Your Satisfaction May Be Guaranteed, But It’s Seldom A Priority [Part One Of Many]

September 24, 2011 Blog No Comments

by Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler “Your satisfaction guaranteed or your money back”. It’s a familiar marketing proclamation often made by product manufacturers and service providers who are confident that you will be satisfied enough not to return a product or demand a refund on a service. The “satisfaction guarantee” used to be a key differentiator, something companies were willing to promise would-be purchasers, perhaps, because they believed their products and services to be of superior quality, and therefore unlikely to be deemed unsatisfactory. But over the years, the money …

Dirty Little Secrets of the Book Publishing Industry…Or Why You Shouldn’t Invest In Book Publishers Who Waste Your Investment Dollars By Avoiding Change

September 22, 2011 Blog No Comments

by Scott Abel, Content Strategist, The Content Wrangler If you’re an investor, you should know this dirty little secret. Most book publishers are wasting your investment dollars. That’s right. They’re burning through your cash at record pace, in a desperate attempt to keep pace with changing user expectations they didn’t have the foresight to plan for. They are throwing your money at problems that can be solved by making some changes to the way publishing companies work, something many seem unwilling or unable to do. And, they’re happy you don’t …

The STC So-Cal Spotlight Awards: An Interview with Allyson Smith

September 16, 2011 Blog No Comments

In this brief interview with Allyson Smith, Senior Technical Writer at CareFusion in San Diego, we discuss the upcoming Spotlight Awards and why you might want to enter your work into the competition. TCW: Allyson, thanks for taking time out of your schedule to chat with me. You’re the Awards Manager of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Souther California Spotlight Awards competition. For our readers who aren’t familiar, what are the STC Spotlight Awards? AS: The Spotlight Awards competition is a regional competition within the STC that rewards outstanding …

The New Periodic Table: Getting Scientific About Search Engine Optimization Ranking Factors

September 12, 2011 Blog No Comments

The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors Search engine optimization — SEO — may seem like alchemy to the uninitiated. But there is a science to it. Search engines reward pages with the right combination of ranking factors, or “signals.” SEO is about ensuring your content generates the right type of signals. Our chart below summarizes the major factors to focus on for search engine ranking success. The Search Engine Land Guide To SEO explains factors in more depth, with tips and a tutorial on implementing them. Read on! Download the complete infographic …

Five Generations of Cybercrime: The Content Wrangler Interview with Cybercrime Expert Stu Sjouwerman

September 1, 2011 Blog No Comments

I’m a bit concerned about cybercrime. Actually, that’s not true. I’m very concerned about cybercrime. It seems it’s getting worse. And, no matter who I ask at my financial institutions, no one seems to have any concrete answers. In fact, they don’t really even seem to understand how online security actually works, let alone seem capable of explaining to me how we can protect ourselves. So I arranged an interview with Stu Sjouwerman (pronounced ‘shower-man’) to find out more about it. Stu recently wrote a book called Cyberheist: The Biggest …