Smart marketing is like a cup of coffee. The coffee that we drink, as beautiful and invigorating as it is, starts out completely differently than what ends up in our cup. Coffee begins life as a hard, greenish-coloured bean, and it does not look or smell remotely edible. It is not a food. Humans cannot [...]
Track Your Activity And Double Your Conversion Ratios Photo by SunnyGraph on iStock Many years ago, I was a car insurance salesman, and I was very unenthusiastic about what I was selling. I don’t like cars very much. They just get me from place to place. Lots of my customers thought about their car insurance [...]
Selling feels sleazy when you ask for commitment too early On the same day, I received a party invitation and a sales pitch. One of them made me very uncomfortable, and the other did not. The sales pitch was on a used car lot. I happened to be walking by, and on a whim, I [...]
Email is the virtual welcome mat to your business Photo by RTImages on iStock The moment I stepped into the store, I felt something was wrong. My wife and I were strolling down Hawthorne Street in Portland, Oregon. Our young kids were at home with their grandmother babysitting, and we were on our first [...]
A Lead Magnet is a short, digestible, nicely designed example of your work. The right kind of Lead Magnet will build you an email list of potential customers who all face the same problem. If you design your Lead Magnet to solve a small problem well, you can: demonstrate your expertise, qualify your leads, [...]
The new Gutenberg editor is the future of WordPress. I've decided to take Gutenberg for a spin in advance of the core update. Since WordPress website design is the foundation of my business, I'm always testing the latest tools and upgrades in advance, for two reasons: a) I want to make sure it doesn't break [...]
If you write a lot of blog posts, getting them all into one place can be really useful. Having a digest of sequential blog post can streamline your promotion strategies on social media, and also serve as an easy reference tool for when you need links in the future. Case study: The Aware Show The [...]
I'm writing this post on my phone, and I'm hitting 'Publish' before it's ready. This is one of the few blogging ideas that can make Corbett Barr stop and say, "Hey, I've never heard that before." He was interviewing Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, as part of a Fizzle course called Start A Blog That Matters. [...]
Featured images for blog posts look great. Blog posts with featured images enhance visual appeal, increase clickthroughs, and augment the user experience on your blog. (With clever use of titles and ALT tags on each image, you can even boost your SEO.) It is really easy to find images online, and downloading them is a [...]
Recently a friend of mine moved to Ojai, and I wanted to reach out and make an impression. So I decided to send him an Ace of Sales Email Greeting and give him an ‘Ojai Five.’ Making this customized image only took a few minutes. I’ll walk you through how to customize your own photos in [...]