The Forum Is Open

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As part of the training site that is being worked on, we’ve built a forum to discuss this stuff.

Comments are nice, but a forum allows you to ask me anything and get an answer, as well as asking each other and building off everyone’s knowledge and experience.

The Forum is OPEN!

When the training site is complete and launched, the forum will be part of it, and as such, it will cost to be a member.

Right now, before everything is complete, we’re trying to build up the membership, so it is FREE.

If you join right now, it will be free forever. You will have a free lifetime subscription. Even after the training site goes up and it costs other people money to join, you will still have your free subscription to the forum.

You will also get a discount in the price of the training, when that’s offered as well.

There are not a lot of members yet, so there’s not a lot of conversation yet. Please jump on in and get things started. You can tell all your friends that you were there when it started.

If you have a question, I’ll be eager to answer it. Ask me anything about Internet Marketing, WordPress, Web Development, or Small Business. Ask whatever pops into your head.

Check out the Untangling the Web Forum.

Posted in free | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

How do I get more readers for my blog?

I stumbled upon this advice on “how do I get more readers for my blog?” and thought it was worth passing on.

Businesses should blog. The search engines love it and your readers love it. It’s hard to start out without many readers, but if you follow this advice, you’ll soon have readers.

The trick is figuring out what to give them.

Stuff Christians Like

“How do I get more readers for my blog?”

That’s a great question, it’s just the wrong one to ask first.

Want to know the right question to ask first when you find yourself with a blog and a hope that people will read it? Want to know the secret that I start every day on Stuff Christians Like with? It’s pretty simple.

Don’t ask “How do I get more readers for my blog?”

Ask instead,

“How can I give more to readers?”

The distinction is subtle, but I think it’s an important one. At the simplest level, a blog is just a gift exchange. People you may never meet from countries you may never visit, show up at your blog and give you the most precious resource they temporarily have in their hands – time. Whether it’s 30 seconds or 3 minutes, they offer you something really special, minutes of their day that they will never get back.

In return, you give them something.

Read the entire article at:
http://stuffchristianslike.net/2009/12/1-secret-ive-learned-about-blogging/

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 1 Comment »

What Matters Now: get the free ebook

Seth always seems to be in front of the people that seem to be changing the world. He brought together 70 people to share ideas on how we can turn things around, how you can turn things around and they contributed to this free ebook.

If you want to do business in 2010, if you want to be inspired in your own life, then you need to read this.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Now, more than ever, we need to shake things up.

Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I’ve organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you’ll find it worth the effort.

Read the entire article at:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/what-matters-now-get-the-free-ebook.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

Here’s an excerpt.

G E N E R O S I T Y

When the economy tanks, it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business.

It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art.

If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.

In a digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs.

If you make a difference, you also make a connection. You interact with people who want to be interacted with and you make changes that people respect and yearn for.

Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. This is your art, it’s what you do. You touch people or projects and change them for the better. This year, you’ll certainly find that the more you give the more you get.

Seth Godin is a blogger and speaker. His new book, Linchpin, comes out in January.

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

Get an Evergreen for Your Blog This Holiday Season

Get an Evergreen for Your Blog This Holiday Season

These kinds of posts should be about what your site is about. They should show your expertise on the subject. They should be the kinds of posts that are so valuable, so informative or entertaining or insightful, that people will want to read them for years to come.

If you could write THE definitive guide or explanation to the subject of your site, there will be links and tweets and traffic.

Think about what your subject is, what keyword you want to be know for, and write a really good post about it.

You’ll see the traffic.

The evergreens we admire for their longevity

The most obvious way is to write about a topic that never gets old. These are cornerstone reference posts, like ‘10 Ways to Build a Better Blog.’ These posts are evergreen simply because people always need that information.

The good news is that evergreen reference posts are pretty straightforward to write. Do a step-by-step summary of how to do something from start to finish, and you’ve got yourself an evergreen post.

They’re also good for defining something that’s often mis-defined. For example, I have posts bookmarked in my ‘Evergreens’ folder on “What Marketing Really Is.” And I refer back to them often, because marketing is a slippery subject.

