And this is the problem with just about every lame speech, every overlooked memo, every worthless bit of boilerplate foisted on the world: you write and write and talk and talk and bullet and bullet but no, you’re not really saying anything.

It took me two minutes to find a million examples. Here’s one, "The firm will remain competitive in the constantly changing market for defense legal services by creating and implementing innovative and effective methods of providing cost-effective, quality representation and services for our clients."

Write nothing instead. It’s shorter.

Most people work hard to find artful ways to say very little. Instead of polishing that turd, why not work harder to think of something remarkable or important to say in the first place?

this list was amazingly acquired by:http://www.ezmarketing.com/classifieds.shtml

So mad props and a little link love deserves to go this way!

So here it is, the holy grail to both riches and Google page rank juice!

Most Internet marketers don’t appreciate the pulling power of classified ads.
They think classifieds ads are for selling cars or finding jobs not for promoting an online business.
While it’s true a classified ad is a good way to sell a car, or find a job, it is also true that online classified ads can be used to launch and promote your online business and by adding the link to your web sites in your ads you may also help improve your page rankings.

Here’s a list of online classifieds that offer free ads. I have used most of these over the years and the ones highlighted in yellow are my most productive sites. If you have others that work well let me know about them and I’ll add them here for others to use. Contact me…

Craigslist

1 Class Ads
1 America Mall Classifieds

AR-Auto Classifieds

Able Wise Classifieds
Ad Net! Classifieds

AD-Line Classifieds
Ad An Ad
Adland Pro Classifieds manages over 3700 of the Web’s classified sites. Place a free ad about your website and you are linked to all these sites. I have been using Adland Pro since 1999 and it is the best classified ad site around.
Ads For Free

Alaska Classifieds Ads

Amcho Classifieds Ads

American Classified – Free classified Ad Online
AdsOMatic
Atlantic ClassifiedsAtomicbot Classifieds
AZ Family Free Classifieds
BCT Marketing 4 U Ad Post Classifieds
BestHost Classifieds
Best Mall
BMI’s Free Classifieds
Buy & Sell Classifieds
Business 8 Free Ads
Buy & Sell Online
Cashscripts Free Classifieds
City News Classifieds
Citisale Classifieds Online
Classifieds 1000 Free Ads
Classifieds For Free
Classifieds Network
Classifieds Worldwide
Commerce Classifieds
Com Corner Free Ads
Cyberod2000 Free Classifieds
DEW Agencies Classifieds
Direct-Go Classifieds
Domestic Sale Classifieds
EPage Classifieds manages over 28800 of the Web’s classified sites place an ad and you are linked to all them.
EC E-Classified Ads
EzClassifieds & Everyday Business Ads
Excite Classifieds
Find It Free Classifieds
Flea Market at FUW
For Sale C1
Free Classifieds
Free Classified Ads
Free World Classifieds
Gateway 2 China Classifieds
Gems 4 Friends Classifieds
Global SIC Classifieds
Health Shopper Classifieds
HGG Group Classified Site
High Desert Computer
Hotel Online Classifieds
InfoSpace Classifieds
Jo’s Hope Classifieds
Junk Mail
Kick Ads
Kingdom Classifieds
Loot Classified Ads
Marketing Resource Classifieds
MGA Web Submissions and Classifieds
Mjmls Classifieds Free Advertising
My Town Ads Free Online Classifieds
Net Classifieds
Net Nickel Classifieds
Net Trader
NetScape Classifieds
New Quest City National Classifieds
OZ Free Classifieds
PC Adz Classifieds
Post A Classified
Potter County Classifieds
Quick-Checks Free Classifieds

RLAJ Classifieds
Route 6 Classifieds Online
Salem County Classifieds
Santa Barbara Classifieds
Sell Buy or Trade
Selling Ads
Showroom Today
Sula Small Biz Classifieds
Software 4 Profit Classifieds
The Classified Page
Three Sisters Classifieds Network
Torontonian Classifieds
Totally Free Ads
US Free Ads
USFreeads has been providing high traffic, high response Free Classifieds since 1999. They also offer a lucrative 2 tier affiliate program. Earn Money from Free Classifieds.
USA Shopper Classifieds
UltraBoard
VMG Classifieds
Victoria B.C. Buy N Sell
Waron Marketing Classifieds
WWB City
Web Sitings Classifieds
Web Adder Classifieds
Web Ads Online Classifieds
Webmaster Tool Central Classifieds List
Web Zone Classifieds
Yahoo! Classifieds
Ziply

Giving away a magician’s secrets

Steve Cohen makes more than a million dollars a year doing magic tricks.

