Get Found, Get Featured: Turning Your Site into a 24/7 Publicist

Many don’t realize it, but a website is an essential tool for media. The majority of journalists list the company website as their first stop when researching a story. A media-friendly website could be the deciding factor between you or a competitor being featured on that podcast you’ve been eyeing.

There’s an added bonus to the web not everyone enjoys: making your website media-friendly. Remember, advertising is what you pay for, public relations is what you pray for, unless your Apple.

A media-friendly website and online presence could be the deciding factor on whether you are chosen as an expert for a story or included in a piece of press. For most entrepreneurs and small businesses, there are several basic rules everyone should obey, in one form or another, to ensure your website boosts instead of sabotages your value to the media. This means abilities to get reviewed, quoted or, if you’re shooting for stars in the outer galaxy, a feature on you alone. In this session, we will take a deep dive on how to optimize your website for media and turn a site into a 24/7 publicist.

Reviews and Testimonials: How to Get & Use Them

You know what’s more powerful than talking about yourself? Letting your happy customers talk for you. In the age of online reviews, few things are more persuasive to a buyer than dozens of positive testimonials online. In this talk, we’ll discuss which review sites to focus on, how to ask your customers without sounding pushy, and how to use the reviews you get to market your business.

Creating your brand and the killer onliness statement

What makes you the only?? Do you know? If you asked 10 people in your company what they do and who they work for would they have 10 different answers? Brian Town, CEO of Michigan Creative will talk about how they are helping companies across the midwest find their brand and be the ONLY!

In this session you will learn how to create an onliness statement, find your brand archetype, and be able to have brand unity across your company. Brian’s company has created brands for companies across the midwest and help them define their only. WE want everyone who attends to leave with a great idea of what makes them the only. We will also discuss and show why everyone needs a brand anthem video.

SEO in 2019

Everyone hears they should be doing SEO, but what does that really mean? I will cover the core basics of SEO and provide insights and strategies that are actionable for attendee’s that day.

The presentation will include: – SEO as A.R.T. – Topics vs. Keywords – Title, Meta, and Content Optimization – Importance of backlinks and citations – Intro to technical considerations

Joyride: A Radical Departure from Traditional Sales that Lowers Risk, Wins More Clients, Creates Value, and Drives Growth

When you’re pitching a potential client a project, you’re asking them to risk their time and money.

By utilizing the Joyride model, you’ll not only lower risk and gain the trust of your potential clients. You’ll also win more projects not for being the cheapest, but because you’re the best option.

What’s harder than asking somebody who’s never paid you to pay you $1?

While most creatives are willing to gamble on the traditional sales approach of wasting countless hours in writing and revising proposals, Hien Lam and Matt Hansen, co-founder of Huck Finch, believes there’s a better way. They call their concept “joyrides,” which involves short-term, lower-cost workshop experiments with clients that validate ideas before anyone writes a line of code or crafts a page of marketing material. Joyrides are a way to charge for a small, fixed-price engagement that delivers a huge amount of value to a client while preparing them to invest in a much larger engagement.

In this talk, they’ll share how anyone, regardless of industry, can put this concept to use to de-risk projects, validate customer vision, and build trust with clients.

Do you create custom proposals for your clients? Do you have to continuously slash the price of your creative work just so a potential client will say yes?

If so, then let’s take a joyride together!

Using a content creation checklist to manage your blogging editorial calendar

I started a simple blogging project about 18 months ago as a way to recover from near-burnout as a graphic designer at a day job and as a freelancer. I wanted a fun project that would let me play and be creative. But of course, I’m a designer who specializes in brand management, so this little play-project turned into an experiment in building a brand to establishing myself as an authority in the niche I chose to play in (stationery supplies, art journaling, paper, and pens).

Imagine my surprise when this little play project took off and I suddenly had an audience clamoring for more and more content from me. I had to figure out a way to publish these in-depth, long-form articles on the website while nurturing this growing community who was hungry for more content from me. I also had to figure out how to squeeze in content creation, website design, and learning about SEO and marketing while still holding down a day job that keeps me away from home for 12 hours a day.

That’s where my organizing and time management skills came in. I devised a way to chip away at content creation using a detailed checklist and editorial calendar. As a designer and writer, I have no desire to learn how to code – but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a beautiful, functional, and effective WordPress blog.

I’m not a professional blogger, but my blog is making me some extra money and I’m having fun learning new ways to use content to make more money.

I’m not a project manager, but I’ve had to learn how to manage this community of like-minded “nerds” and keep content creation on track and publish regular articles and about seven million other things all at once.

I’m not a marketing guru, but I had to learn how to leverage SEO and grassroots marketing tactics to spread the word and grow a following.

I’m not a coder or WordPress developer, but I sure can use the features of a theme to make it do what I need it to do without having to touch a single line of code.

I’m just a girl with a blog who had figured things out along the way and I wonder if there are others who might learn a thing or two from my methods.

Web Accessibility: A Visual Case Study

Web Accessibility. You hear everyone talking about it. You know you need to be working on this. Maybe you don’t know where to start? See what the Detroit Zoo has done to make their website more accessible. This talk will be very visual and feature before and after screenshots.

  1. We will do a very quick overview of what web accessibility is.
  2. Then we will go right into how the Detroit Zoo did audits and testing, developed a plan of action, and then overhauled their website to be more accessible. There will be lots of before and after visuals to help you imagine and understand how this actually looks on your websites.
  3. We will also talk about ongoing challenges and maintenance.
  4. Last, we will share a few helpful links and resources.

Search Rediscovered: Adapting to the New World of Structured Data and Schema

In 2019 we don’t just compete with our peers in search. The knowledge Graph has arrived, and it is dominated by schema and structured data. Google is now a portal for search and our direct competition online.

Google has slowly migrated away from traditional search and pushed further into a world that is controlled by artificial intelligence and structured data. Few marketers have acknowledged this shift and adapted to Google’s usage of advanced SEO techniques.

While many marketers are starting to think about popular topics such as AI and voice search, they are missing the underlying code base that will help prepare them for the new world of digital marketing and search.

The search results page is evolving, and it is shifting even faster for certain types of queries. Will you be prepared?

Learning Objectives:

  • Learn the basic elements of schema and how Google uses structured data to better understand your website and how it relates to a user’s search queries.
  • Learn what exactly schema is available for the healthcare industry and how this applies to your website content.
  • Learn the action steps necessary to prepare your organization for schema identification, implementation, and validation.

Using Podcasts to Grow Your Business and Increase Your Bottom-line

Podcasting is a growing medium and a perfect means to build a following around your service, product, or idea. In this session, you will learn how to use a branded podcast to build authority in an industry, learn more about your target audience, network with the right people, and make more sales.

Podcasting is a growing medium and a perfect means to build a following around your service, product, or idea. In this session, you will learn how to use a branded podcast to build authority in an industry, learn more about your target audience, network with the right people, and make more sales.