons, I find that a mostly plant based diet makes me feel better. I’ve tried to convince my parents that they need to adopt a similar diet, but they’re not really interested. Now with that said, I honestly believe chickens wouldn’t exist if they didn’t provide us eggs…but I also don’t like factory farming conditions. However, I understand that without modern advances in agriculture, we wouldn’t be able to support our massively ballooning population.
WAIT!!!
Be honest. You totally scanned over that last paragraph didn’t you?
The reason you scanned over it is simple, you really don’t care WHY I choose to eat the way I choose to eat. I either had you, or lost you at the word “vegetarian”.
It’s the exact same with your business.
- Nobody cares WHY you choose to sell sprockets*.
- Nobody cares about the history of your sprocket sales.
- Nobody cares what the ethical reasons for your sprocket manufacturing process is.
- They want to know that your sprockets will solve a problem they have.
- They want to know what pain points your sprockets fix in their business.
- People care how your sprockets will make their lives better.
*NOTE: I don’t care if you sell artisanal platypus abodes, or high end consulting services, for the sake of this post, we’re calling all of it sprockets…WHAT you sell doesn’t matter. HOW you sell it is what matters. (more…)
by Craig | May 31, 2018 | Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Marketing in London, Ontario
With some services you can easily see they’ve done a poor job for you, if your car starts making a clunking sound after visiting the mechanic, you’ve probably got a bad mechanic. If your haircut looks horrible, you probably have a bad hairdresser. If you get the wrong leg amputated, you probably have a bad doctor.
Digital marketing can be a little more difficult to come to that conclusion.
How can business owners avoid being preyed upon by unethical digital marketing agencies?
The following are sure-fire things to watch out for when working with your digital agency, or to keep an eye out for when trying to procure services from one. (more…)
by Brian | Apr 18, 2018 | Building a Business, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Marketing
Our Manage Comics blog was recently suspended by Medium for no justifiable reason. To date the only explanation we have been given is that we were accidentally caught in their spam filter.
This caused a huge impact on our business, saw our page rankings plummet, created dozens of orphaned links from sites that had referenced us, and left us scrambling to solve a problem that our vendor has not been able to give us a reasonable explanation behind.
Because of the negative effects on our business, and Medium’s lack of a reasonable explanation for what happened, we have removed all content from Medium, and we are firmly advising our clients against using Medium as a blogging platform. (more…)
by Craig | Mar 28, 2018 | Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Internet Business, Marketing
“Mobile-friendly” now officially reads as Mobile-first with the news that Google is officially rolling out its plan to use the mobile version of your sites content to index its pages. Mobile versions will also be used to understand its structured data and to show snippets from the site in the Google search results.
Mobile-first indexing means Google will use the mobile version of a web page “for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for,” the company writes in a blog post.
(more…)
by Craig | Feb 14, 2018 | Content Marketing, Marketing
Want to know a secret? despite what you’ve heard, you don’t need to hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company, you don’t need a marketing agency to come in and do your SEO. What you need is content that outlines the pain points your prospects are having, and details the benefits of your solution.
At NorthIQ, we like to think of ourselves as a little bit like Penn and Teller, we lift the veil of secrecy on the world of marketing and tell you things we’re not supposed to tell you. This makes us very different than our competition, and frankly makes some of them hate us.
The product most SEO companies deliver is snake oil, it will cost you a lot of money, doesn’t do much good, and in fact in some cases will actively harm your business. In the best case scenario, you will waste time and money building something tuned for algorithms that change all the time.
This isn’t the first time we’ve written about SEO, last year we wrote that “SEO is a Big Pile of Crap!“, guess what? It still is. (more…)
