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Welcome to the first edition of “What We’ve Been Reading”. A semi-regular roundup of interesting articles, tips and tricks related to digital marketing. Blue Star Business Services is your one-stop-shop for your digital marketing needs and outsourcing, whether you’re a small business, a nonprofit, or an organization of any size.
Email Scams
We’ve been seeing a big increase in email scams lately, which had already started ramping up during the pandemic. Clive Thompson goes into detail over on Medium, in a post entitled, The Email Scam That Nearly Worked on Me. Scammers are most likely taking advantage of the move to remote work and turnovers in staffing due to the labor shortage. Fake invoices, especially involving emails claiming to be “Norton Email Rewewals” are common. Snopes has more on that.
Is WordPress Losing Ground?
Is WordPress losing ground? Probably not. Joost deValk is the developer of Yoast, the most popular WordPress SEO plugin and one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. His new post, WordPress’ market share is shrinking, examines why there’s been a 0.4% drop in WordPress’s market share among Content Management Systems over the past few months. It may not sound like much, but deValk says this the first time WordPress’s market share has ever dropped. The likely culprits are the growing popularity of competitors Wix and SquareSpace, especially as they start to improve their SEO, which used to be… not great. Still, if you look at the actual numbers, there’s a massive difference between WordPress and everything else. WordPress is the 800-pound gorilla. WP isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and its ecosystem of tools and developers is impossible to beat… at least for now.
The Fastest Growing Apps in 2022
Leon Zucchini (yes, that’s his real name) looks at the Ten Fastest-Growing Apps in 2022 (Including Some You Don’t Know) So far, we have a grand total of zero of these apps installed, but they’re worth keeping an eye on. Some of these look great for small businesses and small teams. Notion looks like it might be Google Docs meets Trello. TripActions is an easy way for small businesses to handle business travel, corporate cards, and expense reporting. Miro looks like a virtual whiteboard. Keeper focuses on your company or organization’s IT and data security. Monday handles project management and task coordination. You can see the whole list on Leon’s Medium.
That’s it for this week.
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