Fighting Fires and Identifying the Arsonists
Continued thoughts and prayers for families and friends who have been getting affected by this past week’s massive winter storm fronts that saw in some places once-in-hundred-years low temperatures and snowfalls.
So there is no confusion...
This is the time to ensure safety and returns to normalcy for those affected by this event! If you or your family are still having issues, know that you can reach out via email (david-at-sirusdigital.com), phone/TM, or direct message on our social platform contacts and I will do what I can to help!
Along that vein, this is NOT the time to be pre-assessing blame upon political ideas or opinions that you disliked before this started.
I watched with frustration as talking heads stepped to their microphones and social media platforms to point fingers of blame while fellow Americans were without heat, water, electricity, or other basic needs.
How about we make sure electrical service is repaired before debating wind farms, solar panels, and power grids? How about we make sure homes are heated before entertaining more debates about fossil fuels (that will convince no one)? How about we ensure that everyone has water before arguing about which President from Washington, DC (whether the one who was there or the one who just got there) is to blame for it?
What can you do?
Instead of descending into the upcoming games of blame, here’s my recommendation for some steps that you can take for you and your family:
- Have a few days of water and shelf-stable food available for everyone in your house. (Note: Since these types of events can lead to families & groups congregating, it is good to have a little extra!)
- Have some alternate sources for heating, lighting, and cooking in the event that your primary sources are temporarily unavailable. Propane grills, multi-fuel cookstoves/lanterns, and wood for fireplaces can make a big difference in extreme circumstances.
- Talk with your doctor to get emergency stashes of any medications that you might need. (Note: Regularly rotate these emergency supplies to ensure that they are current and effective when you might happen to need them!)
- Put some emergency cash in leak-resistant bags and freeze them in your freezer. Having them frozen is an effective way to ensure that you don’t wastefully spend the “available” money lying around, but you can easily thaw it when a true emergency situation arises.
In addition to these four, there are other basic skills like fire-building, first aid, firearm safety, etc. that will go a long way to making you among the most-prepared for emergency situations. While the odds of a wildly-dystopian future are slim, recent events highlight that temporary service interruptions and periods of challenge are to be expected.
As the Boy Scouts say: “Be Prepared”
For those checking out the book reviews, I finished The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. My post of notes from the book is complete. You can check it out on my blog at this link.
If you would like to read along, I will be starting Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi soon.
Note: Book links are Amazon affiliate links.
I heard this quote on a videocast with Joel Marion participating. It really stuck with me in its simplicity and accuracy.
How many times do our businesses guess or imagine what a customer might want (and be willing to purchase)? We have all participated in the sales or marketing strategy calls where leaders were trying to “figure out” what they needed to sell or how much they should charge for it.
If you have an audience (whatever the size), ask them!
If you have customers (whatever their demographics and buying characteristics), interview them!
Imagine how much more effective our plans would be if we developed them based on what ten customers had told us. Imagine how many more customers we might have if we started basing offers on what twenty-five prospects had expressed interest in buying!
Data and direct answers beat our opinions and presumptions most every time! The alternative is a business based on luck!
Mortgage Originating – Marketing Planner for 2021
If you are planning marketing strategy and budgets for 2021, feel free to download and use this set of worksheets. The linked blog post explains how to use them for yearly/monthly estimating providing metrics to measure your progress.
Note: If there are additional worksheets or tools that you need, let me know and I’ll look to adding them.
Other Links
18 SEO Issues that can lead to search ranking & traffic loss
Kudos to the folks at Search Engine Journal for a well-rounded piece providing insights into how to keep your site indexing well & generating traffic consistently. Overall, their suggestions fall into three general areas:
- Your content (Are you continually adding to it as well as updating what is there? Both are important!)
- Links to your site (Are the sites referring to you consistently ranking and generating traffic? If they lose, you can lose!)
- Technical site issues (Is your site itself having issues? The stability of your hub is important just as is the content you put on it!)
It is a good idea to track rankings and traffic for your site on at least a monthly basis. Likewise, I recommend doing a deeper check-up on your content, your links (to & from), and your site’s technical health on a least a quarterly basis.
If you need help setting up and executing a monthly/quarterly review process, shoot me an email and we will schedule a time to chat. Let’s make sure that you get the best returns for the time and money you invest!
Here are a couple of additional SEO-related links:
Total Number of Backlinks do not matter (Google’s John Mueller)
More search engine & traffic hints
Google may rank Public Relations posts differently
How to scale your business
Ryan Deiss of DigitalMarketer.com recently started a new company Scalable.co focused on helping businesses scale & grow. He shares some fundamental ideas in this post, but I’d recommend subscribing to their weekly newsletter as it provides solid hints & techniques to use.
WordPress Plug-in Hack (Site owner: WARNING!)
SirusDigital.com doesn’t use the Ninja Forms plugin, but if you use it on your site, be sure to update your site and plugins immediately! Based on the shared write-up, this vulnerability can allow some nasty site takeovers that would be a mess to clean up. Since the plugin creator has released patches (on Jan 25th and Feb 8th), you want to make sure that your site is up-to-date and protected.
If you’ve got a bigger mess to fix or just need some help with a site maintenance program, let us know.
