I mean for a business, or any dream for that matter, to work we can’t just care a little bit, we have to go all in. Likewise, we can’t manage a little bit or market a little bit – we have to go all in. They’re fundamental to our business.

Here are some quick  marketing lessons learned the hard way that could same you real time and real money. And you know what they say about time . . .

Lesson #1: Do the work and then do it again. 

You have to do the work to create a great product. And then you have to turn around and do the work again to create a smart marketing strategy and management solutions. Having a great product doesn’t excuse poor management or weak marketing.

Lesson #2: Website strategy shouldn’t be an after thought. 

Every website is not the same. Some are like brochures, they just lay there until someone stumbles across it and picks it up. But others are like the energizer bunny, they just keep going and going and going. The owner creates new and relevant content and marketing campaigns that go out gets attention and visits. The energizer bunny website goes to work (just like you).

Lesson #3: Make my website simple please.

You don’t have to design your own website. You can put your energy into something else while you pay an expert to create it for you.  But in the end you still want something with a login, so that you or a member of your team can change the text, plus add a few videos when you want to. Beware of designer hijacked websites.

Lesson #4: One time around the marketing block is never enough. 

Just like we all want more than one client, then we have to market more than one time. Consistent marketing is a about a systematic approach, not a random collection of hodge podge solutions.

It’s hard to implement 15 marketing ideas at once, especially when you’re learning at the same time. It’s difficult to remember what everybody told you. But it’s easy to choose one strategy, study it, implement it and then start another.

Lessons Learned Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends

4 Quick Marketing Lessons: Some Learned The Hard Way

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends

4 Quick Marketing Lessons: Some Learned The Hard Way is a post from: Home Wealth Project
Special Thanks: Kissimmee Auto Repair, Kenyan Safari Package, Sell Medical Practice

I mean for a business, or any dream for that matter, to work we can’t just care a little bit, we have to go all in. Likewise, we can’t manage a little bit or market a little bit – we have to go all in. They’re fundamental to our business.

Here are some quick  marketing lessons learned the hard way that could same you real time and real money. And you know what they say about time . . .

Lesson #1: Do the work and then do it again. 

You have to do the work to create a great product. And then you have to turn around and do the work again to create a smart marketing strategy and management solutions. Having a great product doesn’t excuse poor management or weak marketing.

Lesson #2: Website strategy shouldn’t be an after thought. 

Every website is not the same. Some are like brochures, they just lay there until someone stumbles across it and picks it up. But others are like the energizer bunny, they just keep going and going and going. The owner creates new and relevant content and marketing campaigns that go out gets attention and visits. The energizer bunny website goes to work (just like you).

Lesson #3: Make my website simple please.

You don’t have to design your own website. You can put your energy into something else while you pay an expert to create it for you.  But in the end you still want something with a login, so that you or a member of your team can change the text, plus add a few videos when you want to. Beware of designer hijacked websites.

Lesson #4: One time around the marketing block is never enough. 

Just like we all want more than one client, then we have to market more than one time. Consistent marketing is a about a systematic approach, not a random collection of hodge podge solutions.

It’s hard to implement 15 marketing ideas at once, especially when you’re learning at the same time. It’s difficult to remember what everybody told you. But it’s easy to choose one strategy, study it, implement it and then start another.

Lessons Learned Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends

4 Quick Marketing Lessons: Some Learned The Hard Way

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends

4 Quick Marketing Lessons: Some Learned The Hard Way is a post from: Home Wealth Project
Special Thanks: Kissimmee Auto Repair, Kenyan Safari Package, Sell Medical Practice

Does Your Marketing Make the Grade

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Laura Fitton (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

A number of years ago Hubspot created something called the Website Grader, a tool that graded a number of important aspects about a website and concocted a score or grade based on those factors.

Although no tool can really accurately measure the effectiveness of a website, the tool had a nice marketing bent to it and was a pretty simple way to help someone understand the most important elements of their site.

About a month ago Hubspot upped the game and came out with what they are calling Marketing Grader. The tool still focuses on your website, but it also considers a number of offsite considerations that have a great deal to do with success on the web these days.

Things like Facebook, Klout and Twitter use are considered and the overall integration of social in general. Again, no tool will ever be perfect, but I highly recommend running your site through this tool.

