Marketing
Quick Marketing Lesson About Communication
Yesterday, I got a voice mail from a customer who wanted to cancel his membership on PCMech. That’s fine. It happens. No sweat.
His voice mail, though, was rather passive aggressive. A bit of a threat that I needed to call him back otherwise he’d have to take it to another level (which I guess means dispute the charge).
Today, I canceled his charge for him and sent him a quick email letting him know it was done. Half an hour later, he leaves me another voice mail. I was ignoring him, not returning calls, and apparently being a bad guy.
Sigh. So, I called him.
5 Ways A Marketer Can Hurt Their Reputation
In this business, a HUGE part of what we do comes down to interpersonal relations. This goes beyond blog posts, our list sizes and marketing strategy. I’ve said before that this is ultimately a people business and it will always remain true.
If relationships aren’t kindled and maintained properly, business suffers. It really comes down to the good ol’ Golden Rule: Treat others how you yourself would want to be treated.
Some marketers forget this. In an effort to form a big launch or squeeze every last dollar, they forget that it comes down to real people first.
Remember, Blogging Is A People Business
People make things too complicated.
I see it all the time in the world of blogging. A lot of bloggers out there trying to build up traffic, get recognition and make some money. They read blogs about blogging, which are (hopefully) written by people who have actually done that. Too often, however, I find that they get mired down in minutia.
Perhaps you know the type of minutia I’m referring to. Stuff like:
- “I’m going to keep tinkering with this theme until it is just right.”
- “I’ll launch my blog in 3 months, when I’ve got everything perfect.”
- “What little tid-bits of secret tactics are those successful bloggers doing that I’m not?”
- “I wonder if I have my meta tags right.”
The list goes on.
How I Got a 250% Opt-In Rate Increase With No Work… With Popup Domination
Some of you may have noticed that I silently launched a new lightbox opt-in form on this blog late on Friday afternoon. I’ve already had emails asking me how I did it. The design is really professional and it also resulted in about a 250% increase in opt-ins from what I was getting using Aweber’s lightbox form. And the best thing is…. I didn’t have to design it myself or hire anybody to do it.
How cool is that?
I did it using a brand new Wordpress plug-in called Popup Domination, being released by my far-flung blogging buddy from England, Michael Dunlop.
How To Display Your Feedburner Subscriber Count In Plain Text
You have likely noticed that many bloggers choose to display their RSS subscriber count on their blogs. The most common way to do that is by using the little button graphic which Feedburner provides.
A fancier way to do it is to display it in plain-text format, thereby allowing you to style it in whatever way suits your blog.
When I made some recent design changes to DavidRisley.com, I decided to display the FeedCount using plain text. Below is how I went about it…
The 3 Big List Building Mistakes Bloggers Make (And How To Fix Them)
By now, we all know the importance of building up an email list for our blogs. It helps you to bring people back, build the relationship, mobilize your audience and, yes, make money.
The problem is that most bloggers are dropping the ball on actually growing their email list. It comes down to some real basics of making the offer. These are basics that, quite frankly, have been stated time and time again, but few bloggers apply.
Last week, I did a Q&A call with my Blog Masters Club students. In addition to answering questions, they watched me record a couple of videos in real-time. One of them was this video which discusses the typical list building mistakes.
Oh Sh**, Another Damn Product Launch?!
Launch fatigue.
Its been an item of discussion lately in some circles, including by Dave Navarro, who had a great article about it. He also mentions a piece over at Productive Flourishing.
May was a pretty packed month for product launches – in this market. And those of you who pay attention to it all were feeling pretty inundated and ganged up on. Some of the big annoyances I’m seeing out there are:
- Artificial scarcity plays. Let’s face it, most of this stuff is digital so you need to have a pretty compelling reason to limit availability on something that is digital.
- Over-hype. Calling something the best thing since sliced bread when it isn’t. I think I’ve seen about every possible way to hype something, but I constantly find more.
- Tugged in multiple directions. When you have a perfect storm of launches like there was in May, consumers feel ripped apart. And as any marketer will tell you, when you give people too many options, they’ll often just choose none of them.
As Navarro correctly stated, it isn’t product launches that are the problem. It is the repeated pattern.
The Question You MUST Answer To Be Successful As A Blogger
Why do you blog? What’s your offer? Why should I pay ANY attention to you whatsoever?
Do you have an answer for this?
There are a number of differences between hobby blogging and professional blogging. In my view, many of the bloggers trying to make money in this medium are running things like a hobby blogger and expecting money to pop out of it. And that’s not going to happen.
Why You Should Position Yourself As An Expert To The Media
This is a guest post by Shelly Cone.
I absentmindedly drummed my pen against my keyboard waiting for that elusive muse to grant me some much needed inspiration. I had just accepted an assignment for a large trade magazine about what’s new in construction and manufacturing machines. Big machines. The extent of my knowledge of machines is what I’ve seen on Bob the Builder cartoons.
I needed an expert to tell me what the latest new thing in equipment was, but who is an expert in that?
Every field has its experts. When you read, watch or hear a news story the reporter isn’t the expert, it’s the person being quoted. But even then that person isn’t always the expert. A lot of times that person is simply the person who was consistent at building a relationship with that reporter, who got on their radar.
The REAL Reason Why Bloggers Need A Mailing List
To most of you guys, this is probably not any kind of news alert. After all, building an email list from day one is probably one of the most common pieces of advice I give. But, why? The most obvious reason is so you can sell things. We all know that email lists are powerful [...]
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