There are downsides to these types of evergreen posts. You’re up against a lot of competition, for one. There are already thousands of evergreen posts on building a better blog or providing better customer service. There’s probably an evergreen post on 10 Ways to Do Absolutely Any Topic Imaginable.

If you want your evergreen post to be the one that gets bookmarked, you’d better make it really, really good.

Which brings us to the second downside: Evergreen posts often require much more work than your standard post. You’ll probably wind up putting in at least 5 hours — and probably more like 15 — making sure everything is well-written, entertaining, compelling, and that you didn’t make any mistakes.

You might also be putting some extra hours into in-depth research if your evergreen post is on a topic that’s difficult to understand.

Read the entire article at:
http://feeds.copyblogger.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/0GUusIszMsk/

Posted in web traffic | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

A free Wordpress blog can really cost you

This article, excerpted below, lists 13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.

All of them are valid.

The biggest cost of Wordpress is the time it takes you to create a site and make it what you want it to be. The biggest downside to using a free service is lack of control.

I suggest that you try out a free site, (after all, it’s free), and learn the ropes.

When you are ready for a “real” web site, then get your own web host and install Wordpress. You can point everything on the free site at the new site.

With your very own web site, you have complete control of everything! Sell stuff! Publish what you want. Make it professional and compete with other businesses. Rock the world.

Final thoughts.

13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.

So basically what I’m saying is that it’s not a good idea to have a free website as your main home online. Whether you’re an individual or a business, get your own domain and pay for your own hosting.

If you already have a free Wordpress site, and it is your only blog/website, I suggest one of two things. 1) Buy a domain, install wordpress and start fresh. You can always direct people to your new blog from your old blog, or 2) Export all your content from your free site into a paid site, then you’ll have everything in one place. The sooner you do this the better in my opinion.

That said, blogging communities are great and should not be ignored. Having a free blog within a blogging community however, is very different than having a website all your own. Of all the free blogging communities around, I like Tumblr the best. Here is a list of some of the most popular blogging communities.

Wordpress is a blog application found at Wordpress.org
Wordpress is free to use. It’s called open source.
Wordpress is awesome. Smart people use it.
Wordpress.com is a place to be part of a blogging community.
A free Wordpress blog doesn’t make sense as your only blog.
A free Wordpress blog is a great way to learn the ropes.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.socialmediatherapy.com/2009/07/03/a-free-wordpress-blog-can-really-cost-you/

Posted in Wordpress | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

The Most Amazing Wordpress theme – Headway 1.5
(Part Two)

I responded to comment on the original post about Headway this morning.

Headway 1.5 Premium Wordpress Theme

Andrew wanted to know what it could “do”. That’s a reasonable question, so I thought I’d try to answer it.

I think the list of features, or the actual tasks it can do, is probably similar to other premium themes. The big “woah” moment for me was the visual editor.

I had an event happen a week ago that caused me to need to get a site up quickly, like from nothing, no idea or content, to functioning site in like 4 hours.

I could have copied an existing site, using my old handcoded theme and thrown it up, changed the colors and been done with it, but I used Headway.

It was easy to create the pages in Wordpress, then play with the visual editor to decide colors and layout.

I could add a wigetized sidbar, or 3, and put them where I wanted them.

I could control the width by click and drag to the width I wanted. Changing the width of the sidebay is usually going into the CSS file and guessing, then reloading the page, then guessing again. With this, I clicked and dragged until I was happy.

Of course the color pickers were easy and wonderful. You clicked on the element you wanted to color, and clicked on the color picker. That element was now that color.

I want to be sure I’m communicating this clearly. I like this theme, not because it “does stuff”, but that it does stuff in a visual editor. It’s value is not in what it does, but in how it does it.

You can select elements in a drop down menu and style them from there, but you can also just click on the area that you want to style to select it.

The visual editor is a bunch of “floating palettes” over the top of your page. You have to move the palettes around sometimes, to see what’s behind them on the page.

I also used Headway premium Wordpress theme to build my coming business site, You Can Sell Crafts. I spent less than two hours on that site. I’m not promoting that much yet and the products aren’t in place, so I just needed a quick and dirty site for now.

I like it though.