The report it produces breaks your grade into three topics – top of the funnel – what you’re to attract visitors, middle – what you’re doing to convert that traffic, and analytics – what you’re doing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing.

In addition to simply grading your site, you’ll be offered action items for things that need attention and every element measured comes with a handy tip that talks about best practices for the item. Simply going through and reading those tips would be beneficial for many people.

For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Hubspot’s Inbound Markeitng Evangelist Laura Fitton. Fitton, who some may know as @Pistachio, does a great job in this interview explaining the ins and out of the Marketing Grader.

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Does Your Marketing Make the Grade is a post from: Home Wealth Project
Special Thanks: Kissimmee Auto Repair, Kenyan Safari Package, Sell Medical Practice

You hired them for a couple of reasons:

• You feel they are experts in their industry
• You want your website to rank high in Google and produce leads
• You don’t have the necessary skills to do it yourself or the time to learn how to do it yourself

A great internet marketing agency knows what is best for your website and your SEO strategy.  They know that all mighty Google loves relevancy. They know that the content on your website needs to be very relevant to the keywords that best describes your service or product and will tell you no if you decide it’s a good idea to fill your blog with content with the latest recipes you saw on the food network even though you are in the plumbing industry.

A weak agency will not question the  latest post you made to your plumbing blog on how to properly sift flour. Oh no, they will just go ahead and let you do what you want because it makes you happy, the customer is always right and they are still getting paid so what do they care.

• Red flag: an agency that doesn’t question your decisions regarding your internet marketing strategy may not possess the necessary skills to be in charge of your strategy. They may not question you, because they honestly don’t know what they’re doing or a better way to do it.

A caring internet marketing agency will have the gumption to tell you no and explain why it isn’t in the best interest of your SEO strategy. They will tell you that your continued irrelevant content will only confuse Google’s spiders and weaken your website’s ability to rank for certain keywords that you want to be found for.

Side-note:

Blogging is the easiest way for a company to participate in their search engine optimization strategy and social media marketing simultaneously. Frequent, relevant blogging creates website activity that entices hungry Google spiders to visit your site more frequently. The more relevant food those spiders have the higher your website will rank. A fat Google spider is a happy Google spider.

A great agency will advise against decisions that will harm the overall power of your SEO strategy. They will offer other solutions to your requests such as; posting your recipes and food tips to your company’s plumbing Facebook Page where irrelevant content is acceptable (as long as you are posting relevant material too).

In conclusion, when hiring an internet marketing agency, test their level of experience. Ask for case studies and present them with a similar scenario as the irrelevant post example above and see if they are willing to tell you “no”, that isn’t a good idea  because….) Also, if they use the term “guru” at all…run the other way!

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5 Ways to Use Other People’s Content in Your Marketing

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

You need lots of content, you know that, but you also know that content creation is one of the more time intensive marketing activities you have to tackle.

While you do need to create your own content as the foundation for your total content and teaching strategy, you can – and should – supplement your content with that from other people.

Image hazel.estrada via Flickr CC

One of the best services marketers can provide these days is to act as a filter for all that’s being produced out there and aggregate the best of the best on behalf of our communities.

Finding and sharing consistently high quality, relevant content and adding insight to this information is not only a great way to increase the volume of your content, it’s a great way build trust in the value of your content.

Here are five ways to add other people’s content to your routine.

Cobrand a winner

Lots of people produce great content in the form of downloadable white papers and eBooks. In some cases they do this to attract newsletter subscribers and links, but quite often they do it because they know something about a topic and want to document it.

With just a little bit of searching you can probably turn up a great eBook that your network would love to get their hands on. Now, some people might simply link to this content, but I’d like to suggest another way.

What if you approached the eBook author and asked if you could send it out to your networks, with full credit to the author, but with the ability to add one simple information page about you or your company at the back?

With this approach you could potentially build a library of content overnight with the right topics and content.

Here’s how to get started.

Use the Google filetype operator to find lots of potential candidates on just about any topic you can imagine. Here’s how it works. If you want to find PDF documents and eBooks about content curation, for example, you would type: content curation filetype:pdf into a Google search box.

This tells Google you are looking for content related to content curation, but you only want results that are pdf files. This way you’ll probably turn up any number of candidates for cobranding projects.

