SEO - Not The Only Thing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always a big focus for a company's website. Everybody wants to be on the first page on Google but is it still the main thing? Absolutely not! Today, reviews are just as important as SEO.

"The customer experience is the next competitive battleground." - Jerry Gregoire

Think about this for a second; you do a search for "X" product and your company is shown first on Google but the company's reviews are mostly negative. Would you want to do business with a company with mostly negative reviews?
SEO alone is not enough to make a company's website stand out anymore - it also needs outstanding reviews.

The next time your web designer ask if you want to invest in SEO tell him "Of course!" but then go straight back to the meeting room to figure out to best serve your customers.

Social or Unsocial Media?

"Happiness is best predicted by the breath and depth of one's social connections." -Robert Putnam

Those who feel this isn't true probably don't have many close relationships. Social media doesn't bring people closer together, it drives them further apart.
Some people spend more time in-front of a screen than in-front of other people and, when they do get together, they spend their time texting other people instead of being attentive to the person next to them.

This is a problem since the only way to build anything great is with the help of a community and the only way to have a community is to have people around other people.

Lets meet old friends and not bring our screen devices with us.

Understanding Impulses help with Finances

“An impulse is a wish or urge, particularly a sudden one. It can be considered as a normal and fundamental part of human thought processes, but also one that can become problematic, as in a condition like obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
-Wikipedia.org

An impulse buy is brain washing ourselves into thinking that we need the item. It's to the point that we think it'll be the source of our ultimate happiness. We know we did an impulse buy when the feeling goes away as soon as we purchased the item.

Advertisements are designed to create such feelings in us, while it’s impossible to block all ads from entering our mind, we should minimize our exposure to them to better control our emotional impulses towards items we really don't need.

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Revision Wednesday
Blog post originally created on November 8, 2012 and can be found here.

In The Dark

"To become a leader worth following you must give time and attention to the inner man. To leave a Legacy that goes beyond accomplishment alone, a leader must devote himself to matters of the heart." -Andy Stanley

A leader is someone who leads by example but is your example worth following? Are you a the leader in your field but doing dishonest things when nobody is looking?

The name of those who had a weakness of the heart no longer only comes with their field of expertise. If we think about Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong - we all think about how great they were in their respective fields ... but also what happened to them at the height of their careers.

What you do in the shadows will eventually be brought to light. Let's be good people even when nobody's looking.

We're Getting Old!

"Wisdom is the one thing that makes growing old worth it."-Jiraiya

Age slows us down both mentally and physically but we learn to do things more effectively - requiring less energy in the process.

"In youth we learn; in age we understand." -Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

We seem to think that we've reached the height of our knowledge during our teen years only to realize again that we know next to nothing once we hit our mid twenties. Only then do we ever realize how smart our parents were and we should of listened to them more.