Knowledgeable Expert or Shameless Profiteer?

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I’ve know blogging associate Mike DeWitt for quite a while now. We first met at Open Comment Night over on Successful-Blog way back when.

So far Mike has commented on every single one of my Bed Head posts. (We’re on Day 12 of 40 right now. I went back through and checked. He hasn’t missed one yet.)

Well no one can comment on my blog everyday for nearly two weeks straight and not expect me to check out their own blog. Of course I went poking about Mike’s. And of course I found something noteworthy.

Back in January Mike wrote a post called A Moron I Want To Learn From.

The moron Mike is referring to is Mark Joyner (and moron is how Mark describes himself when he says, “I’m an official blogging moron.”) Read more

Think Before You Call It Spam

Those of us who make our living working primarily online know full well how pervasive the scourge of spam has become. Whether you are an online publisher like me, or just dealing with the hoards of junk emails that come your way everyday you know the problem is real.

But did you know marking that email newsletter as spam is probably not the best way to keep it out of your in box?

In fact you could even be causing problems for other folks by doing that.

Unwanted Newsletters

From a marketing perspective the email newsletter is a wonderful way to reach out to potential clients and keep a recurring contact with past customers. Because the costs per message are incredibly low this is a marketing tool of choice for just about everyone from the solo entrepreneur to the major corporation.

Trouble is, it is usually pretty easy to add email addresses to the mailing list. Because of that it’s easy to get on to mailing lists that we really don’t want to be a part of, whether we unwittingly “agreed” to be on the list at one point or not.

Being bombarded with unwanted email can be frustrating. And the temptation is to just “make it go away” by hitting the “mark as spam” or “junk” button. But you might want to think before you do that and here’s why. Read more

Creative Marketing from an Accountant

OK. One of the points of marketing is to help folks remember your brand, right?

What if your product or service isn’t exactly flashy or naturally attention getting? How can you stand out from the crowd?

Say your business is accounting. Good accounting is a critical piece of any successful business. But let’s face it. Not only is accounting a little on the, um, unexciting side for most folks but accountants themselves generally tend to be very conservative unflashy folks.

So how can you make sure you’re noticed and people remember your brand?

Well a local Accounting firm here in Savannah just made sure I’ll not forget them soon.

My Kind of Marketing

As regular readers here may know I have two flavor passions. Coffee & Chocolate. The argument could be made my consumption levels of these two wonderful substances is remarkably unhealthy. I’m OK with that.

Knowing that you can imagine how I stood up and paid attention when Gorgeous brought the chocolate bar pictured below home from her BNI meeting yesterday.

Now that’s just plain creative. Since it’s tax season a nudge in the IRS direction is a good attention getter.

How much more effective do you think handing someone that instead of a plain old business card would be?

I promise I’ll be talking about Karp, Ronning & Tindol far more since they helped feed my addiction than I ever would have otherwise.

What can you do to help get more conversation rolling about your business?

A Glimmer of Hope in Microsoft’s Marketing?

I keep saying that business is about people and relationships with them. Build the relationships and the money will follow. And in greater quantities than if try to reduce people to numbers and statistics.

In his Breaking Up With Advertising post, David Armano points out this treasure of a video clip that seems to indicate Microsoft might be coming to understand that whole relationship thing.

Classic Quote:

It’s just I’ve changed. And you haven’t.

I’ll be interested to see what the Amanda Chapel crowd has to say about this whole thing since they tend to be so hostile to the idea of treating customers like people worth building relationships with rather than like cattle to be herded.

Sometimes Marketing Can Be Wasted Money

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not at all hostile to spending marketing dollars. In order to attract customers, they have to know you are there and what you have to offer.

However I just experienced an eye opening instance when money spent on marketing would have probably been a complete waste.

A Marketable Event

One of the primary reasons Gorgeous and I didn’t head right back to Savannah after SOBCon is that we had to come up to Wisconsin to finish cleaning out her father’s house. The plan was to have the mother of all rummage sales to get rid of it all.

As originally conceived the sale would run Thursday, Friday and Saturday and we expected it would take all three days to convince folks to pay us a token for the privilege of carting off Dad’s stuff. We’d have to either pay someone to remove whatever was left over, or add it to the U-Haul we’ll be driving back toward Savannah on Sunday.

Since we had three days to work with we made the strategic decision not to advertise the sale as is the custom in this part of Wisconsin. Factoring into that decision was the fact that Dad’s house is on the main drag in town. We figured there’d be enough traffic over 3 days that we could take the chance and forgo the mass marketing and just put one sign on the curb.

We miscalculated somewhat. Read more

Joining The Good Blogs

I’ve been hearing a lot about a relatively new blog cross promoting service lately called The Good Blogs. I first heard about it nearly a month ago when Mike Sansone mentioned how much he was digging having the widget on his blog (that’s a lower case digging. )

Since then I’ve noticed Ben Yoskovitz has become part of their community over at the Instigator Blog and has the widget in his side bar. Carolyn Manning used the The Good Blogs widget on her thoughtsphilosophies.com to find a few treasures to add to the z-list meme.

Ben Yoskovitz took an even deeper look at the company and service when he posted his interview with Vernon Lun, one of the co-founders of The Good Blogs over at Startup Spark at the beginning of the month.
Read more

Is Internet Marketing Really Dead?

I just finished reading The Death of Internet Marketing (aff) by Mike Filsaime.

Mike is an internet marketing heavy hitter. He’s the guy that wrote Butterfly Marketing, so it seems he knows what he’s talking about.

In his latest free e-book he tells us why the way marketing has been done via the internet is not working anywhere near as well as it used to just a few short months ago and why the current methods are already gasping for breath.

The good news is Mike also shares some strategies that he feels will help us to succeed in the near future. Mike’s certainly right about one thing. The times, they are a changing!

The question is do you want to get left behind or adapt, overcome and go on to success?

But hey, don’t take my word for it. I heard about it from Mike Sigers over at Simplenomics who heard about it from Brian Clark at Copyblogger. Both of these guys are recommending you read this and they definitely know what they are talking about.

Mike Filsaime is willing to pay up to $2 per lead to build a double-opt in email list and he’s giving away some dynomite information in this free book to do it. He says he’s only offering the book for a short time, so do yourself a favor and download your free copy right now and learn a thing or two.

Enjoy!