Email newsletter snacks

Publishing a weekly email newsletter is a proven way to stay top of mind with your community. Of course, offering a great free eBook as mentioned above is a great way to build that weekly newsletter list.

As you compete for inbox space you must keep in mind that your newsletter content must be consistently useful, relevant and convenient.

One of the best ways to meet these qualifications is to produce high quality content filtered from other sources and delivered in snack-sized bites. Think in terms of an email newsletter that might contain 5-6 great articles presented with abstracts that lay out in about 100 words with someone might want to click through and read the rest.

Using tools like AllTop, GoogleReader, NewsVine or PopULRs you can easily locate and aggregate content related to topics of interest to your readers. You may also be able to locate local bloggers that could be great candidates for guest content and strategic relationships.

Curate a magazine

The idea of curating content is very hot right now, but in order to really make it pay you’ve got to also be ready to add insight. So many people look at curation as something more closely aligned with republishing.

Republishing content you find does have value, but narrowly targeting a very specific topic and becoming known as a trusted source of insight on the vast array of information being published on any topic is how you take content curation to a new level.

Below are some of my favorite tools for creating your curated online content magazines.

• MySyndicaat – http://mysyndicaat.com/home
• Scoop.it – http://www.scoop.it/
• Storify – http://storify.com/
• Curation Station – http://curationstation.com/

You can also use tools like Delicious, Evernote, Pinterest or Pearltrees to simply clip, bookmark and organize content you find for republication.

If you want to really know how to get great at this follow Robin Good – Here’s a great place to start – What Makes A Great Curator Great?

RSS to HTML

This technique is perhaps a bit more technical, but it also allows you the greatest control.

Just about all online content these days comes powered by RSS making it easy to convert whatever find into a feed that can be converted to HTML code and displayed on any page we like.

For example, if you wanted to publish positive mentions of your firm on a new page on your site you simply set up Google Alerts so that you received notice that your firm was mentioned. Click through to the page and assuming it’s something you want to publish to your site you would bookmark the content using PinBoard and tag like “ournews.”

PinBoard creates tag based RSS feeds so anything you tag with ournews can be displayed in a specific RSS feed. This gives you total control over what you want to appear in the feed.

Once you create the feed you can take it to FeedBurner or RSSInclude to convert the feed to HTML code that you can embed on a page or widget to easily display the content from the feed wherever you choose.

Then any time you bookmark a new item it will publish to the page.

Ask little things

One of the best ways to get lots of people to create content for you around a specific topic is to ask lots of people to answer one very short question.

This can be a great way to collect lots of suggestions, opinions and insights to support or start a topic of interest to your readers.

The other powerful thing about his approach is that you can often get higher profile contributors to participate if all you are asking them to do is answer one question or finish one statement.

Once you collect all of your answers you simply collect them and add context and analysis.

It’s time to make other people’s content one of your content foundation planks.

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

5 Ways to Use Other People’s Content in Your Marketing is a post from: Home Wealth Project
Special Thanks: Kissimmee Auto Repair, Kenyan Safari Package, Sell Medical Practice

The introductory chapters explain the role metrics play, based on surveying 252 firms dedicating $53 billion to marketing.  Examples like Circuit City’s failure – constantly running sales to draw customers despite thin retail margins – make effective punchlines, particularly with counterpoints such as competitor Best Buy spending its budget on branding and customer relationships.

“…few firms get marketing, and many do not.  The result is that firms that get marketing have a competitive advantage and those that don’t struggle.”

The first opening chapters note why many companies are not analytic, outlining obstacles to data driven marketing and defining traditional marketing metrics. One typical excuse of B2B businesses – “We’re a B2B company and sell indirectly to customers. As a result we don’t know who our customers are.”  In the best analytic traditions, Jefferies remind that improvement is possible without oversell:

“There is a frame work for developing a data-driven marketing strategy. You don’t need 100% of the data to get started.”

The next book segment outlines the 15 Metrics ballyhooed in the title.  Five nonfinancial metrics are grouped, with the next 4 grouped to address return on investment.  Chapter 6 is a particular favorite (All Customers are Not Equal: Metric #10 – Customer Lifetime Value).  It includes a breakdown formula for determining the value of a customer segment, and has an example chart of a value-based direct mail marketing strategy. Chapter 7 rounds out the 15 with web analytics metrics such as bounce rate and cost per click.