I will now tell you the secrets of this magic:

1. He sells to a very specific group of people, people who are both willing to hear what he has to say and able to pay what he wants to charge them.
2. He tells a story to this group, a story that matches their worldview. He doesn’t try to teach non-customers a lesson or persuade them that they are wrong or don’t know enough about his art. Instead, he makes it easy for his happy customers to bring his art to others.
3. He intentionally creates an experience that is remarkable and likely to spread. "What did you do last night?" is a great question when it’s asked of someone you entertained the night before, particularly if you can give the audience an answer they can give. That’s how the word spreads.
4. He’s extremely generous in who he works with, how promiscuous he is about sharing and in his attitude.
5. He’s very good at his craft. Don’t overlook this one.

I guess it comes down to this: if you’re having trouble persuading people to buy what you sell, perhaps you should sell something else. Failing that, perhaps you could talk about what you sell in a different way.

Important clarification: I’m not telling you to sell out or to pander or to dumb down your art. Great marketers lead people, stretching the boundaries and bringing new messages to people who want to hear them. The core of my argument is that someone’s worldview, how they feel about risk or other factors, is beyond your ability to change in the short run. Sell people something they’re interesting in buying. If you can’t leverage the worldview they already have, you are essentially invisible. Which is a whole other sort of magic, one that’s not so profitable.

Seeded from: http://askdirectmarketers.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/sales-and-marketing-differences-defined/#comment-205

Your question: Selling and marketing are used similarly–they’re interexchangable terms in many people’s minds.  Can you explain the difference?

Our answer: In a perfect world, sales and marketing are aligned so well, that it truly is hard to understand where marketing ends and where sales begins. At its most basic, Marketing develops sales leads, by a combination of some of the following disciplines:

• Creating a reputable brand. Creating the right product perception.
• Nurturing leads that are not quite ready to buy.
• Understanding the life-cycle of a prospect, so that sales can close the lead once they are ready to buy.
• Maximizing channels such as advertising, public relations, branding, social marketing and direct response techniques.

Then, sales is responsible for closing the sale–getting that contract signed. The sales process relies on one-on-one relationships. Sales relies on meetings, cold calls, and networking. Sales engages with the prospect or customer on a personal level rather than at a distance.

Personal selling is the process of putting a human being in contact with customers and allowing the relationship that develops to result in a sale for the business. A good salesperson is an excellent listener and always attempts to meet client needs, and match their company’s capabilities to those needs.

When sales and marketing work together, you’ll see the best results. Too often, we see a huge gap between marketing and sales, and oftentimes it’s only a communications issue. Marketing believes that sales are lazy because they’re not working the leads that Marketing worked so hard to acquire. Conversely, sales thinks that marketing’s leads are junk–that they’re not qualified and not nearly ready to buy.

It truly is key to get sales and marketing on the same page. Hold meetings so that each group understands what the others’ goals are. Marketing really needs to listen to sales because they’re closest to the customer. Sales needs to understand what the corporate objectives and overall strategies are so that they can drive to the same strategies. When you can get your sales and marketing teams to work together, you’ll win by having a better pipeline and more closed sales.

Simpler words have not been written. Here is the blueprint on becoming successful on the internet. Period!

Please take some time to read this over, ponder it, and then give me a call if you want to work together.  In this internet game, it is a support oriented concerted effort. . .and all get successful together!

Good Gawd, this is seth godin at his absolute best!

10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.

Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I’m not sure if there’s a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people’s personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).

Some ways to think about this:

• George Clooney (in  Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
• Farmers don’t dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
• Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
• When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
• Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
• Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
• Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
• Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
• The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
• A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
• One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
• A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.

Who are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?

Profound  words, by Seth Godin

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we’re amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can’t help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long off to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.

Want to know why so many companies can’t keep up with Apple? It’s because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.

The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.

Now you’ve seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?

The Future is US. . . . .

The Future is NOW!

"I am the hole on the flute that God’s breath flows through." 
Eckhart Tolle

Team Hoyt is a father (Dick Hoyt, b. ca. 1940) and son (Rick Hoyt, born January 10, 1962) from who compete together in marathons together.  Rick has Cerebral Palsy, a condition acquired at birth because his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck during birth.

Dick pulls his son Rick in a special boat as they swim, carries him in a special seat up front as they bike, and pushes him in a special wheelchair as they run.

Dick explains, that the line is blurred, “. . .between me and my son, I don’t know who is giving the greatest gift. . .”

Go to Source

Dell continues to be one of the more visible corporate behemoths actively using social media, and today they’re out with new numbers to demonstrate some of the success they are having.

The company tells us that they’ve now generated a total of $6.5 million in revenue from their Twitter presence, where they have nearly 1.5 million followers on their @DellOutlet account (and 3 million “connections” across all social sites).

