For the past seven years or so my career has been a virtual one. I've worked as a Targeting Specialist in the advertising and search industry, and now as a content specialist in social media. The team I work as well as the whole of the company is completely remote.

We utilize different platforms for staying connected, through chats, emails and meetings. My current company organizes so-called coffee meetings in which they invite an employee for a chat in which they discuss not only their job, but also their work and living environment, the latter of which can be quite interesting as the company is a global one. In light of the current pandemic that we find ourselves in, these coffee chats are another source to find out what is going on in a different part of the world and how they are dealing with stress and precautions.

In the past few weeks we have seen traditional brick-and-mortar businesses both struggling and become increasingly creative to adjust to changing landscape that the COVID-19 crisis had brought. Sadly, many businesses have already had to close their doors permanently. Others have found alternative ways to conduct business. Therapist offices have been able to conduct appointments through ZOOM or Skype or another platform. Some restaurants have improved their online ordering system and/or offer curbside pick-up service. Traditional offices have set up their employees with a remote work environment. It makes me wonder, how will business be conducted after this pandemic and restrictions have been lifted?

I would think increased flexibility around remote work would be offered since this has been proven to work? I'm also considering the strain around commuting. Now online systems have been updated and improved for many businesses this may be an added way to continue doing business going forward.

One thing is clear, we are learning to look at business and jobs differently now, including the value thereof. ​

I'm currently working with a client on setting up an Instagram profile.

Instagram is known for beautiful engaging pictures to capture a young audience.

Writers and poets come up with short inspirational quotes.
Event planners post the perfect shot to illustrate what they can pull off for their customers.
Non-profit organizations crop their flyers to an Instagram ready post to alert their growing audience to upcoming events as well to affairs of related organizations.
Bands and concert halls not only publish pictures of past shows, but also feature calendars of upcoming occasions. 

Yes, it is all about the hashtags #. Use these and be creative! This is how the public will find you!. Do repost and provide proper credit! Your followers will appreciate it and you will gain new followers! There are several apps that can be downloaded that will automatically credit the original poster for you when you repost an Instagram post.

​Have fun with it!

​Back in 2004 I needed to attract visitors to a custom printing website for invitations. The business was a small start-up. Its web presence was being drowned out by the larger printing companies' websites.

​How was I going to bring the businesses’ products before customer’s eyes?

A mentor told me early on, “It’s not about the number of people visiting your website; it’s about the people wanting to be there.”

My first reaction was to disagree. Didn't we want to have as much visitors as possible? This was during a time that webmasters hid dubious search terms irrelevant to the website's content into its pages to get their site up in search results. Since then, these practices have been banned.
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The question I needed to ask myself was: “What did this printing business offer its customer that they were looking for?” Narrowing in on these searches would bring the site quality customers that would want to be there.

Narrowing keyword terms down to ‘custom invitation printing’ was not enough for this website to be noticed among its competition.

I had to find its niche offerings. What was this business offering that the customer was looking for?
With help of the Google Ad Words tool I found people were looking for specific invitations that the website offered such as ‘Jasmine princess invitations,’ ‘first birthday invitations,’ ‘pooh birthday invites.’
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​Now that I found the specific keywords I would use for the business’ website I could put them all into one landing page. However, I wanted the customer looking for ‘first birthday invitations’ to find just that and not have to weed through pages of irrelevant cards.

I decided to create separate landing pages with keywords specific to the offering.
Guess what? It worked! Pretty soon, visitors found their way to the unique offering that this business had to bring to the marketplace.

You may say “that was in 2004! Things have changed!” Yes, you are right, since then the landscape of search has changed tremendously. For one, we have Social Media. Secondly, analytical platforms have become more advanced. We have more tools to help us fine-tune our Search Engine Optimization to reach our audience.
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However, the basics remain the same.