Ryan Shell, Author at RyanShell.com

Another Reason Bloggers Aren’t Respected

For years bloggers have been vying for the respect of brands and traditional media, but this post will highlight yet again bloggers aren’t ~~always~~ respected.

Before you continue reading, know that I’m a long-time blogger across multiple disciplines, so… I’m “inside the family” on this topic. Here we go.

I recently reached out to a number of fashion bloggers to inquire about advertising on their website. I inquired for a personal project, and it’s nothing remotely controversial or anything of the sorts.

Of the eight I emailed, guess how many I heard back from?

One.

What’s even better than that? That one blogger couldn’t tell me what I could get for X amount of advertising dollars and wouldn’t even begin to brainstorm options.

What a joke. When did getting free publicity become easier than buying advertising?

Six Things Every Psychotherapists Website Should Have

By Ryan Shell

I recently found myself researching various psychotherapy websites for a project, and was almost dumbfounded by what I saw. Sure, I found some good websites, but a vast majority looked like they were created in 1998, and I’ll explain a bit later why this is wildly detrimental.

It’s amazing that psychotherapists help us understand things about ourselves and how we tick, yet, many of their websites don’t tap human behavior/needs to allow themselves to better connect with potential patients.

Again, I’ve looked at a ton of psychotherapists websites and in doing so have decided that there are six fundamental things these types of websites should have. And these aren’t “bells and whistle” type things; they are what I’d consider the must haves for any successful psychotherapist website that converts.

GoDaddy.com Hits Crisis Mode

By Ryan Shell

GoDaddy.com crashed on Monday, September 10th, and it took thousands of other sites down with it.

Simply put, GoDaddy.com was hacked and their DNS servers were taken down. In layman’s terms, this means if you purchased a domain or host your site with the company, your site was down. Customers were becoming more agitated by the minute, and by 1 pm (Eastern) GoDaddy.com had a full-scale crisis on its hands. My personal websites are hosted with the company, so as a customer my interaction with the site went exactly like this:

Upon realizing that the site was down, I Googled “GoDaddy customer service phone number” only to find that the phones seemed to be down as well. I then pulled up Twitter.com/GoDaddy where I saw that they were cognizant of the problem and were in the process of trying to rectify it.

Trust Your Gut Decision

By Ryan Shell

“I knew I should have done that!”

You’ve said it. I’ve said it. We’ve all said it.

Not trusting your gut decision, in most instances, is a bad idea.

I’ve recently been pricing out some vendors for a new project and narrowed my prospects down to two.

Position Matters

By Ryan Shell

It doesn’t matter if you are pitching a product a cause an idea, or anything else you want to add to the list, your sales pitch position will positively or negatively impact your success.

While walking home last week I observed two different men pitching the same exact thing on two different days in virtually the same exact spot, and one guy was clearly having more success than the other.

When you read the pitch examples below it’s likely that you’ll instantly understand why one was more successful than the other, but I hope you’ll also takeaway the fact that small changes can have a big impact. It’s also worth noting that a good sales pitch, even for something as simple as what you’re about to read, matters.

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