Improving many small, controllable components of your business by just 1% can have dramatic effects for overall performance. Here are some ways to do that.

Relationships aren’t optional. They are a fast way to get to trust.

Partnerships increase potential by opening doors you can’t, and they amplify credibility instantly.

There’s a lot of hard work behind all these great movie titles. The names are rarely a flash of genius. They are typically the result of a structured creative process combined with marketing psychology.

That’s it. One goal. This is where many stall because they’re trying to look at everything, but this part can be very simple. Ask yourself why would you email people in the first place?

Organic Meta works best for building familiarity, trust, and brand credibility—not for driving immediate sales. It should support other marketing efforts through consistent, story-driven content that humanizes your business.

From site hosting to ad accounts to ecommerce systems we rely on a larger and larger list of digital properties that keep our businesses running.

The term “influencer marketing” can spread fear in the hearts of small business owners who just don’t know all of the details about cost effectively managing influencer marketing.

People don’t just buy what you sell, they buy why you do it. This can be an edge versus larger competitors as big brands often don’t communicate the personal side of the business because there isn’t one.

If you learn how to use AI properly it can provide some excellent ideas and fuel your creativity. But it won’t do the creative work for you.

The reason focusing on strategy and planning in the morning can be so important is, often if we don’t get to it in the morning it just never happens.

Email isn’t just a touchpoint, it’s your conversion engine. It builds credibility, demonstrates your value, and moves people from curious to client/customer.

Start with impact versus urgency. Ask will this impact revenue, customers or stability?

Testimonials can provide enhanced credibility so using them correctly can increase your customer base.

Communicating with your audience is easy. But connecting with your audience makes them feel like you are both part of an active community that shares the same ideas, passions and beliefs.

People won’t buy from your emails if they don’t get to your website. People won’t click on a link in your emails unless they open them, right?

Captions help people remember the video content. A recent estimate is captions increase recall by as much as 8%.

Social connections are more trusted than brands, period. People are more likely engage with content from friends than from company pages.

In the past year, 65% of searches didn’t result in a click and this number continues to climb.

Keeping a notebook of effective competitive marketing content and techniques can be very handy when it’s time to initiate something new in your organization.

Customizing ChatGPT with your data can be similar to onboarding new hires so they understand as much as possible about your business before they start solving problems.

This article looks at diving deeper and building your own language model agents to accomplish specific tasks.

Are you interested in trying out an AI tool to see what it can do for you? Here’s an easy read on getting started with Chat GPT.

So you’ve got a blog and people are reading it. Excellent. But now it’s time to generate some profit from your hard-earned efforts. What do you do to turn readers into customers?

You are fired up to get your blog off the ground. You have a few under our belt but you aren’t fully confident in your abilities to create customers from your efforts.

Literally the keystone to everything you do with your brand should be centered around how you are different and better.

This article is part two regarding working with partner companies to exponentially expand your social reach and effectiveness.

When you set challenging goals, you push yourself (and your team) to go beyond your normal way of operating which leads to greater performance.

The point is, if you put the same amount of effort into your emails as you do with your landing pages, good things can happen.

On their profile page it says: “Don’t Just Dip, Dive into a world of flavor with Fresh Cravings dips! Follow us for a healthy snacking experience like no other!”

Your prizes should be directly related to what you offer so you can effectively market to your entrants later!

When people participate in social media contests, on average, over 62% have been known to share the contest details with others.

This article is part two regarding working with partner companies to exponentially expand your social reach and effectiveness.

A great marketing strategy can make all the difference in success or failure for your organization. These topics can be daunting which is why this article is written with simplicity and ease of execution in mind.

Working with partner companies can seriously expand your social reach, growth and engagement.

With the release of Ken Burn’s Da Vinci documentary it made me think about how Leonardo Da Vinci would approach marketing. Here are my thoughts on the topic.

This is part two of how to create an effective content marketing plan to turn leads into prospects, then customers.

Creating a content marketing plan for lead generation can seem daunting and complicated, but with some basics and goals defined, it can be much less painful and of course be very rewarding.

Social listening provides a powerful tool to identify conversations, topics and trends that resonate (and don’t) with your target audiences.

What are your customers thinking? Combine this information with deep customer demographics and know you can deliver exactly what your customers want.

You can’t take likes and follows to the bank, so using strategies to bring your community closer can increase your bottom line.

Really knowing who your customers are is SO important but it’s also hard to find time to focus on this task. These tips should help.

Often ignored, checking in on your competitors is a sure-fire way to generate ideas that lead to more success for your organization.

Let’s put together an initial KPI plan to test working backwards from the sale and define what we need to measure.

In this article we’re going to discuss advertising KPIs and how to use them.

Comprehending digital marketing data (KPIs) can seem daunting and overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.

Don’t you wish you had a last chance mechanism to keep people engaged on your site or a way to grab their email address before they leave potentially forever? The good news is the ability to do this exists now. Here’s how it works.

Learn how to get your marketing emails into your customers’ inbox and out of the spam folder.

Since people first started selling stuff, the basic elements of the sales funnel have always been this: Awareness, Attention, Interest and Action. Sales Funnels are very simple and logical once you understand them and how to set one (or many) up.

We know that using email marketing is important. But how do get email subscribers? Read on for tried-and-true strategies to grow your email list.

Uncertain what’s going to happen with TikTok? Here at The Bureau of Small Projects we are too. Here are some methods to encourage your followers to connect in other ways in case TikTok does end up going away.

ALWAYS Start with a picture. There is a reason that you don’t see words hanging on people’s walls very often. It’s because we are hardwired to respond to visuals. People don’t like to read unless they are engaged. That’s why books have covers. The biggest mistake people make is to try and describe what they are saying with a picture. The job of the picture is to get people’s attention. if you have their attention they will read what you have to say.

