Up and Running:

I’ve posted here recently–several times–on how important web search is for startups and growing businesses. Today I found one interesting new site and received a recommendation for another longstanding good site to follow in this area.

Thanks to Josh Cochrane of bplans.com for these tips:

The SEO consultants at SEOmoz have a couple of catchy recurring series of posts on their blogs. One is “Headsmacking Tips,” which covers basic techniques or easy wins that often get overlooked. Sort of a “back-to-fundamentals” message. Here’s an example: Vertical content can earn you links.

The other is “Whiteboard Fridays,” a weekly video post series (similar to your new Bplans.com content) where the company founder explains a topic on video using simple whiteboard. Again, I just like the catchy title. An example: How to get awesome links

Meanwhile, thanks to somebody recommending it on Twitter, I just discovered an almost brand-new blog called Rank and ROI Web Marketing. There are only a handful of posts, but the first two I saw were very good. That would be:

• Small business owner’s guide to Google backlinks and
• Online Local Business Listings for Small Business

The first time I took our company to exhibit in a trade show we brought along a big plastic fishbowl with a sign that said: “Free Drawing! Drop your business card in the bowl for a free copy of Business Plan Pro®.”

Three days later we had four fishbowls full of business cards. Business cards, business cards–and not a lead among them. Fortunately we typed in only a few hundred names and sampled the marketing results before we spent the resources to input thousands.

The list was useless. None of the people sampled wanted our product.

The following year we took the same product to the same trade show–and the same fishbowl, too. That second year, however, we put a sign by the bowl that said: “For more information about Business Plan Pro, drop your business card here.”

After that trade show we ended up with a few hundred good leads. We input the data and followed up and made some sales.

I’ve used this story often in teaching, seminars and managing my own company because to me it illustrates the importance of target marketing and focus.

In this example, quality of leads is much more important than quantity.

Thousands of bad leads are worth nothing, while a few hundred good leads have real value.

(Note: this is reposted with permission from Planning Startups Stories.)

My friend and colleague John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, sent me this overnight. I had the pleasure of participating in one of his workshops last month in Chicago, and I highly recommend it.

If you’re anywhere near Northern California, or going to be on Nov. 13th and 14th, Jantsch will be doing a two-day marketing plan event in person. The workshop includes our new software, Marketing Plan Pro powered by Duct Tape Marketing–the special version Jantsch developed in partnership with Palo Alto Software–and the goal is for you to have your marketing plan done right then and there, and with his help.

In his e-mail, Jantsch said the organizers are offering a 25 percent discount to my readers today through Monday, Oct 27th. So if you’re interested, sign up now.

For that discount, use special purchase code EBMK1108 by midnight Monday, October 27. That’s $1,121.25 per person ($1,495 regular price).

Click here
http://www.e-myth.com/seminars/ducttapemarketing/

I love the title of this post, although it isn’t mine; it’s the work of John Battelle of Searchblog, writing on American Express OPEN Forum.

The worst business meeting I ever suffered through was with a bunch of marketing people who were forced to figure out where and how, and to whom to sell a product that had already been built.

Here it is — so, who do we sell it to? That’s just so hard, like rowing upstream.

Instead, identify the need and the market around the need, and solve it. That’s the right way.

Here is John Battelle on this:

I’ve argued elsewhere that a truly successful business is one that is an ongoing conversation. Those conversations are marketing–if you add value and connect to your customer, you’re succeeding. If you don’t, you fail.

It’s easy to know if you’re succeeding while having those conversations–we’re all pretty good at sensing when customers are happy as we directly interact with them. But we often forget a crucial ongoing conversation that usually occurs beyond our personal presence: the conversation between the customer and our products.

Case in point: I’ve worked closely with a well-known software firm that spends millions on marketing programs that do a very good job of convincing consumers to buy their products. Once those products are in the hands of customers, however, that marketing spend ends. But the conversation has just begun–the customer not only installs the software, he or she then interacts with the product again and again, often multiple times a day. And sometimes the customer sees an error message.

And while the software company doesn’t see it that way, that error message is marketing. Unfortunately, that message is written by a programmer, and it fails to do anything but irritate the customer.

OPEN Forum by American Express » Blog Archive Product Development IS Marketing, And Vice Versa

This is hard for me to post, because it–well, the headline, at least–seems so negative. Still, I’ve been dealing with a number of startups lately, and it seems like we all need a refresher reminder:

“I don’t know the secret to success, but I do know that the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.” – Bill Cosby

I watched John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing workshop last week at the annual Small Business Development Center (SBDC) conference in Chicago [disclosure: Palo Alto Software publishes a Duct Tape Marketing-powered Marketing Plan Pro]. Much of what he does reminds me, brilliantly, of how important it is to understand . . .

1. Who is your target customer. In detail. Not just generalities and demographics, not even just psychographics, but who is this person, what drives her, what does she really want from you, what does she like to read, eat, watch? Where does he live, and with whom? What does he drive?
2. Who isn’t your customer. John had a great post on Duct Tape Marketing a couple of months ago, saying what to do in a recession is to focus down and more narrowly. This came up again in his workshop. Sometimes the secret to success is who isn’t your customer.

I was in a panel presentation not long ago alongside an expert in customer service. At one point, after she’d dizzied us with stories of Nordstrom retail clerks changing customers’ tires and taking as returns products that Nordstrom had never carried, somebody asked, with just a hint of exasperation,

“But how does a company stay in business like that? How do they make money? Who pays for all that?”

At which point, after a beautifully timed pause, the expert said:

“Yes, that is the question, isn’t it . . . and pay attention, because this is the most important thing I’ll say all night . . . you have to understand that not everybody is a customer.”

Which, at that moment, made everything else she’d said make sense.

I was talking with somebody who’s trying to build traffic for his fiction e-book. He needs reviews, he says. He asked me how to use social media, specifically blogging.

I suggested traffic first; readership. You can’t just write about your own book. You can, however, write about some related or tangential or contiguous subject that interests the same people who might be gatekeepers related to the marketing of your book.

What is that subject? That’s a critical question. The somebody in this case is a talented writer. Maybe the new blog is about writing, or fiction or e-book publishing or the specific genre. That, I don’t know.

But it does seem logical. The way to find readers is to write about something that interests them. That’s not a guarantee of anything, because you can build a great blog without ever having anybody go there. Without it, however, you have nothing to promote.

The iPhone now has an application that they say (read the article at HuffingtonPost) is cooler than the Kindle for reading ebooks. And I bought the iPhone. But I also bought the Kindle. Gulp.

Oh dear … now my iPhone is cannibalizing my Kindle. It’s bad enough to be a gadget lover/early adapter adopter and all, but now the one is making the other obsolete. That’s bad for my rationalizations when I get the latest and greatest. Say it isn’t so!

Somewhere there is at least $400 of wasted money.
More on Technology

Pardon me if I call it “good old” guerrilla marketing, because the landmark book by Jay Conrad Levinson was originally published in the 1980s. Yesterday I got a reminder that some good ideas remain good ideas, with or without the Internet. So much has changed, but some of the fundamentals still apply. Ironically, what I call guerrilla marketing fundamentals are so important because Guerrilla Marketing changed so many of the previous fundamentals.

I picked this one up yesterday at Campus Entrepreneurship, where David Miller posted Thoughts on Guerrilla Marketing. It’s a really good summary, and it includes a link back to the source site, too. This is a good read for you if you’re starting a business and a good refresher if you’ve been around a while.