Thoughts on Marketing…

Your competitors have blogs. People in industries related to yours have blogs. Are you reading them and taking the time to add a comment? If you want to increase exposure for your own business, you should. Every time you comment you have the opportunity to invite people back to your site, and on many blogs [...]

Pick up a newspaper, read an e-mail, or browse web pages, and you’ll see dozens of marketers breaking the #1 rule, and wondering why success continues to elude them. What is that #1 rule? “It’s not about you.” Many marketers think that their message should be about themselves and all the wonderful products they sell [...]

If you own a small business, such as a corner grocery or a design service, you don’t need to bother with a website, right? No, wrong. Of course there’s nothing that says you have to have one – after all, you got along without one all this time. And, if you’re perfectly content with the [...]

Have you gotten into a rut with promoting your local business? Do you feel stuck with running the same tired ads in the newspaper or printing up sale flyers to insert in sacks when customers make a purchase. If so, business probably isn’t increasing at a very rapid rate. So try these three simple steps [...]

Every day the news tells us about some new reason not to trust… this morning it’s all about high-level SEC agents spending their working hours viewing porn… while being paid what amounts to about $110 per hour, plus benefits. And that’s just the latest in a long line of news stories about lying, cheating, stealing, [...]

Every writer has pet peeves that make him or her cringe. I actually have two. The first one is “I want to thank…” It must be just me, because I see it and hear it all the time, but my instant reaction is always “Well, then why don’t you do it if you want to?” [...]

In a word… NO. Not unless the recipient has given you permission and told you they prefer FAX communications from you. Back when I had the real estate office there was one particularly annoying sales person who wanted to sell us things like imprinted pens, notepads, calendars, etc. She also carried flyer boxes, sign frames, [...]

I just read an entertaining article about the perils of not carefully proofreading your marketing materials before you send them out into the world. (Entertaining to read – not so entertaining to the poor folks who missed a detail in proofreading.) Specifically, it was about what can happen if you fail to check to see [...]

Want to do something today – right now – that will help build your business? If you have a pen, a piece of paper, an envelope, and a stamp, you can do just that. You can write a thank you note. In fact, you’ll do even better if you write a dozen thank you notes. [...]

Is your mailbox full of junk? Mine sure is, and some of it is getting really annoying. I can’t count how many e-mail marketers have been telling me things like “Only 2 days left” – “Today’s the last day!” and similar shouting-type messages for at least the past 3 weeks. If it’s the last day, [...]