A year and a half ago, my kids’ buddy Alex Smiley, 11 years old, was diagnosed with Leukemia.
He went through a series of punishing Chemotherapy treatments and finally was pronounced cancer-free last fall was pronounced cancer free.
A month ago the Leukemia came back.
Alex has chosen to stand up and FIGHT.
I have a true barn burner for you today. This one is WELL WORTH YOUR TIME.
I have a customer, Bill Bailey, who sent me one of the strangest emails I’ve ever gotten, just a month before my Autoresponder Seminar last September:
> I have never discussed this with you but March 30-June 28, 2007 I
> spent in the federal prison camp in Pensacola. Long story but
> basically I was a little too aggressive in some of my data collections
> methods and got the attention of the FBI (!) and next thing I know I’m
> being indicted and sent to prison (not to mention the $700K in legal fees
> and $150K in restitution.. ouch!).
After about 20 minutes the other marketing guy at the table says, “Perry, you sure are quiet over there. What do you think?”
Uh-oh. He asked, and I just couldn’t stop myself. Our happy little dinner meeting (complete with scalloped potatoes, chicken cacciatore and blueberry pie a la mode) suddenly experienced an abrupt change of direction.
Last September I held my now-famous “Autoresponder Seminar” in Chicago, which as it turns out, was only days before the stock market went into free fall:
Here’s a video from the very first 10 minutes of the seminar, talking about “Let’s say a bunch of big banks and stuff start going out of business and let’s say people are getting on TV on a presidential debate and they’re saying, “This is the worst thing since the depression!”
I go on to talk about how online marketers will go on to survive and thrive:
Do you have a sales page that’s not doing as well as it was a year ago?
In my professional opinion, even a sizzling sales letter written by a pro copywriter only packs 25-50% of the punch that you actually need to get the job done.
On April 15 my wife contacted our accountant to make sure he’d remembered to file an extension for our taxes.
Three days later she got an email back from him that said, “Yes, I did file the extension, and of course I went home at 6pm on April 15.”
An accountant who goes home at 6pm on tax day?
Are you kidding me?
That sounds like a punch line to some kind of stupid joke.
“Chinese Water Torture” is the term I affectionately use to describe the drip-drip-drip of a great autoresponder.
A powerful autoresponder carves deep grooves in your marketplace. It leaves permanent, indelible marks.
Chinese Water Torture eventually gave us the Grand Canyon.
It will give YOU the Grand Canyon, too.
The #1 asset in your business is your customer list.
Therefore your #1 business tool is the software you use to manage and talk to your customer list.
Choosing a platform for this job is no trivial decision. The importance of this cannot be overstated. The ease and profitability of everything you do in your business over the next few years rides on it.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a huge industry: SAP, PeopleSoft, Goldmine, SalesLogix, ACT!, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAS. Big companies.
Online, there is the whole issue of sending emails out to customers. Managing and delivering email is a whole world unto itself. That’s why companies like Constant Contact and Aweber exist. Those companies are email-only CRM and they’re growing like crazy.
Why? Because keeping yourself off spam blacklists and getting your email delivered is a full time job.
There’s no better day than Father’s day to publicly acknowledge:
Sometimes dads get the short end of the stick.
I remember when I was about 11 years old I bought a hilarious issue of MAD magazine. You know, MAD – the satire mag with the picture of Alfred E. Newman on the cover.
One particular article was mocking the media, and had this cartoon of the typical dad as he’s usually portrayed on TV:
Yesterday I heard an interesting statistic that jobs are being lost at a clip of 600,000 per month…
AND new businesses are being started at exactly the same rate: about 600,000 per month.
Uncle Sam is not going to save anybody’s bacon, despite all the claims to the contrary. There are a lot of dying industries in America and all the duct tape and bailing wire in the world won’t save ’em.
You know what’s going to save peoples’ bacon?
