I averted my eyes from a billboard while driving on the highway today. I won’t pretend like I did it for the sake of keeping my eyes on the road; I did it out of principle. I’m still not sure what it was advertising, though if the previous twenty I had already seen were any indication, it was likely a brief but nevertheless compelling argument for why my current insurance provider was inadequate.

Hm. I never realized.

Read More

Q: What do landing the perfect job, finding your ideal mate, and winning friends all have in common?

A: They all require you to know how to market yourself.

Yes, it’s the reason people sweat interviews (and first dates), spend hours drafting cover letters, and even pay others to assemble their résumés — we don’t always know the best way to sell ourselves. Marketing yourself is an essential skill to get where you want to go, but the process is often easier said than done.

Read More

Advertising, like language, is no modern phenomenon. Today, we’re so overburdened with ads that advertising has garnered a negative connotation. “Ugh, how can we get ads off of Facebook?” or “Why can’t they skip the ads before the movie starts?” are common 21^st century woes.

Read More

The Language Ninja is hoping you are having a splendid middle-of-February, and that your Valentine’s Day was a wonderful celebration of affection between you and the one you love most. For the Ninja, it was a day largely spent weeping. Let’s get started!

Q: When is it appropriate to use “I,” “me,” or “myself” in a sentence?

A: If you are an elected official giving a press conference or a director of marketing giving a presentation, it is mandatory that you use “myself” in any instance you might possibly be tempted to use “me” or “I.” No, it isn’t “correct;” it just makes you sound important.

Read More

Every 365 days or so, people like to reflect on the previous year and extract lessons. From news stories to top 10 lists, it seems late December and early January is a time of reflection and pointing out all that has changed in the past 12 months. And there’s plenty of change to reflect upon since, after all, change is the only certainty in life — well, that and death and taxes. However, while it’s easy to reflect on worldly events, sometimes our own lives take on a more nuanced progression.

Read More

Welp, here we are at the end of 2014 with a brand new year peeking out over the horizon. If you’re like us, you’re thinking about your business adventures from the past 12 months and planning on how to make 2015 blow 2014 right out of the water.

Here are a few tips that can help:

Read More

One of the most internationally ubiquitous weapons, the Russian AK-47, has undergone a little makeover. The assault rifle was developed in the 1940s in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died almost exactly one year ago. Prior to his death, the weapons engineer wrote of his “spiritual pain” in wondering if the AK-47 has done more harm than good. Although Kalashnikov’s intentions to invent a weapon of defense may have been noble, it’s impossible to determine if the weapon has wrought more destruction than it has ever defended, given the AK-47’s uncontrolled global distribution.

Read More

Rake up the excess on your old blog, and rake in new connections.

Ah, fall: my favorite time of year. I’m not a full-fledged drive-thru maven in yoga pants with an uncontrolled addiction to #PSLs, but I do love a touch of fall flavor. Interestingly, autumn is really a season of decay in some senses: the leaves wither and fall, the air turns colder, and warm ovens turn the harvest’s bounty into pie after pie.

Even though this season is about things falling away, it’s still impossibly joyful for many people. Perhaps it’s our collective recognition of the fact that when things wither and die, they will come back renewed after a winter of rest. Whatever it is, we can’t get enough of fall. And perhaps the world of business writing, copy, and marketing could use a touch a pumpkin spice.

Here are a few lessons we can all glean from some of fall’s most cherished pastimes and traditions. This is an excellent time of year to do a bit of “cleaning house,” just as we pack away the shorts and bring out the sweaters with October’s first chill.  

Read More

Can any business really exist without an online presence? This slightly existentialist question is really one of practicality rather than philosophy:

• 89 percent of consumers use search engines to learn more about businesses and the products or services they offer before making a purchase
• 71 percent of purchase decisions start out with an online search
• There are 100 billion searches conducted on Google every month

Read More

Can SEO “stick it to the man?” Google’s betting on it with its latest search algorithm update that rewards secure sites with more ranking points. The move is meant to encourage site owners to update their domains with secure connections (adding the “s” in “https”), and the reason given behind this move is that Google’s tech gurus just want the Web to be more secure. After all, it’s commonplace to read about a data breech these days, with one of the latest citing around 1.2 billion accounts hacked by a Russian criminal group. More security around the net will mean safer browsing, and safer browsing means more confident Internet users who are less cautious about divulging their personal data, be it financial, medical or something else.

Read More