Archive for July, 2010
Walking the Talk Means Knowing How to Walk First
The kinds of questions I get when I do marketing seminars, or webinars about private duty are so specific to the entrails of running a private duty business that it is hard for me to understand how someone who has not actually done that can answer the in-depth level of response that my viewers/attendees expect. As a consultant, myself, to industries in which I have not had a business, I know that I do bring something to the table, but it is not that deep understanding that one only gets from doing something oneself.
The difference between experiential knowledge and knowledge obtained by research, consulting or learning from others is simply different. Thinking of an analogy, it seems that you can learn how to climb, what supplies to take with you, what to do in case of an emergency, but until you have donned the equipment, faced the elements, and actually climbed a mountain, you really cannot empathize with the hardships you face, the meaning of split second decisions in an emergency, the responsibility and the feel of the weight of the responsibility that comes from having safety over the lives of others.
Translated into running a home care business, it seems that starting, growing, understanding hardships, facing challenges and the problem solving that evolves comes out of that experience allows a person to walk that talk better than not having experienced it. It is facing a difficulty and working through it that gives a greater depth of ability to understand issues.
Our Private Duty Business Manual and all the forms one could ever want to use are available for sale on our Home Care Agency Marketplace, www.markethomecare.com. All of these processes and forms come as a result of years of experience actually starting and growing a business, and running it profitably along the way. Many of the questions I get on the private duty marketing webinars are answered in our marketing module, and all the information in all of our forms and manuals has been personally vetted, if not written, by me. So, why not use a proven tool to help growth, and one that comes from experience, having walked that talk for over 17 years and having talked that talk for 13 more.
The Cobbler’s Children Have Shoes!
Well it has been a long time in coming, but corecubed has a newly redesigned website. Done in ExpressionEngine it allows us a great showcase of some of our client work, and also I now have the ability to edit internally, so I am not at the mercy of my wonderful designers, rather in control!
Some benefits to using a content management system (CMS):
1. Updating. It is really easy to update a website without needing to know programming code or be skilled at web design.
2. Cost savings. It is much quicker to add pages, post articles, and link to files than it would be with the old standard HTML designed website, and you don’t have to pay another skilled person to do it.
3. Scalability. With a CMS site, planned and designed for growth, expanding and growing is easy to do with a great system already in place. ExpresssionEngine and WordPress allow for easy expansion without starting over from scratch.
4. Community & Connectivity. When updated often and set up to integrate with social media outlets, a CMS often has the ability to easily make connections with other sites and to bring more visitors to yours.
However, let me emphasize that there are other reasons that make a CMS site beneficial to the business, but those relate to the skill set of the designers and the people planning the site (which we have in depth here at corecubed):
1. Clean code. What that means to you is that the search engines like it and it makes the site ranking better if the parsing is easy.
2. Flexibility. We can easily change out showcased items on the home page, what is featured on the inside, and where photos and text are located.
3. Attractiveness. Well this is not really the CMS, this is our designers! They do know their stuff and continue to deliver top quality and incredibly attractive design.
Note that the clean code and attractiveness come from the skill of the person setting up the CMS. Don’t be misled thinking you can slap up a CMS site and have clean, SEO-friendly code out of the box. It is as easy to build an awful CMS site as it is an awful HTML site! “Well. Maybe even easier…….” says Will Chatham, Web Manager at corecubed.
Join us with a new website or a redesigned website if your business is sluggish, or if you have new products or a new story to tell. We specialize in content-driven websites and utilize ExpressionEngine and WordPress on a regular basis. Our web design team is deep and rich, and we use these tools to provide ourselves and our clients with powerful content management that doesn’t sacrifice SEO, clean code, or beautiful custom design.
Sometimes Easy is the Key to Success
Since 2006 we have been collecting products that help home care agencies grow and posting them to one of our internal sites, www.markethomecare.com for sale. Recently we launched the site in a new shopping cart format, and it is along the lines of the websites we have been developing recently. Content management is really the future of how anyone who wants to do great business on the internet is doing it. Simply stated it allows anyone, whether computer/tech savvy or not to edit, post, upload and control the content of the site.
We have recently completed redesigns of several home care agency sites in ExpressionEngine, a content management system that allows for incredibly intense and powerful design with that added power of editing capability for the owner. A blog is built into the software, and the code is clean so the search engines love it. A picture is worth a thousand, so take a glance at Live Free Home Health and also Responsive Home Health. I think you will be impressed with the design, the information, the ease of navigation. And, just imagine if you had the power to edit as well! (more…)
Flash in the Pan
Well it IS the 5th of July and the celebration is over for another year. Watching all those celebrants, the fireworks, and the enthusiasm made me think of marketing a business, and the difference between a hard launch of a product (like the 4th of July, don’t you wish?) and just getting the word out regularly about what you offer. Less flash, but definitely worth the effort.
Since we have loads of products and services that directly help those in the home care, home health care and hospice industries, you should know that we just upgraded our marketing site www.markethomecare.com so it is now easier to use, and better meets safety and compliance standards. Take a look see and let us know what you find there. We add in new products regularly, and the prices are right for those watching their budgets. And, in case you are not finished celebrating and want to see the largest fireworks display in North America, I am including a video from Thunder Over Louisville. Definitely NOT a flash in the pan, but the real fireworks deal.