Although a tiny percentage of the company’s total sales (Dell generated more than $60 billion in revenue last year), it does represent significant growth in revenue via social media in the past year. Dell says its sales from Twitter have actually tripled, which is consistent with previous reports about their performance.

With real revenue now being generated via companies on Twitter, the question everyone is asking how Twitter will monetize it. The answer still isn’t clear, though the company continues to suggest that premium accounts for corporate users are in the works soon.

[img credit: pinksherbet]

Tags: dell, social media, twitter

Go to Source

Help your customers avoid taking responsibility

It’s interesting to see that people are much better at putting up with things that happen to them than they are at living with the consequences of a bad choice.

When you can blame someone else (or the gods of spite, chance and bad luck) it’s emotionally safer than it is to acknowledge you made a lousy choice.

If the weather is freakishly bad on your vacation, you can embrace pity from your friends, and spend your angst cursing the storms.

On the other hand, if you book a trip in the middle of hurricane season, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

This is a great opportunity for marketers and others that want to engage with the public. If you can figure out how to communicate, "it’s not your fault," then people will be grateful, and they’ll return. It might not be right, it might not be mature and it might not be the behavior society wants to advance, but it works.

Even better, figure out how to teach your customers to enjoy taking responsibility. It’s the long term solution that builds a healthy relationship between customer and vendor… you coach them on good choices and they embrace what happens after they make them.

"Hop in, I’ll drive."

Just because someone offers you a lift, doesn’t mean you have to take it.

In a joint venture or possible business arrangement, it’s reassuring when the other person offers to drive. "Leave it to me," they might say, or, "I’m socializing this through the organization… be patient, I’ve done this before and we need to do it this way."

Often, this is true. It’s the honest appraisal of a generous insider, someone who wants both of you to succeed.

But, just as you should never get in a car with a drunk driver, understand that the minute you let the other person drive, you’ve bought into their process. Spending three months or three years following someone off a cliff is nuts.

I’d rather disappoint you today and refuse your offer of a lift than end up with both of us having wasted hours and hours of time somewhere further down the road. No, you can’t pitch this to your husband, that’s my job. No, I won’t stand by and watch you mangle this before the board. No, we’re not going to interact with customers your way merely because it’s the only way you know.

Thanks, but I’ll drive this time.

Friction

Stamps (remember those?) make direct mail work. Because it costs money to send a piece of junk mail, you’ll think two or three times before you mail something to a million people.

Email, of course, is free.

Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending email to everyone all the time is the cost of all the people you’ll lose. You might lose them because they unsubscribe, or more likely, you’ll train them to ignore you. Worse still, you might just make them annoyed enough to badmouth you.

Drugstore.com made two mistakes with their relationship with me. First, they bought the lie that opt out is a productive strategy. They unilaterally decided that I’d be delighted to get regular emails from them, merely because I bought some shaving cream.

The second mistake? They didn’t bother to be selective about what they sent.

I’ve never purchased diapers online, since my diaper purchases predate online diaper shopping. And my hope is that I won’t be buying Depends for another fifty years or so. Drugstore.com should know this. And yet, because it’s apparently free to email me, some lame brand manager says, "sure, do it!"

Except then I unsubscribe and an asset that is worth ten or a hundred or a thousand dollars disappears, probably forever.

Find friction and embrace it, don’t ignore it.

This is a profound Sethism

From the Master, Seth Godin

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them. As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, "I’m going to post this."

If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.) "Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time" is a strategy.

Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics.

In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.

The next time you find yourself spending 8 hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.

This is WHY you endeavor to grow your friends/followers/fans on Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, [fill in the blank]. . . .

The quality score is a really complex black box algorithm, there are many things that it takes into account. Here is for example something that is very far from being intuitive or obvious: If you just added a keyword and you bid a very low amount (seems to be correlated with what…
Don’t be a miser with AdWords, or at least don’t show it – http://www.ppchacking.com

It’s official!

Microsoft announced today that they have struck a deal to power Yahoo’s search, while at the same time Yahoo will be powering paid ads on Bing.com (Microsoft’s new search platform…formerly known as MSN).

You can get all the details here:

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-29release.mspx

…and here:

http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx

So why is this good news for marketers?

It’s simple. With Yahoo and Microsoft now a team, Google finally has some competition in the search market. This means:

1. Ad costs may go down, and…
2. Google may stop being such enormous jerks to their advertisers (which could mean less “Google Slaps”)

Obviously this is just my speculation, and the deal doesn’t go final until 2010 so don’t expect anything to change overnight, but competition is (almost) always a good thing for consumers, so for now, at least, I’m chearing this deal.

