Category Archive

I have friends who are on 47 different marketing email lists. They know what everybody out there in marketing-land is doing, and if I want to know, all I have to do is ask ’em.

A couple of those guys are really successful, and I don’t knock anything that works for people. However even the ones with the radar cranked up the highest still actually only take advice from a small handful of people.

For every one person who can pay attention to 10 or 20 or 50 streams of advice, I know 1000 others who are just drowning in information and ideas with no sense of coherence or direction. It’s just the idea-of-the-day club and it gets people nowhere.

I have never been that way. I’ve never paid serious attention to more than 3 or 4 people…

“ONE guy or gal in that parade represents HALF of the money that those 2000 people are actually willing to spend with you. Thousands, perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars! You don’t know which one he or she is, but that person did walk by.

“That guy (or gal) is what I call a HYPER-RESPONSIVE CUSTOMER…”

With the economy the way it is, fear and desperation are rampant. The get-rich-quick biz-op guys are out in droves. My buddy Sean D’Souza from New Zealand wrote a great blog post about the role they have in sorting the winners from the losers.

One of the rules at Roundtable meetings is: Your 6 pound laptop computer stays put away unless you’re using it to help the person who’s on the hot seat.

No checking email, no typing while other people talk. You’ve gotta give 100% focus to whoever is presenting their problem to the group.

This is ALWAYS hard for some people.

Ever since the global financial meltdown in October, I’ve seen a FLOOD of business opportunity seekers. Lots of people who are brand new to marketing, online marketing, and business in general are hunting for ways to make money.

Plenty of folks are getting a good ol’ fashioned education in the School of Hard Knocks. And LOTS of people are getting fleeced, cuz the “get rich quick” guys are out in droves, hunting for marks.

“…on the radio program, a researcher was explaining that 10-20 years ago, an older virus that most definitely WAS related to the swine flu virus family, borrowed genes from an *external* strain of human flu virus, and the combination of those two created a newer, deadlier pathogen.

Thus we witness, in real time, the evolutionary progress of an adaptive viral machine.

I thought, there’s nobody who can grasp what’s really happening here faster than a bunch of folks like you and me who re-write and test Google ads to evolve our businesses…”

Many people who write ads for the web make tiny little mistakes in word choice that KILL their appeal. One wrong word is all it takes. Tom Hoobyar created a course called Word Magic and it comes with a “cheat sheet” called The Sales Killers: Seven Words that will Murder Your Ads. You can run through your sales letter using … Read More

This morning I had a conversation with Andy, a professional photographer who has a day job at a major newspaper. He came by because we’re about to upgrade our image around here and we’ve hired him to take some photos.

(The pic of me on my home page is 5 years old and was, uh, taken at a department store.)

Your motorcycle breaks down. In order to fix it, you need to open a little compartment in the engine.

The compartment is held shut by a screw whose threads have been stripped off and you are unable to open it because of a stupid 10 cent screw.

The famous book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” describes this exact scenario: