By Jessica Albon
The fact that your approach is oriented towards developing a relationship with your readers as well as other people in your niche makes the effort of doing my own newsletter rewarding. When relationships are more important than receipts, the motivation is in the right place, and good things follow. Everything I’m learning from you has everything to do with that very principle. It feels so good to be working with someone (you!) that remembers that the “p” stands for “people” more than “profit.”
Karey Shane, Author
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By Jessica Albon
I’ve been working with Jessica for over two years. She has taken me from a text-based email newsletter to a custom-designed e-newsletter that generates real results for my business.
Recently she developed my new blog. In addition to the design (which is fantastic), she took care of all technical issues. I trust Jessica absolutely to give me top-notch marketing and technical advice — which I constantly put to good use. Plus, she’s fun and great a person to work with.
Dianna Huff, President
DH Communications, Inc.
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By Jessica Albon
Dianna Huff, a marketing communications copywriter, wanted to start a blog to build her reputation online and in the social networking arena. Since we’d designed her HTML email newsletter, she also asked us to create her blog. Using WordPress, we designed a blog template that both built her brand identity and also united her website and email newsletter designs.
We designed Dianna’s blog in 2006, and gave it a face lift in November of 2008 to reflect Dianna’s new website.
Here’s what Dianna had to say about working with us
I trust Jessica absolutely to give me top-notch marketing and technical advice — which I constantly put to good use. Plus, she’s fun and great a person to work with.
Read the rest of Dianna’s testimonial.
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By Jessica Albon
A local Realtor needed a website for properties she had listed in a specific community in North Topsail Beach (on Topsail Island, NC). We created an easily-updated website that she was able to add and subtract listings from as she gained and sold listings.
The Realtor was able to use the site to build a community among homeowners in the neighborhood and soon had six listings (out of 43 homes). The site was very popular with buyers, sellers, and other real estate agents and continued to be useful for owners seeking to rent their new homes as vacation properties.
This site was built in HTML and CSS and updated using the client’s choice of website editing software.
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By Jessica Albon
According to the E-Myth, there’s no such thing as too many systems. But, here’s the thing: creation requires chaos. When we strive to be too regimented, too systematized, too simplified, we give in to the illusion that any job can be done by any person and that skill, talent, and personality play no roll.
After all, can’t anyone put Tab A into Slot B?
This plowing under, recycling, recession we’re in has come about as proof. See, for too many years now, we’ve given in to doing things exactly as we’re told. We tore out our kitchen counters and replaced them with granite, because the home improvement shows told us to. We tore down our businesses and restructured them so that “the people didn’t matter.” We “managed *around* the people.”
People make mistakes.
We all know it’s the people who muck things up, right? So, if we circumvent the …
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By Jessica Albon
Changing email technology and pressure from competitors was the main problem that caused us to seek a new newsletter design. The old design was working, but it looked a trifle amateurish, some aspects of it were clumsy to use, and it was running into problems with spam filters etc. We found it very difficult to find someone locally (in South Australia) who specialised in email newsletter design, who understood the need for a ‘simple but effective’ look and who could also advise us about how to avoid triggering spam filters.
I found working with you surprisingly easy, given that we are based on the other side of the world. Jessica was very quick to understand what we wanted. She clearly understood the technology and its problems, and she explained all aspects very simply. I think the best thing for me was her quick grasp of the spam and …
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By Jessica Albon
Coming soon! A premium WordPress theme designed to meet the unique needs of studio artists, designers, illustrators, photographers, and anyone who needs an online portfolio. This theme features:
- Advanced portfolio setup that will automatically feature your work
- Key pages pre-programmed into template
- Social Bookmarking ready
Free Announcement List
To receive an email when the theme is released, just fill out this form:
P.S. Your email address is safe with us! You can unsubscribe at any time and we’ll never sell, swap, or give away your email address to anyone else.
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By Jessica Albon
Like the cobbler children who have no shoes, I realized that I had outgrown my brand. Here I am, being sought after as an expert in marketing and my number one piece of web real estate no longer reflected my business or who I have evolved into as a professional services provider.
In the old version, I was trying to be too many people at once, to appeal and speak to both the corporate buyer and small business owner at the same time – it simply wasn’t working. I needed to get out of my own head and put myself in the capable hands of someone who could tell me when I was off-base or who might (what a concept!) have a different idea about how to do things.
I knew it was an “all or nothing at all” undertaking, that I needed a consistent overall brand identity for these …
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By Jessica Albon
Last month, I won NaNoWriMo (participants write a 50,000 word novel in a month). While I’d decided to participate on the 1st of November, and even made a bit of progress throughout the month, on the final weekend, I was 20,000 words away from the 50,000 word goal.
So, I did what any sane, sensible person would do: decided I would write those final 20,000 words over the weekend. And then I did it.
Along the way, I learned a few lessons about writing faster, so read on to find out how you, too, can write 20,000 words in a weekend.
- Clip your nails. I’m a gal with strong, healthy natural nails. And I generally keep them a longish length. Not super long, or even long enough that they impede my regular daily typing tasks, but longer than short. What I discovered when I was keeping the focus on speed
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By Jessica Albon
You’ve heard the rumor: web users like ‘em bigger. I use a 22″ widescreen for design work. It’s pretty great. But, it’s also too much real estate for any one window so I usually use it as I would a dual monitor setup, which I’ve never been willing to make room on my desk for.
So, here’s that that means: I’ll give your site 800 pixels or so; if it doesn’t fit, I growl (and either close your site or work around it, depending on how important that site is to what I’m doing). The good news is that most sites fit within 800 pixels. The bad news is those same sites are seeing my stats in their visitor logs and thinking, “Hey, should we be designing wider?’
There are lots of good reasons *not* to design wider, and that’s only one of them. Some others are:
- Yes,
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
Think your article topic is a challenge? Try promising people inspiration and see just how quickly the writer’s block sets in. And that brings us to our first two tips:
1) Get really, really honest. Have you noticed lately how much people are swinging between “Things are great!!” and “Times are hard.” Sure, “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” (F. Scott Fitzgerald) BUT when it comes to creating content and staying inspired, you’ll find integrity of thought goes a long way to ensuring output.
So, start by focusing in on the core of what you want to communicate, and let yourself be as vulnerable as …
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
If you’re in an inspiration drought, there’s one obvious way out: Make it rain. But how do you make it rain? Especially when you want not H2O to fall from the sky but big drifts of lovely, ready-to-go articles and content?
If all you need is a bundle of enjoyable exercises for getting creative in your writing, you’re not in a drought, and you’ll find these tips to be way too much work. Instead, get a copy of my tiny guide and ignore these tips. But if you’re in a full-on, desperate drought, you’re going to have to buckle down and sweat a little. The tips that follow won’t be easy, if you do them right, but they will bring the rain when applied repeatedly.…
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
You’re as tired as I am of all this talk about the economy and what it means to small businesses, no doubt. And I bet you’ve rolled your eyes at that 60% of Americans think a depression is likely statistic that’s been bandied about (and more or less made up/misquoted).
But that doesn’t change this fact: you might be mired in your own inspiration drought. I was. And many of my clients are. So, know that if you’ve been feeling a lack of inspiration and enthusiasm in your business, know you’re not alone.
The economy is hugely different today than it was in 1929. And these days, inspiration matters far more than it did back then. Face it, when people worked in factories, they didn’t exactly have to …
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