Mickey Mellen
As a marketing professional, you understand the immense value a marketing agency can bring to your company. However, convincing your boss to invest in one may require a well-structured approach.
Read MoreWhen building a marketing tech stack, which is essentially the list of tools you use for your marketing efforts, there are many things to consider. Your goals will significantly impact what your tech stack looks like, so having those goals sorted out first is essential. Once you’re solid there, you have two main paths to choose from: At first glance, it seems that option 2 is the way to go, but that’s often not the case. A single tool that does everything sounds great in theory, but those types of tools generally do each thing a little bit worse than the best-in-class for each individual need. There’s certainly an advantage to having everything in one place, but is it worth the trade-off? I know many people who do it both ways, so there’s no right answer here. What should be included? There are dozens of areas you can consider for […]
Read MoreWhen working on marketing for your technology business, there are a lot of things that you need to pay attention to. Ultimately, though, if you can keep these five ideas front and center, everything else should fall into place.
Read MoreWhen it comes to ranking well in search results, there are two very different areas where people tend to focus.
Read MoreThere are plenty of things that the first point could refer to. However, there’s one thing that rises above all of the others, and it’s far more common than I’d like to see.
Read MoreIn a digital world, keeping your files organized is becoming an increasingly important thing to do. At the same time, the number of files each of us has to manage is growing at a very fast pace, which makes it hard to keep up with. At the end of the day, there are two main things you want to do with your files: Keep them safe and keep them findable. When it comes to keeping your files safe, findable, and organized, there are a few things to keep in mind. Folders vs search While I grew up in the folder-style file structure world, that is beginning to fade away. A fascinating article from the Verge talks about how younger students don’t use (or even understand) the concept of files. This quote from the article really stood out to me: She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they […]
Read MoreBuilding a new website can be a long process, but the joy of launch date is hard to beat! Once the site is launched, though, what’s next? We like to say that “a website is never done“. The day it launches is amazing, but you should immediately be moving into maintenance and improvements. These are two separate things, but both are vitally important if you want to hit your goals. Maintenance “Maintenance” sounds like a boring word, and website maintenance is certainly boring—and that’s a good thing. Much like the sound techs at a concert, you only notice poor website maintenance when something goes wrong. Consistency and predictability are great things for both sound techs and website maintenance. So what’s involved in website maintenance? We detail it on our support services page, but it really boils down to a few key areas: Backups: If something goes wrong, backups are gold. […]
Read MoreAt GreenMellen, we’re big believers in the power of WordPress. I’ve personally been using it since 2004, and our agency has been using it exclusively for more than a decade now. But why? There are a lot of great content management systems out there, so what makes us stick with WordPress? There are four big reasons.
Read MoreAds about building websites make web development seem quick, which it can be. But creating an effective business website takes a longer process.
Read MoreI’m going to miss 2019. It’s hard to say what the “best” years are, but in terms of growing a business, this one was pretty darn good. I’ve been trying to figure out why it was good, and I’ve come up with seven reasons. 7. Uber This is relatively new for me, but I’ve started taking Uber to some of my off-site meetings, and it’s been shocking good. It’s not that I mind driving, or that the Uber drivers are all perfect, but having that few extra minutes to catch up with life is so wonderful. A great example of this was just a few weeks ago. I went to the Northeast Cobb Business Association luncheon, and I took an Uber back to the office. Along the way, I caught up with messages that I had missed in the past 90 minutes during the luncheon, sent out a few quick replies, […]
Read MoreToday marks GreenMellen’s 10th anniversary, which is amazing to me. It’s been an incredible ride, and I’m thrilled with how our company has grown over the years. The Beginning To start, though, it really goes back about 15 years. Back in 2004, I tried WordPress for the first time, and it’s become a more critical part of my life and business every year since then. In fact, it’s still the core technology that we use in our company today. Later that hear, I was hired on at Mt. Bethel UMC to be their web guy, and Ali was brought on as an intern a year later. In 2008, Ali left her job at the church to start her own design company (and her old site is still up!). I left in 2009 to focus on web development, and we quickly realized we’d need each other’s help to get things done. […]
Read MoreIf you’ve thoroughly researched search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll learn that getting other sites to link to yours is a critical piece to ranking well. Google’s original PageRank algorithm was all about understanding the link structure of the web, and it instantly made Google the best search engine in the world — and it wasn’t even close. While Google has now gone far beyond links, and they don’t matter as much as they used to, they’re still a significant part of their algorithm. As a general rule, the more reputable sites that link to you, the better off you’ll be. However, over the years, spammers have worked to game Google’s system, so you need to be careful about how you go about this. Gone are the days of just automatically submitting your site to 10,000 directories and calling it good, but if done carefully, link building can still be hugely […]
Read MoreOn July 24, 2018, the Chrome 68 update is due to be released, and any website that has not adopted HTTPS/SSL encryption (with the green padlock by their website address) will be marked as “not secure.” Over the last year, SSL is something we’ve talked about a lot at our Meetup, and now is the time you need to add this layer of protection to your website. Get the scoop about the Chrome 68 update, how it will impact your site if you’re not protected, and what you can do you incorporate SSL correctly. What is the Chrome 68 Update Google has been warning website owners for years to get SSL certificates for their sites, and this new Chrome release will clearly mark websites without them as “not secure.” Here’s an example of how unprotected sites will look in the address bar: Since Chrome is the most popular browser, it’s […]
Read MoreI first started dabbling in SEO for some personal projects back in 1999, and we’ve been soaking up knowledge and keeping up with Google’s changes ever since. The SEO category of this blog has hundreds of posts dating back as far as 2005, so this isn’t something new for us. To show you some of what we’ve done, here are some clients that have done very well over the past few years. A home builder in Atlanta An Atlanta-based home builder saw a huge rise in traffic after we launched their new website. Their organic traffic from Google for the three months prior to launch was 548 visits. In the three months after launch it rose to 3354 visits — a 600% increase! Results this dramatic are not common, but if things are done correctly you can see quite a rise. In this case, simply adding more keyword-rich content to […]
Read MoreWhile the native WordPress editor is pretty solid, and can be easily enhanced with tools such as Markdown, many people still prefer to write their posts in other software and then copy them over to WordPress. If you’re in that group and love Google Docs, you should be quite happy about a new Chrome extensions from Automattic (the parent company of WordPress). The new Chrome extension (found here) will connect your WordPress.com or Jetpack-enabled self-hosted site with Google Docs. You can write your post in Docs, then click and copy it over to your site as a draft. While ease of writing might be a great feature for some people, collaboration could be even bigger. WordPress can be a bit clunky when trying to share drafts, and Google Docs makes it much easier. Images One of the biggest problems with copying and pasting from other sources, such as Word, is […]
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