There are two distinct strategies that consistently bring in leads, donations and sales. Most successful websites use a combination of these two strategies because nothing beats them for converting visitors into customers and once you learn to recognize them you will see these strategies everywhere!

When you are a small business owner, there are several ways to test whether your idea could work and be of interest to prospective customers. An effective way to see if there’s some traction for your idea is an approach popular with the tech-industry called an MVP. An MVP is a very simple, stripped-down version of a website with just enough features to satisfy early customers, test pricing or see if people even want your idea. The goal is to get valuable feedback before spending a ton of money on product development.

Real estate in high-traffic corridors is expensive for a reason. Businesses in those places rarely fail. It is the same with websites. Websites with high-volume traffic rarely fail. If you haven’t already, you should install google analytics on your website and see how many people are actually going there. People usually have an over-exaggerated idea of how many people visit their site and the actual numbers can be sobering. Fortunately there are many things you can do to improve your organic search results. Here are the first few steps.

Psychological pricing is a marketing strategy designed to coerce people to pay more for your products or services. We also use this model to increase donations for Non-Profits.

Since people first started selling stuff, the basic elements of the sales funnel have always been this: Awareness, Attention, Interest and Action. Sales Funnels are very simple and logical once you understand them and how to set one (or many) up.

There are many factors that contribute to a slow website. Some are technical, like hosting, the theme you use, the number of plugins you use. Some of these are choices, such as Image Size, Streaming Video, Ads and Social Feeds. Big images, Video, Ads and Social Feeds slow down a website but increase conversion.

Faster is always better, but before you make a decision, there is a balance to be had, and OFTEN companies choose conversion (selling products) over load speed.

API, B2B, CMS, CPC, CRM, CSS (and we are still only in the C’s). Good god our industry loves it’s acronyms. Sometimes, acronyms are useful, but usually, they are just plain annoying. But here are 3 VERY good ones. If you only have time to memorize a few, forget KPI’s and learn these 3, they will explode your business!!!!

The question people always ask us is: “What is the difference between a custom HTML 5 WordPress theme and customizing a commercial WordPress theme?” There are advantages and disadvantages with both of course. People usually choose a Commercial theme because it’s much less expensive and easier to maintain. But even if you have the resources, custom is not always better. Read below to see if a custom HTML 5 WordPress theme is right for you.

The purpose of the logo is not to explain what you do. It’s to help people remember you and define the quality of your organization. The most beautiful logo in the world will not increase sales at all but an ugly one can demolish your brand and lower your prices.

A website is the first point of contact people will have with most organizations and making your website spectacular may be the best money you ever spend. Here is a guide to help you  understanding why a great website costs money and where you can cut corners if resources are tight.

Our perception is formed through two basic psychological approaches. Once you understand how they work, you can influence what people do without them even realizing it. This is exactly how big brands use your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.

One of the things we are VERY good at is reducing bounce rate. This means that we create sites that engage visitors and keeps them on your website for a long time. One of the principal ways do this is to use big, highly engaging imagery. One thing we know after more than 20 years in this business is that people make a decision weather they stay or leave your site in seconds, even milliseconds. This is far too little time to read text and understand what it is saying. So, what this means is that it is the imagery that makes the difference.

People often ask us what is the difference between the million dollar websites we would build for big brands and the ones built by the low-price website designers you see all over the web.
One factor is that big brands hire teams of psychologists to figure out how to get people to buy. You may not have those resources, but there are a bunch of tricks you can do on your own.

It’s all about cognitive bias. A cognitive bias refers to the systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical or controlled fashion.

Architecting a website is about using internal links is to direct users to other content within your website. However, besides directing users to other content you can also use internal links to flow the link power to your whole site, such that articles that have little to no links also rank on Google. To do this, think of each section of your website as a self contained micro-site – it’s own closed ecosystem focused on a certain subject of expertise. Then make sure every page links to the page below it in each micro-site. Lastly link them all back to the main page of the micro-site.

Creating a great website is the single most important thing you can do for your Business. No one will come to your office or storefront any more without looking at your website first – except for maybe a very few businesses that rely solely on foot traffic. And even then, a great website with a strong web presence will perhaps double your revenue.

Driving traffic is the name of the game on the web. What good is a gorgeous website if no one visits it? Ironically many of our clients seem to think that once they make their site live that millions of people will know about it, then are stunned when they turn on analytics and see that only their mom and their brother are going to it.

The biggest SEO issue that most websites face is lack of quality content. Content is important because it is the way that Google evaluates what your website is about and how good it is. Google is a great reader and it reads, understands and archives the content of each website it crawls. If your content is weak, Google lowers the rank of your website, sometimes ignoring it all together. Google needs to provide great websites for Google users to stay in business and Google sees little value in a website that offers poor content.

Even small businesses have to look good. Your website will be the very first point of contact for your customers, so even if your budget is tight, your website has to be absolutely perfect because you never get a second chance to make a first impression. You may have a great looking site, but is it working properly? A broken website not only will be penalized in search engine results, but it will provide a frustrating experience for your customers and the attrition rate will soar. Use this checklist to see what needs fixing in order to turbocharge your website!

Technology is constantly evolving. This means your new website WILL become outdated. Like a brand new car, if not properly maintained, it WILL break. A website is not to be put up and forgotten about. Studies have shown that keeping your websites content up to date and fresh can boost sales, reduce bounce rates and greatly reduce the risk of security issues. So here are some common problems and some tips to keep your website healthy and running in tip-top condition for a long, long time.

YouTube is the second largest search engine. To ignore YouTube is to ignore potential customers. Follow this checklist to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website.