Thoughts on Marketing…

Today’s newspaper ran a story about the high cost of insuring a vacant home. It told of the plight of homeowners who had to move before their home sold due to job transfers, and who were stunned when their insurance premium increased by eightfold. The insurance companies claim that in addition to a greater risk [...]

Face it – the only people who want someone who is “new” are the ones who are so hoping to get a low price that they’re willing to take a chance on you. They might even offer to let you work for them for free in order to build your reputation, your portfolio, your experience, [...]

Have you looked at many “About Me” pages? Do they confuse you? Some of them confuse me. Talking about yourself isn’t easy – at least for most of us it isn’t easy. We’ve been conditioned since childhood not to do that. I don’t mean talking about events in your life the way we do with [...]

Tonight I took a few minutes to look at the statistics on my recent ezines – you may not know that I send out 3 different ones: One is general marketing, one for real estate agents, and one for fundraisers. In going back over the numbers for the last year or so, one thing is [...]

You know all the copywriting rules say that before you can market to someone, you have to know what motivates them. You have to know what they really want – what they really think. When I was first studying copywriting (which I still do, because there’s always more to learn) there was one phrase I [...]

Have you thought that it would be fun to add a favicon to your website? (That’s that little icon up in the title bar just before your site name – all the “big kids” have them.) I thought it would be fun, and I read about how to install them, but didn’t have a program [...]

We all know that before we sit down to write any kind of marketing piece, we need to know who the prospective buyer is. Once we know, we’re supposed to form an image of that person, consider what matters most to them, what they worry about, what excites them, what motivates them, and more. But [...]

Have you considered buying a software program that guarantees to make dozens of new articles from just one – by changing some words to other words with the same meaning? If so, you may get more comedy than content. This morning I got a google alert that one of my ezine articles had been picked [...]

If you talked to a dozen marketers you might get a dozen answers if you asked for THE most important thing to remember about marketing. They might say “the headline,” “the list,” “the offer,” or even “the P.S.” Some would say the research – knowing who the target audience is before you write a word. [...]

Today I tried to buy a replacement part for a gas barbecue grill. I knew it might be a challenge because the grill is probably 10 years old. And of course no one is expected to keep using some old thing like that! Well, we do, so I tried to buy a gas valve for [...]