 | Cheap Gas Makes You Lazy
With skyrocketing gas prices in the US people seem to be doing what they can to save a little gas here and there. My wife and I are hopping on our bikes for grocery runs and walking to the nearby coffee shop. Returning to good, wholesome basics is what we’re doing. Stuff we should be
| Duct Tape Marketing - 7/3/2008 10:34:14 AM |
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| Learn Word of Mouth Marketing from the Guy Who Wrote the Book
Seriously, my friend Andy Sernovitz did write a great book called Word of Mouth Marketing.
Now he’s hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get the best introduction to word of mouth
| Duct Tape Marketing - 7/2/2008 3:40:52 PM |
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| Is Marketing Hard or Easy, Both or Neither?
I wonder if you could help me an experiment by answering the following in comments.
1) What’s the hardest part about marketing for you?
2) What’s the easiest part about marketing for you?
I’m curious how often the same thing will be one for some and the other for another.
I’ll go first
Hardest - 1) Remembering...
| Duct Tape Marketing - 7/1/2008 2:50:27 PM |
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| Coaching Excellence Series Rolls On
My monthly expert interview series continues in July with a live session with David Meerman Scott on Wednesday, July 16th Noon CDT.
David is an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach ...
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/30/2008 1:36:28 PM |
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| Mobility Tools with Tom Wilson
Tom Wilson, Executive Director of AT&T’s Small Business Group, is my guest this week on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.
I’m a big fan of technology for the small business because I think it’s one of the great ways to level the playing field. In this show we spend time talking about tools the small business
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| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/30/2008 12:52:19 PM |
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| The Best City for Entrepreneurs
I am doing an interview today with a journalist writing a story about entrepreneurial cities.
You’ve probably seen these kinds of articles before, but to me this is such a tough question. What’s the best place to be an entrepreneur? Most of these types of polls take a look at tangible things like access to capital,
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/30/2008 9:40:07 AM |
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| Lifetime Value of a Customer is Unlimited
Maybe you’ve heard of this term that some marketers use called “Lifetime Value.” The idea is to calculate what a customer might be worth over the course of doing business with you perhaps for years as opposed to a single transaction. The determination of this number might change the way you look at how much
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/28/2008 6:30:54 AM |
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| The Most Expensive Way to Grow a Business
There are really only four ways to grow a business – Get more leads, close more deals, increase your average transaction or add products and services to your offerings. Of the lot, trying to generate increasing numbers of leads is the most expensive.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you drop your lead
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/27/2008 10:51:29 AM |
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| Duct Tape Marketing Coach Blogs
As frequent readers of this blog know I am building an army of Duct Tape Marketing coaches in an effort to take the message that marketing can be simple, effective and affordable to the legions of small business owners out there trying to grow their companies.
I have to tell you that I am personally very
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/26/2008 12:53:53 PM |
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| Think of July 1 as a sort of a Jan 1
This article on the AP wire is such a good reminder - mid year financial check-ups
The grade school my kids went to used to celebrate 1/2 birthdays - the 6 month date between one birthday and the next - why not celebrate 1/2 vision day for your business.
So, you sat around the fireplace in
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/26/2008 10:42:24 AM |
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| Another Tiny Facebook Hack
I’m not really that fascinated with Facebook but many of my readers are so here’s a hack that someone noticed I was doing and they asked me how so figured maybe others wanted to know as well.
Each time I write a new blog post it automatically changes my status in Facebook to something like: John
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/25/2008 4:00:12 PM |
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| The Perfect Referral Motivation
Do you want to know the best way to motivate referral sources? Well, perhaps you’ve guessed it’s not money or for that matter direct compensation of any form. There will certainly be exceptions to this, but the perfect referral motivation is to tap our deep seated human need for community. People get great pleasure from
...
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/25/2008 12:39:12 PM |
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| Blog and Ping Facebook Style
When blogging first got going the idea of writing a blog post and then pinging the RSS and blog directories to notify them of your update was standard operating procedure. Fact is, it still is, but it’s become automated by services like Feedburner.
