From the category archives:
Let’s start at the beginning.
I don’t hate Timothy Ferriss, nor do I hate his book, “The Four Hour Work Week.”
In fact, I think the book is excellent in many ways on a tactical level.
What I do hate is the underlying philosophy that makes an idea like The 4- Hour Work Week so appealing. [...]
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Just because marketing advice is repeated often … doesn’t make it true.
“Find a need and fill it … that is the key to successfully marketing a business.” – Someone who needs to be slapped around a little bit.
Truth is, follow this “find a need and fill it” advice and you are inviting commodity pricing.
Think about [...]
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When I write about touchy subjects, I get angry E-mails.
In July of 2004, I wrote that b2b marketers and salespeople that rely on cold calling are like functional drunks. They don’t grow fully because of it … in the back of their mind they know it is bad for them … yet they manage to [...]
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Exceptional experiences that pack a story to tell are the new luxury marketing offers. (And there is a lesson here for all businesses, marketing to the affluent or not, so read on.)
People with disposable, six-figure incomes are spending money on luxury goods that used to be reserved for the “upper crust” of society. These are [...]
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If you honestly evaluate your advertising using the five questions in this message, one of two things will happen:
You’ll discover that your advertising provides compelling and powerful answers to each and every question. If so, congratulations—you’re in the top 1% of all small business advertisers, and you’re achieving amazing results from your advertising.
or
You’ll find that [...]
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For over a year, I spent my Tuesdays and Fridays sweating/grunting/bleeding/puking at Maximum Bob Whelan’s gym in Chinatown, Washington D.C. Calling it a gym might be a stretch. It was more a cave-like dwelling devoted to the voluntary infliction of pain and testing of limits. I loved everything about it.
A couple of months in, I [...]
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Landon, a computer reseller in Toronto, Canada, wrote it to ask:
“Michael, so much of what you talk about will cost money, but I’m stretched so thin right now that even a small expenditure is too much. If you had a turn around a small reseller quickly and without spending any money on marketing, how would [...]
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A few days back, a friend asked me why I spend so much time working with small businesses on their local internet marketing. His argument was that there is much more money to be made working with larger companies that have more money to spend.
Maybe, maybe not.
But to really answer the question, I need [...]
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A reader asks: “Michael, how can I get past the gatekeeper when I cold call? It seems like I always get stuck with the assistant. I feel like I’m banging my head up against a wall, day-in and day-out, trying to get through to the people who can buy my [widget]?”
Dear Reader,
Imagine the look [...]
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One of my favorite lunch spots is a Mexican chain called Qdoba. Like many restaurants, they have a customer loyalty program. In a nutshell, the more you eat there, the more incentives they give you to keep coming back. It’s a good deal all around. This week, something happened with that program that impressed me, [...]
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Plenty of ingredients go into a successful business.
In the early stages, one of the most important is having the energy [...]
One of the groups I’m most often asked about marketing to is the affluent.
Regardless of what you might have been [...]
This blog is and always has been about whatever is going on in my brain and my business — which [...]