The SEO stuff is great. The transition stuff is great. I haven’t tried the image stuff yet, but I’m sure that’s all great too. Whatever, dude. All the other premium themes out there are great too.

What's totally awesome (I do live near the beach and have long hair, so I can say that without irony) is the visual editor.

It’s like building a site in Photoshop instead of BBEdit, where I usually work. You don’t even have to go to a settings page, save the settings, then check the page. None of that.

You are seeing the page as you design the page, on the page, without leaving the page.

I’ll even complain about the lack of control on absolutely everything. If something needs to be styled or added, but it’s not in the drop down to be selected, I can do it through the editor, by changing the style sheet manually, which is what I’m used to. No loss. No gain.

But, I’m telling you, this visual editor changed the rules.

Woah, dude.

Posted in Wordpress | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

God Has Given Each Of You

I was working on a video project for a church. They wanted a video to show at an “appreciation” dinner, where they feed all of the volunteers that work hard all year to make things happen and do thing to help other people, both inside and outside the church.

They wanted to open with this verse. I thought it was appropriate for anyone with a small business, regardless of your religious beliefs (and yes, I know you have them.)

“God has given each of you some special abilities; be sure to use them to help each other, passing on to others God’s many kinds of blessing.”
1 Peter 4:10 (LB)

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

How To Succeed In Business

The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.

Dick Costolo
Founder, FeedBurner

Read the entire article at: http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/03/too_many_companies.html

I read a lot of articles and ebooks about how to make money on the Internet. I can give you a lot of advice. I know a lot of stuff. We can talk and you would learn a lot from me. I have a fountain of information and I could really, really give you some great advice on how to make money on the Internet.

Or…

You could just do it yourself. The real key to making a business succeed on the Internet is to just do it.

Then, keep doing it.

The only people who fail at business are the people who quit doing it.

There are no magic bullets.

The Secret is: “Work your ass off”.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Read the entire article at: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/238372936/the-secret-2-0-watch-this-video-to-see-what-the

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

FITZ’S BOTTLING CO. PREMIUM MICRO-BREWED STRAWBERRY, Soda Pop Review

I’m on a strawberry kick, so this one was next.

The color was pretty artificial, but I’ve liked other sodas made by Fitz’s, so I wasn’t sure which way this one would go.

The smell – Not bad. Smells like strawberries, but not too sweet or artificial.

The taste – Good. This has a good solid fruit taste that’s above average. It’s full of fruity goodness. It’s a little bit, I don’t know. They didn’t use real sugar in this or something. It’s not bad, so I won’t take any points off.

The aftertaste is a little artificial, but not too bad.

This is a good soda, a solid above average, but I’d buy the Jackson Hole Strawberry instead. This will do if you can’t find anything else and you’re hurting for strawberry soda.

Posted in Soda Pop | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

JACKSON HOLE SODA CO. STRAWBERRY RHUBARB, Soda Pop Review

I loved the Jackson Hole Soda Company’s High Mountain Huckleberry. It was really fruity without the syrupy sweetness. This one had to be good too, although strawberry is really easy to make too sweet. I’m cautious.

Cool label, once again. No photo for this one.

The first sniff is promising. Enough strawberry, but not too sweet.

The sip is good. Yes, folks, we have another winner. Got balance of fruit and sweetness. It’s full and complex and fruity.

Wait for the aftertaste and there it is, even better than the sip.

It’s like your whole mouth is filled with fresh strawberries.

Wow, this one is very good. I’ll be buying this one again. Yes, I will.

Posted in Soda Pop | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

Why Don’t Bloggers Understand Email Marketing? by Yaro Starak

Building an email list is important if you are going to be doing any marketing on line.

Building an email list is important if you are going to be doing any kind of marketing on line.

Let me repeat that.

If you are going to be selling anything on line, then you need to be capturing email addresses of people who are interested in what you are selling.

An email list is just an automated way to gather email addresses and send them emails in a managed way.

There’s a few moving parts to the system, so it’s difficult to understand for some people.

First, there’s “the list”. This is a list of names and email addresses.

How do people get on that list? Why, they subscribe, of course.

There’s a mechanism put in place to make sure that they people on the list actually WANT to be on the list. That’s the “confirmation email”.