Now that social networks like Facebook have begun to enter the small business
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| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/24/2008 6:22:58 AM |
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| What Does Cash Flow Have To Do With Marketing?
Cash flow and marketing are attached at the proverbial hip - Marketing is all about growing your business, but quite often, even when things are rocking along, you can’t grow your business without effective cash flow planning.
When the economy make a move towards uncertainty, fully understanding the relationship between strong...
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/23/2008 5:22:37 PM |
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| Talking Groudswell with Charlene Li
Charlene Li, senior analyst with Forrester, stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast to discuss social media and her new book, co-authored with Josh Bernoff, Groundswell.
Much of Li’s work at Forrester is in working with very large organizations to help them understand how to use social media, but the funny thing is that mos...
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/23/2008 12:29:14 PM |
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| How Are Your Marketing Proguessions Working Out?
In case you’re wondering (and I’m sure I’ll still here from some of my VA readers) that’s not a typo in the title - I’m trying to create a new word by running guess and projection together to illustrate a point that alludes most of the business owners I’ve worked with over the years.
I believe
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| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/22/2008 3:39:12 PM |
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| Free Online Video Tutorials
Long time blogging buddy Jim Kukral has created a great series called the Online Video Toolkit for anyone wanting to learn how to jump in and master the use of video for online promotion, education, and training.
You know you need to learn all you can about this medium, but you’ve probably also discovered that there
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/20/2008 2:59:22 PM |
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| Amazon’s UGC Playground
Along with being one of the world’s biggest book stores, Amazon also offers some interesting user generated content avenues that could lead to a bit of exposure for small business owners who explore them.
Amazon user profile - this is much like any social network profile and allows you to add a description of your business
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| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/19/2008 8:51:40 AM |
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| Thank Your New Commenters
Under the heading of a simple way to encourage readership and participation on your blog.
It’s a great practice once you start building a community of readers who comment on your blog posts to encourage more conversation by commenting back on comments. A great way to take this a step farther is to send a personal
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/18/2008 10:35:36 AM |
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| How Complex Should a Marketing Plan Be?
To get to the heart of the question in the title I guess we first need to agree that a marketing plan is an important small business tool.
I think it’s essential and here’s why. Creating a marketing strategy that really allows you to build marketing momentum and then surrounding that strategy with the right tactics
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| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/18/2008 10:17:02 AM |
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| How to Demonstrate Word of Mouth
So how do you demonstrate what a book is about? How do you create word of mouth as an experiment for how to create word of mouth?
If you’re Dave Balter, creator of BuzzAgent, you write a book called The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II. But, what’s really buzzworthy about that?
First off, the book’s a
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/16/2008 3:01:05 AM |
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| Your Favorite Web Things
The managing editor of a publication asked me to identify my favorite web tools for small business and I thought that sounded like a tremendous thing to ask you too.
Give me your top 5 favorite web sites or tools.
Here’s mine at the minute!
Google Reader - read all my favorite blogs on my mobile browser
Friend Feed
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/14/2008 9:41:40 AM |
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| Michael Port on Small Business Marketing
Make sure to tune into the June Session of the Duct Tape Marketing Coaching Excellence Series.
My guest will by Michael Port, fabulous speaker and author of Book Yourself Solid and Beyond Booked Solid. I think the thing I love so much about Michael’s work is that he not only helps people focus on getting more
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/13/2008 5:05:28 PM |
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| The Press Release Triple Threat
PR is great, it’s not free, it’s earned, but when it is, it packs some very nice ROI.
One strategy that small business owners should employ is to take their PR message online and directly to the prospect by consistent use of the age old tool, the press release.
Creating and distributing press releases was primarily a
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| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/13/2008 3:23:02 PM |
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| Intuitive Logo Design?
I’m a big fan of Intuit and all the Quicken and Quickbooks products (yes they also sponsor some DTM initiatives)
About a month or two ago they quietly, in my opinion, rolled out a new logo after 25 years with some variation of the old one.
I think it’s a pretty nice example of a big company
| Duct Tape Marketing - 6/12/2008 3:49:14 PM |
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