Business Blogs: Trends, tips, and real-life anecdotes from industry experts.

I picked up a book in the airport recently: Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher. It’s a fast read and has enough tabloid photos to keep you interested. Her come-sit-by-me-and-dish point of view is disarming and I genuinely enjoyed her tales, her vulnerability and her wit. More importantly, I respect what she is doing.

Wishful Drinking

Carrie Fisher [...]

Just learned about EveryBlock, is a new way to keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over. You can choose your city and get a citywide overview of news by category. I might never eat in my own neighborhood again given the amount of violations reported….
The site is one [...]

Recently, I was contacted by a PR firm (Attention) and asked if I would profile Blake Mycoskie on my blog(s). I’m ashamed to say how long it’s taken me to turn this piece around, however seeing the latest ATT commercial featuring Blake after a long day of meetings (at my day job) shamed me into finishing. My [...]

I typically focus on email marketing, since it is cost effective, it has a viral quality, and VerticalResponse happens to offer a great email solution for startups, but the following suggestions can apply to direct mail projects as well.
When designing your email campaign or your promotion mailing, from copy to layout, consider how your recipient [...]

So I’ve spoken briefly about Twitter in the past. I am still observing the form to understand its place in the overall ecosystem of social networking…and I heard recently that Strunk & White just released a 50th Anniversary Edition of the Elements of Style. To me, it was the perfect collision of old and new…and [...]

A few years ago, banner advertising was at the forefront of online marketing resources. As banner advertising rose to popularity, more and more business owners began to incorporate the costs of banner advertising into their marketing budget, enticed by the fact that they would be able to quantifiably track which ads their website visitors [...]

I attended a presentation today by Clara Shih from Salesforce.com. Clara has a book coming out called The Facebook Era about how businesses are networking, marketing and selling more stuff through social networking apps. We do a fair amount of social media marketing here at VerticalResponse and we definitely believe in it’s value for small [...]

My team visited Scottsdale, Arizona last week as exhibitor and sponsor of the Women Entrepreneurs’ Boot Camp.  We had a chance to sit down with organizer, Susan Ratliff, and discussed key marketing tips and business tactics for beating the recession in 2009 and I thought I’d share some of her insights.
Susan happens to be an [...]

By Erin Jacobs, VerticalResponse
Customers often ask me, what are the best offers to use in email marketing programs, or any lead generation program for that matter.  The answer, of course, is dependent on a list of factors- among them: What is the nature of your business? What are you trying to achieve with your email? [...]

In a recent blog post Drew McLellan tells the story of a 1989 campaign from Crowley Webb for Garcia’s Irish Pub in Buffalo, New York. “[This] most brilliant outdoor campaign broke every one of these rules,” he says. “Every single one.”
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For nine weeks in a row a new billboard would appear in the same location, with [...]