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Torque
Since
July 22, 2013

Chris Lema

Helping Your Customers Find Success

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Featured

Published

January 6, 2014

1 Comment

He was like every other startup CEO that you’ve ever met. Tons of ideas. All of which sound appealing. He was a vision caster. He was energetic. It was virtually impossible not to get excited every time we got on the phone. And nothing changed when we started talking about refreshing his website. Why would it? The skills that had served him to well in every other part of his life should translate, right? But they didn’t. Because his website, as I would fondly explain more than once, wasn’t for him. It wasn’t about his vision. It wasn’t about his […]

Does Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?

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Featured

Published

December 31, 2013

2 Comments

Who Do Your Employees Represent? It started without a lot of thought. You can imagine that at any point in time, throughout all of history, two kids and a video camera is just a recipe for fun. But not this time. This time it would be a recipe for criminal charges—and even bigger consequences for their company. In 2009 two employees of a Dominos franchise decided to make a video. They did all sorts of horrible things to the pizza they were preparing. And then they uploaded it to the internet. Using clues found in the video, commenters figured out […]

Will 2014 Be the Year of WordPress Tuck-ins and Roll-ups?

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Published

December 25, 2013

10 Comments

Like with most great things in the WordPress community, it started with WebDev Studios. Two founders, writing code and sometimes writing books. And a friend of theirs, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, also writing some code and writing books. And then they merged. If you were at Pressnomics this past year, you heard Lisa’s version of the story. And it was compelling. And I’m sure it made more than one small company think about its own position in the ecosystem. Should they partner with someone else? Should they merge? But how do you go about doing this? The questions were plentiful, I’m sure. […]

Success Can Kill You Faster Than Failure

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Published

December 19, 2013

5 Comments

I had more customers than I knew what to do with. People were talking about me. Everyone knew my name. And they all were showing up—money in hand. They were ready to buy. I wasn’t really selling. I can’t call it that. Because this was too easy. All I had to do was let people know about my product, and they just came. We don’t like to believe the saying, “if you build it, they will come,” but in this case, I was living the dream. Until it all came crashing down. To be clear, I didn’t lose millions (that’s […]

Targeted Ads Without Retargeting

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Featured

Published

December 9, 2013

10 Comments

It’s Like Magic (But Not) Even if you’ve never heard of retargeting when it comes to online ads, it’s likely that you’ve still experienced it. Here’s how it works. A person visits your site. They browse around and check out some of your products. Your site drops a little cookie in their browser that tells other sites they’ve been to your site. Now they visit another site—one that has ads on their site. And these ads are delivered by a retargeting service. Including an ad for your site. So now that visitor is on another site, but since they’ve been […]

Monetizing Your Blog

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Featured

Published

December 5, 2013

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It Started With a Normal Email The email was pretty much like every other one I’ve ever received asking if I have any time for a quick call to provide some insight. That week was pretty free in the afternoons, so I replied that I could get on a call a bit later in the week. I scheduled it and didn’t think about it for a day or two. Then when we got on the phone, I started listening to a story I’d heard a million times before. The software company was focused on building products but struggling under the […]

Pricing Your Projects Better

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Community

Published

November 25, 2013

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Does Anyone Know the Secret to Charging More? I’m regularly asked the secret to charging clients more money. Developers, designers, sales, and account folks all have the same question. This presumes three dynamics (which may or may not be true). The first presumption is that there is a single strategy, which once learned, will open the door to riches. The second is that it’s a simple strategy that can be adopted by anyone. The last presumption is that I know it and am willing to share it. Like I said, I don’t know if those three dynamics are all true. […]

Things to Consider Before Changing Your Company’s Name

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Community

Published

November 18, 2013

2 Comments

Big News This Week This past week there was news of 3 different name changes by companies you may know. The first announcement came from ZippyKid, who decided to change their name to Pressable. The second announcement came from MaxCDN about their various brands (HDDN, cloudcache, and NetDNA). They’ve now consolidated brands to simply MaxCDN and MaxCDN Enterprise. The third announcement came from VeloMedia as they announced the acquisition of Crowd Favorite. And even though they were acquiring the company, the announcement included the fact that they were going to move forward under the Crowd Favorite name instead of VeloMedia. […]

Building an eCommerce Store? Don’t Forget Aspirational Intent

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Community

Published

November 11, 2013

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Come Shop with Me Imagine you’re there with me, stepping into the motorcycle store to take a look at all the incredible bikes. Imagine you can not only watch me peruse, but can hear the thoughts in my head. That’s the wish of every single online eCommerce store creator, right? To see what I do and to understand my decision-making. But we’ll get back to that in a second. Picking My First Motorcycle As I walk through the motorcycle store, you start to notice something. I’m only looking at, and considering, the big bikes. You know, the ones that look […]

Segmentation as a Product Design Technique

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Community

Published

November 1, 2013

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Most of the time we think about market segmentation as a marketing strategy. Better Messages In one case, we use it to help us target our messaging. In this approach, we break up our target market into groups that have concerns or traits in common, and we shape our campaigns so that each segment gets a more perfect message. Let’s say we have two kinds of users—business folks building a single membership site, and developers who will build several membership sites a year. In this scenario, a WordPress membership plugin developer might use segmentation to shape their key messages so […]

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