When they fill out the form on your site, the system send them an email and asks them to confirm that they want to be on the list. They need to respond to that email or they don’t get added.

This second step does two things. It stops people from pranking other people by putting other people’s emails. It stops people from using bogus email addresses.

This means that every email on your list has received an email and responded to that email, so it has been proven to be a real email address of someone who cares enough to say “yes”.

The people who go through that process are golden. These are your people. These are the people who want your stuff. They want your content. They want you to tell them wonderful things to make their lives better.

These are the people who will give you money. Treat them well.

The second part is you sending them emails. We’ll talk more about that later. Go read this article first.

How Email Will Make A Difference To Your Blogging

I don’t think bloggers totally understand how the email list fits in with blogging, since on the surface they seem like very similar mediums, both delivering content with the focus on increasing the number of subscribers you have.

Oh, and to clarify, when I say build a list, I’m not talking about a list that just replicates your RSS feed service. This isn’t a list that sends out your latest blog posts and that’s it. This list provides unique value and has a defined purpose within your business.

People read email immediately as it comes in. People read blogs when they want to and tend to skip a lot of it because they scan due to consuming so much at once.

The mindset a person is in when reading blog content is different to email. When reading blogs you are either looking for entertainment, going from blog to blog in a mass content consumption frenzy, or searching for answers to a particular question.

When reading email you are consuming much more personal content. Outside of spam of course, emails are addressed to your name, some even come from family or friends, and while a message from a list you subscribe to isn’t necessarily that personal (it does have your name if the list owner does it right), it comes to you in a place where by nature you pay a special kind of attention.

Simply put – people pay more attention and a higher quality of attention to their email because of the state of mind they are in while reading messages.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/947/why-dont-bloggers-understand-email-marketing/

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

FENTIMANS TRADITIONAL VICTORIAN LEMONADE, Soda Pop Review

FENTIMANS TRADITIONAL VICTORIAN LEMONADE

How can anything that’s named “Victorian” be bad? I mean that was a gentler time when people had refined tastes, right?

This was going to be great stuff.

Look at the bottle. How cool is the bottle. If you look closely, you can see that the glass has a slight blue/green tint to it. The shape is unique. It feels good in the hand, just the right size and shape.

The first smell. Nothing. Maybe a tiny whiff of something like lemon, but there’s no real smell here at all.

OK, so it’s gentle and Victorian.

The first sip and bammo! This stuff tastes like battery acid! There’s no sweetness to it. There’s not even a lot of lemon, just sour, sour, sour.

Bleck. Wow. My jaw is hurting. This is the most sour drink I’ve ever had.

I try another sip. Woo. Woo. Woo. This is strong and sour and this is not a pleasant experience at all!

I try to man up and drink the rest. I can’t. This is the first soda that I can not even finish.

I dump it out in the kitchen sink. It instantly cleans the rust spots.
(OK, that last one wasn’t true.)

I save the bottle for my wife because she thinks it’s pretty.

Just don’t think about how it tastes…

INGREDIENTS: Carbonated Water,Fermented Ginger Root Extracts,Sugar,Lemon Juice Concentrate,Glucose Syrup,Natural Flavours(Lemon,Speedwell and Juniper Extracts),Pear Juice Concentrate,Cream of Tartar

Posted in Soda Pop | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

Secret Marketing Tip For Wordpress Users. Press This!

If you use Wordpress for your blog and you can’t think of something to write about, go find some relevant blog posts to inspire you. Use Google news or Technorati to find something.

Here’s the secret tip. Go to Tools -> Tools in your site. See that thing that says “Press This”? Read that.

Grab little bits of the web

Drag and drop that link to your bookmark tool bar in your browser. It should stay there.

Go to some random, relevant page out there on the web, maybe one that you commented on.

Select some text that you want to quote on your site.

Click on the “Press This” toolbar link.

It will copy the text that you selected, open your blog with an “add new post” page, and plop that copy into it, with a link back to the original site. It will put the text into a “blockquote” which changes the formatting.

You can comment on what you’ve copied.

