I have discussed Facebook with many of my friends and work colleagues and quite of few of them have told me “Oh, I hate Facebook!” (to be clear, I don’t!) However, they still use the platform for various reasons, including because all of their friends and family are on it (and not on Google+), or for business and marketing purposes. So, for all of you who don’t like Facebook and/or want to stay in touch with family and family only, here’s JustFamily – a new social network just for family.

You probably ask yourself “Why should I join yet another social media site?” Here’s why according to the founders of JustFamily:

"There are lots of ways to share “what’s happening now” with friends and the world. But family is different. Family is the only social group that cares about the past, the present, and the future. We’re building JustFamily so families can share life together and stay close in a private place, away from work and friends.”

Well, that sounds reasonable to me. Therefore, I decided to join the network and now I want to show you what it looks like and some of its features. The site is very clean and easy to navigate – I assume because it’s supposed to be used by the elderly people of the family as well.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is still a new concept for me and I admit I am a beginner. This is why when I came across the infographic below, I decided to share it because I am certain there are many people out there with limited (or zero) knowledge of SEO who might find the following information useful.

But first, what is SEO?

According to Wikipedia it is:

“...the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural," or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic"), search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. ”

“As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.”

(Yes, it does sound confusing and complicated...)

What are the benefits of SEO?

A well implemented SEO strategy could help your website rank higher in search engine results (for example in Google) and so would make your business/services/products more visible and easier to find in the online space. This in turn could improve brand awareness, generate traffic, increase sales, improve reputation etc. by boosting the number of people who know about you.

The infographic below breaks down the key components of Search Engine Optimisation helping you gain a better understanding of the concept and giving you some ideas how to implement it.  

Back to the subject of good writing, here’s the second part of my favourite quotes from each chapter of Zinsser's “On Writing Well” (check out part 1 here). One of the best advice the author gave encouraged me to keep on writing and helped me realise that I am making progress of becoming better at it: “... writing isn’t a skill that some people are born with and others aren’t, like a gift for art or music. Writing is talking to someone else on paper. Anybody who can think clearly can write clearly, about any subject at all.”

Chapter 13: Writing about Places: The Travel Article

“This is the essence of good writing about other countries. Distill the important from the immaterial... Beware of waxing. If you’re writing about places that are sacred or meaningful, leave the waxing to someone else.” 

I often come across brilliantly creative ideas and today I decided to share with you another great campaign that managed to change people’s behavior in a fun, new and unexpected way.

The Fun Theory, an initiative of Volkswagen, performed an impressive experiment to find out if people would choose the stairs over the escalator if there were a fun way of doing so. They succeeded. And they made people laugh.

What’s astonishing is that even after 3 years people are still talking about the campaign (I saw it in a tweet last week) and are commenting daily on YouTube, where it has ca. 18 million views. This only proves what an impact it has.

Enjoy the video! 

I finished reading one of the books from  my summer reading list and I thought I'd share with you the quotes that impressed or impacted me the most. I am talking about William Zinsser's classic guide to nonfiction writing "On writing well" - an absolute bestseller. The book is easy to understand, its content flows and the author gives brilliant advice. As Zinsser puts it, this is a 'craft book' and I can only recommend it to anyone who wants to improve his or her writing. 

Below you'll find the notes I made for the first 12 chapters while I was reading book. The quotes I wrote down for chapters 13-24 I'll share with you in another post soon :)  

Chapter 1: The Transaction

“Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.”