Writing for Business Owners

Two Decades of Insights (And Still Going)

I’ve written more than a hundred articles about business, marketing, branding, and design for publications like Inc. Magazine and others, as well as for my own various blogs and websites.

“James consistently amazes me with his insights on design, marketing, and business process.”
—Troy Busot (Founder & CEO, Athlinks)

Articles

Being Different Kind of Leader

There are passengers, and there are drivers—and there are also a few people who ride a bike instead. In his post Let’s Steer This Ship Together, Will Pate talks about a concept that I’ve also been noodling on for the past few months: “leading” and “being led”...

Top 10 Tips for Corporate Naming

Having recently been consulted for a corporate naming project, I thought I’d post my personal guidelines on how to dodge the most common naming landmines. Over the years, I’ve put together a mental checklist that I’ve used when working on naming projects, and this...

Your Business is Dying…Now What?

The LA Times is feeling the effects of the population’s media consumption moving away from print, but their $10 million solution leaves much to be desired. Large companies tend to get so wrapped up in their own momentum that they fail to notice that the rest of the...

To Give an Idea Flight, First Give It a Name

XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML, XSLT, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript were just programmers’ techno-babble…until they were collectively christened “Ajax.” On February 18, 2005, Jesse James Garrett (founder of Adaptive Path, wrote a brief essay entitled “Ajax: A New...

Integrity, Branding, and Blog Payola

Eris Free, Paul Scrivens, and Molly Holzschlag have all touched an emerging issue in marketing—blog payola. Marqui is a new company with an interesting business model. Companies pay them to get their products written about in weblogs, and Marqui in turn...

Better Sorry than Safe

(I wrote this back in 2005 but I preach the same principle today.) The brands we respect, the brands we’re drawn to, the brands we’re compelled to follow are those that are willing to let go of their fear and do what they know is right for them. I recently worked on a...

You Can’t Fake Cool

The recent “I’d Hit It” ad campaign from McDonald’s illustrates the perils of trying to tap into hip subcultures from the outside. Andrew Teman of “World Champion” originally pointed out the ad, a Flash piece appearing at the top of ESPN’s Page 2. (It’s still there at...

Marketing the Mundane

There’s no shortage of advice available regarding the best ways to generate buzz for your hot and exciting new product, but what are you supposed to do if your product isn’t really buzzworthy? Let’s say you’ve made a new line of those plastic clips that you put on a...

Doing the Google Dance

If you run a website, you may have noticed that your Google rankings dancing around over the past few weeks. Is this the end of the world as we know it? Google wields enormous power over the economy. When a Google developer tweaks a formula, thousands of businesses...