Look at this post on my site.
http://www.walton.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-marketing-hard-remarkable-communication.html

I write some of my comments at the top and put in one of my photos. Then, the quoted copy is below that in a “blockquote”. There are a couple lines from what Sonia wrote on her page with a link back to her page below.

This gives you content and something to write about, plus it’s a link to a relevant page, plus whoever you link to will appreciate the link and might come read your site.

Don’t copy too much from someone else’s site, no more than 3 paragraphs or so. This is “fair use”, not plagiarism.

This is a great way to get ideas of things to write about and build some relationships with other bloggers.

Remember that more pages on your site means more internal links and more authority with Google.

Now, go Press This!

Posted in SEO | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 1 Comment »

DR. BROWN’S CEL-RAY SODA, Soda Pop Review

DR. BROWN'S CEL-RAY SODA

Celery soda pop? Really? This ought to be interesting.

I expect the flavor to be really weak, like celery is. You could eat celery all day long and not get anything out of it.

Compared to creme soda or black cherry or something, this has to be worse. There can’t be much flavor in this stuff.

The smell gets nothing. There’s not really a smell to it, as expected.

OK, the first taste is… wow. This is different.

What is that flavor?

Ack. Not liking this at all. I take another sip to try to figure it out.

It’s not a weak flavor at all. This is strong.

It is sweet. There must be sugar in there somewhere.

But it’s something else more than sweet. It’s really vegetablely. It’s like they boiled celery down so it was stronger and then made soda out of it.

This is what I imagine cabbage soda to taste like.

This is not good. I finish the bottle, because that’s what I do, but this is strange. I shouldn’t say it’s “bad”, as much as it’s not a flavor that I like.

There is a distinct vegetable flavor.

This is soda pop for vegans.

They can keep it. I’m done with it.

I’ll give Dr. Brown’s props for trying this, but bleck.

INGREDIENTS: Carbonated Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Citric Acid, Extract Of Celery Seed, With Other Natural Flavors, Sodium Benzoate (Preservative)And Caramel Color.

Posted in Soda Pop | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

JACKSON HOLE SODA CO. HIGH MOUNTAIN HUCKLEBERRY, Soda Pop Review

JACKSON HOLE SODA CO.
HIGH MOUNTAIN HUCKLEBERRY

I was hoping that this one would be good. I love the label. I took extra photos of the label.

I’m wondering if that was all hype to make it looks old and nostalgic or if it was the real deal.

The smell was disappointing. There was not much there.

The sip? The sip was good.

It had a real fruity, berry taste.

There was real berries in the flavor. It was sweet and good and fresh and wonderful.

There was a bit of the mountain meadow in there. Yes, it was good.

The aftertaste was good too. It was stronger than the sip. It stayed with you for a minute.

Ah, berries. Yes, yes, I think I like this one.

It’s not too strong. It’s not too sweet. It’s full of berry flavor and not that artificial stuff.

This is good. I’ll buy it again.

INGREDIENTS: CARBONATED WATER, SUGAR, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, CITRIC ACID, PROPYLENE GLYCOL, GUM ACACIA, CARAMEL COLOR, RED #40, BLUE #1, SODIUM BENZOATE (PRESERVATIVE).

Posted in Soda Pop | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org – The Definitive Overview for Business – Remarkablogger

How much control do you want?

It’s a balance of simple and no control against difficult and total control.

Being the control freak that I am, I always choose control. I want you, as my client, to have as much control as you can. I can make the total control of your own web site a little bit simpler, and be there when you have questions.

Which do you choose?

Hosting: Self or Other

The biggest major difference between the two WordPresses is that the dot com version is hosted for you for free on Automattic’s servers, while the dot org version is software you install on your own web server. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress. Hosting with WordPress.com means you save a lot of money, because it’s free, and you never have to worry about your server crashing. You never have to worry about upgrades, because they’re automatic. Everything just works.

To receive those benefits requires you to give up something very important to a business: sovereignty. You don’t control the software or the server. There are incredible extras and freedoms unavailable to you if you go with the dot com version of WordPress. If you install WordPress on your own web server, we call that self-hosted WordPress to quickly tell which flavor of WordPress we’re talking about.

