Do you remember when you decided to start your own business? I do. Because I was f*cking scared. I quit a good job to do it – so good in fact that my dad thought I went *crazy* and pretty much didn’t talk to me for the rest of the year. But before I could prove him wrong with my results, I had the most overwhelming and stressful time of my life. So much to learn, so little time (I had only enough savings to survive a few months without work). I felt like I had to get a university degree (ekhm…*again*!) just to make my first dollars. For the first 6 weeks or so I was spending all my waking hours […]

“Organic reach is dead” said Mark Wright, CEO of Climb Online (and winner of ‘The Apprentice” show)  on the recent 10X Bootcamp in London  pointing at a graph showing the inverse correlation between organic reach and Facebook’s share price: Let’s face it, we saw it coming. Social media started off as a generous resource ‘connecting people’ and catered to user experience to attract as many users as possible – and to convince businesses that the are the most powerful marketing tool in the 21st century. Now that we can’t imagine our lives without Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, it’s high time for social media to cut organic reach, limit visibility and thus force entrepreneurs to buy paid advertising. We saw it […]

An old friend of mine (he’s a real history buff) asked me yesterday how I liked Angkor Wat. I didn’t know at that time it was a rhetorical question. – I didn’t. The most interesting thing to me was the monkeys. He proceeded to explain to me that I *must* appreciate the historical significance of these buildings and basically ‘you-must-like-it-or-you’re-an-uncivilised-barbarian-and-I’m-not-talking-to-you.‘. I kindly thanked him and moved on with my life instead of explaining myself. Ironically, I used to believe that as someone with a university degree you have the moral obligation to take interest in history, politics, literature and culture. I spent years beating my brain to memorize historical events and dates I had no interest in only to forget […]

A visitor to your homepage spends on average 8 seconds (!) to decide whether they want to stay on it or not. They want to find exactly what they are looking for – where and when they are looking for! Time and attention are priceless these days. Hence, how you arrange information on your homepage is of paramount importance to your website conversions. This post will help you create an effective (coaching – this post was written mainly for coaches, but you can extrapolate a lot from it for your industry I think -especially if you are in a service industry) homepage that sells – by giving the visitors exactly what they want, when they want it. It will walk […]

Would you like to know how to write engaging newsletters? So engaging that your readers can’t wait to get them?  That your open rates are sky-high, everybody is clicking on your links, and you have more and more subscribers and paying customers? Of course you would! Especially given that email marketing has a higher ROI – on average 122% – than every other digital marketing channel, according to a study conducted by eMarketer. Let’s break it down into steps to make it short, actionable and clear: 1. Know what your audience wants to read and what is their problem This should be clear to you after you have created your email marketing strategy  and done exercise 1 (p.5) from the […]