“Marian told me that she thought you were a robot.”

These are the words that my business buddy confessed to me after her friend hired me to design a landing page for her copywriting business. After emailing back and forth a few times with Marian, we hopped on the phone to dig into the details of her project. She said that I seemed like a completed different person when she heard my actual voice than I did over email. That’s when she told my friend that she had thought that I might be a robot. And not the cool kind. The kind that might be an automated bot and you don’t want to give your credit card number or any personal info to. It wasn’t until we got on the phone that I became a real person to her with a funny and quirky personality -- which is why we ended up getting along so well and her project was a huge success!

This is how I came to the realization that I’ve been stuck in a professional rut...I’m literally being TOO professional. I’ve somehow trained myself to come off as so professional that I have all the personality of a block of cheese. And for someone who preaches about letting your personality shine through in your business -- I’m not practicing it myself.

We as humans are visual people, so it makes sense that by adding images to your website you immediately make it more dynamic. But you don't have to just plop an image in and call it good. With the Squarespace image block there are 6 different layouts to choose from to add more creativity to your site. And they work the same no matter what template you're on! Watch the video for a crash course on the Squarespace images block or read below for a description of each layout style.

It’s 2018 and the times are a changing. Even more rapidly for the marketing world. A couple weeks ago I went to a panel focused on digital marketing trends for 2018. And while the topic of many of the presentations were focused on much larger companies than I normally work with, there’s no reason that we as small business owners can’t apply some of these same tactics and to great results. Here are my top three takeaways translated for small business owners and entrepreneurs.