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

When you consider your business model (which includes your marketing efforts), you generally concentrate on these core components:

Why will people pay you? (money, votes, donations)
What does it cost you to sell your item…margins?
What protects you from competition, price-feature battles?
How will you turn an agnostic audience into loyal customers?

Early on when transactions had no costs, doing [...]

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 [...]

Obviously John Wooden is not on my advisory board, but he is in my Pantheon-of-Wonderful-People.
Quote to consider
No written word, no spoken plea Can teach our youth what they should be; Nor all the books on all the shelves It’s what the teachers are themselves. Given to John Wooden by his Father upon Graduation And now [...]

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 [...]

I received a press release today that deserves a few minutes of your scanning. It’s the monthly consumer confidence report issued by The Conference Board.
It shows that consumer confidence actually trended up this month for the first time this year. Is this a sign that we’re going to start hustling and bustling again? Well, little by little, [...]

As yet another way for StartupNation to look out for your best interests in improving the performance of your business, we’ve decided to leverage our awesome PR firm for your benefit. We’ve teamed up with them to provide you a free service whereby we find great publicity opportunities for you.
StartupNation’s PR team is currently looking [...]

If you are on a bootstrap marketing budget and looking for do-it-yourself publicity, you need to be on “GARD” for media opportunities that can catapult your brand to the next level.
In this video, I explain the “do it yourself” system that has helped me garner media features from such outlets as USA Today, E! TV, [...]

This example is why newspapers and TV must reinvent themselves, or die.
Obama is Lincoln v2.0
Taking a page out of Lincoln’s Handbook on How To Be A Good President, Obama is everywhere in the community: at dinner, on The Tonight Show, at the soup kitchens, in meetings, on The Hill. He’s like the “Where’s Waldo?” of Presidents. He’s [...]