Comment below and let me know what you think…  Woot!

-Ryan

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

this was seeded from http://drivingtraffic.com/microsoft-and-yahoo-challenge-google/ so Ryan Deiss gets the props and the scoop!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Winning on the uphills A continuing Sethism from the Soothsayer himself. . . .

Every So Often I come across a particularly selfish, self-centered, sophomoric client in my businesses that tests my patience. I am quick to become curt, identify that person as a zero-sum gain as II become aware of the large sucking sound of my time being wasted.  I then quickly write those people off. . .

I read this today and it changed my attitude. . .

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Interesting business lesson learned on a bicycle: it’s very difficult to improve your performance on the downhills.

I used to dread the uphill parts of my ride. On a recumbent bike, they’re particularly difficult. So I’d slog through, barely surviving, looking forward to the superspeedy downhill parts.

Unfortunately, I had a serious accident a few years ago (saving the life of a clueless pedestrian by throwing myself onto the pavement). Downhill might be fast, but it’s crazy.

Lesson learned. Now, I look forward to the uphill parts, because that’s where the work is, the fun is, the improvement is. On the uphills, I have a reasonable shot at a gain over last time. The downhills are already maxed out by the laws of physics and safety.

The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset. The moment you earn your keep as a public speaker is when the room isn’t just right or the plane is late or the projector doesn’t work or the audience is tired or distracted. The best time to engage with an employee is when everything falls apart, not when you’re hitting every milestone. And everyone now knows that the best time to start a project is when the economy is lousy.

Most of your competition spend their days looking forward to those rare moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn’t.

The law of the little shovel

. . .another Sethism! Gawd, I love this man!

If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.

If you walk around town with a little shovel, you’ll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.

Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.

The important thing to remember is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it’s not going to start working better just because you use it more often.

Connected events, on the other hand, often benefit from frequency and trust.

Which leads to two viable strategies:
1. If you can stay still, stay still. Earn the trust, earn the sale by repeatedly demonstrating value and authority.

2. If you can’t stay still, get a bigger shovel. Your marketing and your sales pitch has to be so refined and focused that it works the first time, because you don’t get a second time.

I came by this via Twitter, and after watching this video, found huge resonation. This is the next big future modality of the internet and as you have already learned. You either adopt and exploit as a business, or be sidelined and rendered ineffectual. Watch, let it make you uncomfortable, and comment. You are my family, and we are a power together!

Taking the leap

More Sethisms from the Master!

The best businesses and the best projects are a quantum leap above the competition. This gulf represents competitive insulation, because others can’t figure out how to get up there with you.

Amazon, for example, has a leap between it and other online retailers. Sure, you might be able to mimic part of what they’ve got, but the gulf is so huge, it’s hard to imagine displacing them any time soon.

Nike has spent billions on advertising, sponsorship, manufacturing, technology and distribution. It’s a quantum leap between them and some start-up that wants to compete.

I think going for the leap is essential for creating a business for the ages, and I want to speculate that there are three ways to make it:

1. BUY IT–you can raise a lot of money or spend a lot of the company’s R&D or marketing money and just buy yourself a huge head start and this provides insulation. (This is my least favorite, because spending like a drunken sailor often leads to other drunken behaviors, including remorse the next day).
2. SNEAK UP THE CURVE–you can quietly develop your business fairly cheaply and then, by the time the competition notices you, it’s too late. Build a Bear Workshop is a great example of this. One store at a time they built a brand, a cash flow and a nationwide footprint that makes it awfully difficult for others to compete. McDonald’s did the same thing.
3. THE NETWORK EFFECT–some markets are ready for one (and usually only one) intermediary to show up and be the default winner. Twitter and Comdex and Alexander Graham Bell are great examples of this.

There are probably some others (like make a genius innovation in your basement and then patent it) but these three are good ones to start with.

Facts always win, right?

Sage and salient word from Seth Godin. . .

If you’re selling a business to business service and you can prove that it’s better, that it delivers more value, that it’s cheaper or more durable or more efficient, shouldn’t that mean you will close every sale?

Even hard-headed business people end up buying the thing they want, not the thing they necessarily need.

The real danger of relying on facts to make your sale, though, is that when the facts are no longer on your side, you’re toast. The low-cost supplier gets hooked on the easy sales that come from acting like a commodity, and if that changes, you’ve got little room to maneuver.

Great brands and projects are built on real value and a real advantage, but great marketers use this as a supporting column, not the entire foundation. Instead, they build a story on top of their head start. They focus on relationships and worldviews and interactions, and use the boost from their initial head start to build competitive insulation.