Thoughts on Marketing…

I firmly believe in newsletters sent in the postal mail – and was gratified to read that marketing guru Dan Kennedy agrees. He says that when your prospects open their mailbox and find something from you they can hold in their hands, it has much more impact than an email – or a link in [...]

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 [...]

I know – you need a whole lot more than one customer. And you can’t write a separate letter to every single one of them when you don’t know who is going to read your ads or visit your website. So what am I talking about? I’m talking about the fact that just one person [...]

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 [...]

This morning I got a frantic e-mail from one of the officers at our local animal rescue: The website is down! Upon investigation I found that their web host, Imbris, no longer exists. It’s been gone since sometime around the end of last month. According to news reports, no one knows why. There’s a sign [...]

Yesterday I picked up a brochure for a new rental business. Along with porta-potties, they’ll supply the tables, chairs, tablecloths, glasses, etc. for your next party. In fact, if your house is too small, they’ll even rent you a tent. It was a home-made brochure and had no graphics. But that wouldn’t have been so [...]

Today was errands day, so I stopped in at the local health food store to pick up some supplements. I couldn’t find what I wanted so waited until the owner finished with her customer to ask for her help. Meanwhile, I wandered around, looking at other things. What did I find but a whole shelf [...]

Small business marketers across the world are trying to get their message out to consumers – and failing miserably. They know they have a wonderful product or service, but somehow, no matter how often they send a letter or an e-mail, and no matter how often they pay to have their message printed in a [...]

Small stores in small towns have a huge disadvantage when it comes to price – because they don’t belong to a huge buying network, they buy at a much higher price than “chain” outlets. Thus, sometimes the small store pays more for an item than you can buy it for if you go out of [...]

So you have a local business – and maybe you think that since all of your customers come from the immediate area, you don’t need a website. Take a minute and re-think that position. Few live in a community as small as mine – population about 1,500 – but even here, businesses would benefit from [...]