Entering your local grocery store you might not think about it. As you walk through the store, you are actually walking through a life sized and physical sales funnel. Here in Finland, the first thing in a store are usually the fruits and vegetables or the bakery. Fruits and veggies are colourful, fresh, juicy, inviting. The bakery hits you with a delicious scent. You didn't go to buy that...
Glitching
Since my older posts about getting rid of spam on Instagram and stopping and preventing your account from sending spam are still quite popular, I decided to revisit the subject. Instagram has changed quite a lot between then and now. This includes many changes to the algorithms, which dictate the reach of your images. With all these changes, spam hasn't gone away. As a matter of a fact, spam has...
Did you know that Google alone processes now over 40,000 search queries on average every second? That is over 3.5 billion searches per day. Your audience and clients and fans and customers are online, looking for entertainment, information, products and services. Having a strong and clear online presence is what you need to reach the right people. A defined online presence is imperative for...
One thing is clear. In the online time, being able to stand out, be heard, and influence is valuable. Way more valuable than many want to admit. Whatever you do, you are measured by your ability to influence. Influence is the capability to have an effect in the world, and make people hungry for what you say and do. Influencer marketing thrives. In it, the effort is focused on influential people,...
There's something alluring about new beginnings. A new year isn't really anything magical. Yet it feels like something new, something different. Better, even. Starting anew. Resolutions are made. More exercise. Eating healthier. The usual. I'm not into making resolutions, since they have a tendency to get derailed. By myself, or by the circumstances. Something comes up, and then I feel bad about...
You have set up an email list with that service everyone said would be great for you. You created perfect opt-in gifts. You built great looking forms, and alluring landing pages. You wrote a blog post to tell about your new opt-in and shared the living daylights out of it. Then, something awesome happened. People subscribed. Not just one person, not only two. But hundreds of people. However, you...
I have been mulling over leaving Twitter and Facebook, or at least using them much less. The thought on Facebook has been there for a while, because to the service is bringing people's awful sides out and the algorithms are making choices in my behalf. Over at Twitter the things have been getting worse and worse too. While bullies and white supremacists are reigning, the folks in charge of the...
Have you ever tried to follow step-by-step instructions to notice that the steps didn't produce the results you were promised? And when you asked about it, you were told that you just didn't want it enough, or didn't really take every step. It's you, not the instructions. That is quite enough to send to you self blaming and depression, thinking you just should quit right now. If this didn't work...
What if the problem isn't the one you think it is? These past days Twitter has been boiling. Twitter announced that they are testing double length, 280 character long Tweets. In their own words, it was to give us users more characters to express ourselves. The response has been less than enthusiastic. Many call Twitter out for not addressing real issues, like harassment and racism and bot trouble...
You may have noticed these orange buttons on my site, with text "Become a Patron". If you click the button, you are directed to a page where you can choose between something called rewards, and different tiers varying from $1 to $100 (or more) per month. What is this Patreon thing, then? Patron means many things, including a (repeat) client of a store or a hotel. It also means a person who,...
Email lists are the hottest hot in marketing these days. At least they are amongst online entrepreneurs, bloggers, coaches and such. It seems like a must to build an email list, in order to find leads, sell goods and build traffic. It's no wonder. With social media services having turned into megaphones for the loudest, and the constant mess of everyone fighting about something with each other,...
It's been almost twenty years since my last French lesson. I wasn't a very motivated student, for many reasons. I had personal issues that were gradually killing my enthusiasm in learning. And the standardised learning and testing felt unfair and stiff to me. I learn differently. Thus, through all these years, I was losing the little French I knew. In these years I have now and then tried to get...
"Twitter threads are like hard to read blog posts. I miss blogs." I know, they are hard to read. Annoying. I often skip them, because I use Tweetbot and it doesn't fare well with threads. It can render them completely unreadable, especially if there are any replies to the Tweets in the thread. I have a complicated relationship with Twitter threads. I share them, but mainly refrain from writing...
I'm starting a podcast. Yes, you read correctly. The writer girl is going to start talking. And yes, it's a work in progress. First of all, I'd like to have a good start. Make a solid first episode, with quality sound (not too quality, I'll come back to this in a moment), and have impactful cover art. This all doesn't happen in a day, at least not for me. And then I have stumbled upon the big...
Too often I see websites created just because. Just because everyone else has one. Just because someone said it's good for marketing. Just because. Those websites generally fail to generate traffic or conversions. This is because their existence doesn't give anything to the people using the web. There's no reason to visit and revisit the site, nor to click on any of the links within it. Here's...
Planning to have a run? It's raining, best to wait for a better weather. And then it's sunny, but too warm. Best to wait for a cooler weather. Then it's too cold and windy. Best to wait. Really, it's not about the weather as much it's about you not wanting to go for that run. It's okay, just be honest about it. I'm planning to have a run, but I really don't want to do it. It's the same with...
Sometime in early 2016 I found Teachable. I had been looking into online course creation, and learned this particular platform was quite popular. Teachable is a platform for creating and hosting e-courses. It is different from such services as Skillshare and Udemy in that you can create your own "school". This means your courses aren't sold by Teachable, and you have a lot of control over them....
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. It simply means indicating the search engines that the pages of your website are worth being shown in the result pages (SERP). In addition to optimising the pages of your website to appear in search results, there are also strategies and techniques that are used to improve the chance people will click the links and stay on the website after...
Your brand has a logo, a beautiful colour palette, fonts, photos, tagline, social media images, and then some. It is honed to perfection, all pieces in the place. Yet still, it's not quite standing out. Something is missing. You try to look into other brands, to find out what it is that yours is lacking. Is it the outpouring excitement of that artist and Internet entrepreneur? Is it the confident...
For a couple of weeks I had the mother of all the spring flus. In the beginning of it, my temp rose over 39°C/102°F and I'm still couching and sneezing. Obviously during this time I hadn't blogged, my Twitter account had been feeling lonely, things were quiet at my Pinterest, my Facebook page was a ghost town, the people in my Facebook group probably thought I've forgot them completely, and let's...
- 1 of 47
- Older →
Hei, I'm Mervi
Welcome to my blog
Do you love to create, but feel tangled up with the business, work, and marketing side of it all? You are in the right place. I help you to untangle everything online.
Follow this blog
Bloglovin' · Feedly · Feed