These middle chapters, containing calculations and supporting material, sets Data Driven Marketing apart from other marketing books.  Jeffery strikes a proper tone between presenting super-absorbent-dry textbook material and text dripping with useless generalities.  Chapter 5 for example includes a spreadsheet template explanation to support a Return on Marketing Investment calculation.  The discussions are advanced but also include charts that will help you envision campaigns more comprehensively.

The ending chapters return to broader ground, serving as a primer for today’s data management and broader operational concerns.  There’s a nod to the ethics for collecting customer data.

“Marketers should clearly communicate the privacy policy both external and internal and how data will and will not be used.”

Examples also note how to demonstrate data to support your product branding. A great B2B instance occurred during OpenHack, a competition in which Microsoft showed how its servers faced 82,500 attacks, yet maintained 100% uptime.  The competition was the genesis for an image changing campaign for Microsoft server, perceived as susceptible to hacking.

“IT professionals were given free training on how to secure Microsoft products within the enterprise, then their perception toward Microsoft products and security change very significantly and positively after the training.”

The formulas enhanced the book without reminding you of a bad study hall experience.  There is an appendix for instructors, a nod towards classroom purposes.  But recalling my grad school days, I can’t think of a better book that noted data, finance, and operations in a digestible package.  Business owners who like to learn are in for a treat.

For building a business based on sound practices and beyond tips and hints, you will want to keep data driven marketing at your side.  While it says Marketing on the cover, you will be hard pressed to find a more solid book that sets a marketing context against other operations in your business.

From Small Business Trends

Data Driven Marketing Makes Branding Objectives Clear

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends

Data Driven Marketing Makes Branding Objectives Clear is a post from: Home Wealth Project
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Marketing Is The Ongoing Operation of a System

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

So often marketers get stuck in the reaction of the week kind of marketing and wonder why it always feels like such a bumpy road.

Marketing should feel graceful, thoughtful, even joyful, but that takes planning, process and patience – mostly though that takes systems thinking.

I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years singing the “marketing is a system” tune and today I’m pleased to introduce my most ambitious compilation of all that I know about how to build a marketing system today.

Introducing the Ultimate Marketing System from Duct Tape Marketing – a complete online guided training tool designed to help you build your marketing action plan and install your marketing system.

The tool takes your down a logical path through 13 step by step lessons that contain video tutorials, audio lesson, downloadable workbooks, examples, forms and loads of related resources.

How the modules in the system are organized – click to enlarge

I’ve also seen a lot of people with good intentions buy a lot of books and courses and fail to move forward because they lacked any support or accountability.

So, everyone that enrolls in the Ultimate Marketing System program also gets 30 days of email support, monthly live Q and A calls, a 30 minute consulting session, and a plan review. We won’t rest until you get this thing built!

And as with everything I’ve ever produced, you have a full no questions asked money back guarantee if you decide it’s not for you.

Go check it out today and get to work building your marketing system before the sun goes down on another day.

Get More Details and Enroll here

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Is The Ongoing Operation of a System is a post from: Home Wealth Project
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Small Business Marketing Workshops, Seminars and Keynotes

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This is a video compilation of a few of the speaking events I’ve done over the past couple of years.

In 2010 and into 2011 it seemed like all anyone wanted to talk about social media.

This coming year I’ll be talking a great deal about integrating online and offline strategies and tactics and the fact that social media has simply become a given that needs to be considered more like a behavior than a tactic.

I’ll be talking a lot about passion and purpose and how building and promoting a business based on those elements is a powerful way to differentiate.

I’ll be talking a lot about selling by teaching, building your Marketing Hourglass and turning your business into a platform.

Feel free to share the above reel with anyone looking for someone with a decidedly practical spin on marketing or point them to the Duct Tape Marketing Workshop page.

So, if you could design a workshop topic you would love to attend, what would the topic be?

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

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Special Thanks: Kissimmee Auto Repair, Kenyan Safari Package, Sell Medical Practice

Must Have Affiliate Marketing Plug-in For Wordpress is a post from: Home Wealth Project
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Ewen Chia – Real Affiliate Marketing is a post from: Home Wealth Project
Special Thanks: Kissimmee Auto Repair, Kenyan Safari Package, Sell Medical Practice