Self-hosted is a double-edged sword. With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have access to scads of themes and plugins that will let you do amazing things with WordPress that you can’t do on the dot com version—it’s like getting the keys to the kingdom. But you’re responsible for managing everything and keeping it updated. Plugins, themes, and WordPress itself require constant upgrading and backing up. Sometimes there are glitches that can only be solved by people who really know what they’re doing. If that’s not you, then you must have access to a qualified person.

Read the entire article at:
http://remarkablogger.com/2009/11/19/wordpress-com-vs-wordpress-org-the-definitive-overview-for-business

Posted in Wordpress | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

PLANTATION STYLE MINT JULEP, Soda Pop Review

PLANTATION STYLE MINT JULEP

I had high hopes for this one. I expected so much from this one that I bought three bottles of it.

I do love real mint juleps. I hate mouthwash.

This could go either way. Was I wrong? Would my bet pay off?

The smell was perfect. Nice, sweet, mellow, fresh mint. It was not too much. It was just enough.

The flavor was perfect. The aftertaste was perfect.

This had the perfect blend of mint flavor and sweetness. You can taste the sugar. It was smooth.

Wow. My bet paid off. I love this stuff.

It tastes like a Mojito.

The difference between real sugar and real mint compared to something called “artificial flavors” is so evident in this soda.

I could drink these all day.

I just might.

INGREDIENTS: Carbonated Water, Sugar, Flavor and Citric Acid.

Posted in Soda Pop | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

BUBBLE UP, Soda Pop Review

BUBBLE UP

Bubble up, “A kiss of lemon, kiss of lime”. I used to drink this one when I was a kid too. I remember it being good and just like 7Up. There was always 7up and Bubble Up. I have no idea why it ever died out. Maybe there was a Ninja fight to the death between the owners of the two companies or something.

I was looking forward to this one. I was curious if it was just as good as 7up and as good as I remembered.

First whiff was good. There was the lemon lime smell, clear and strong.

The flavor of the first sip was great. A flood of memories, but also crisp, clean lemon and lime. Not too sweet, but sweet enough. They hit that magic balance between not sweet enough and too syrupy. Very nice.

THe lemon is really strong. It’s nice. There not too much citrus acid bite, but just a hint of that.

It mostly tastes like fruit, like citrus. They got that fruit flavor to come to the center stage.

Very nicely done. This is better than 7up. 7up is more acid, less sweet, and a lot less fruit. This is twice as good as 7up.

It must have been that Ninja thing, because this stuff should be on every grocery store shelf.

INGREDIENTS: “Contains: Carbonated Water, Cane Sugar, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Sodium Benzoate (A Preservative), and Flavor derived from Lemon and Lime Oils.”

Posted in Soda Pop | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

What Makes Marketing Hard? | Remarkable Communication

I’m becoming a fan of Sonia’s work. She’s got great advice about how to communicate with people. You should click through and read her whole article, then sign up for her mailing lists. She’s that good.

In my experience, I’m finding that I can teach my clients all the technical information in the world, but what people generally stumble on is the “marketing”. That seems to be the killer for most people with small businesses.

On a completely unrelated note, I had a chance to be in Yucca Valley yesterday and took this photo of the crescent moon at sunset. I just had to share it with the class. There’s no other reason for the photo, except I really liked it. Well, and maybe to make up for the “twice as nice” photo in the next post.

Yucca Valley Sunset

by Sonia Simone

I’ve been spending more time lately teaching folks who are new to marketing, and I’m finding it really fascinating.

The same themes come up again and again. These are people who had an interesting idea for a product to sell or a service to market, but they run up against a horrid scary intimidating wall: marketing.

(And even scarier, its evil twin, selling.)

It seems impossibly hard. It seems like something for “other people.” It seems like they’d need a personality transplant to make it work for them.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.remarkable-communication.com/why-is-marketing-hard/

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 1 Comment »

Twice As Nice

This sign was in multiple places at an AM PM gas station. I had to take a photo.

I mean, really? Doesn’t anyone read this stuff before spending money on it?

The take away advice here is to have a 13 year old boy read your copy before you publish it, just to make sure there are no gross jokes involved.

If I had a photo of someone throwing up, I’d Photoshop it in.

So nice, you'll taste it twice.

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »