Embrace the August Lull

Vacations are great unless you’re working. And if you’re in business, the end of summer when all the ad agency folks and their clients are at the cottage can be a slow and worrisome time. But it needn’t be!

Hey you’re a copywriter. Right? You sell things. Well, when you’re not busy selling things for other people you need to get busy selling yourself.

• Tweak your website – Keyword analysis is FUN!
• Prospect for new clients. Go to the library reference section and look up all the new business that have registered and write a short sell-email
• Blog
• Look for new directories that will point to your site
• Drink beer on patios with other creatives and complain about how slow things are but also brainstorm around emerging trends
• Take care of cumbersome non-creative, housekeeping stuff like filing invoices and cleaning coffee rings off of your desk
• do things to make your partner and kids happy to make up for the time you won’t be spending with them when your clients get busy again

Embrace the ups of other people’s downtime. It is an advantage. Working for yourself can be a refreshing reminder of what a great thing you’ve got going. You’ll be in prime condition to respond when the phone starts ringing again in September.

Ignition!

Sitemaps, site maps and helping Google help you

It’s all about SEO right? Picking and generously distributing keywords throughout your site, using italics and bold wherever you can, naming files properly. The list goes on. But what about Site maps and sitemaps – and yes, they are different.

Both the one word and two word versions help bots navigate your site more easily and can help raise your ranking. Sitemap, with a capital “S” and spelled as one word, is an XML file that is placed in the root directory on your server. Don’t fuss like I did when I started out. Just go to www.xml-sitemaps.com and have it done for you. Then go to Google and submit your XML Sitemap for review.

A site map of the two word variety (only capitalize in titles and at the beginning of sentences) is the page you offer your visitors that provides a simple hierarchical breakdown and presentation of all the pages on your site.

Happy site mapping and Sitemapping.

Ignition!