Category Archives: Marketing

In another blog entry, I wrote about a lad in the 1700’s whose elders decided was best suited to be a pirate. That lad was reborn and went to one of the best Chinese hacking schools that existed. Then, he learned the art of market disruption and did startups for a while. After a few years of failed startups, he had his first success — but, the venture capitalists took everything he made. The boy was angry because after all — he was the one who was supposed to be the pirate. But, I guess there is no honor among thieves.

After that, the young man decided that what he really liked was trying to do the modern equivalent of being a pirate like what he was in the 1700’s. He would shoot at other people’s boats. Swing over to their boat on a rope, fight them with swords, tie them up, plunder their gold and other valuables, and then set the ship on fire and watch it burn! His favorite part was waiting til the fire hit the powder kegs and watching the entire ship explode! Arr laddie! Twas a sight to be seen!

So, the man quit the startup business and went into mergers. He drank rum, sang pirate songs and coordinated mergers where the managers of the firm being bought out would all be fired and would go down with the ship. He went a step farther to hire a graphic designer to create graphics of the managers going down with a ship with a flag of their company. He enjoyed this career immensely. Then, he went into marketing for a while and enjoyed finding artful ways to steal the clients from particular businesses and watch them go bankrupt. Arr — the pleasure can’t be beat, even with two pints of rum!

In any case, this is a silly article, but hope you had fun reading it. It’s fun to think about what people would do if they were reincarnated into another time. I was actually a warrior in many of my earlier lives, but I evolved into a healer. From killing people to healing people — what a transition in my soul’s evolution. I no longer do Native American healing like I did in my shaman past lives. But, I do healing on myself. However, the warrior past lives from way back — several thousand years back in many cases seem to help me out in my business career. Business is like war. It’s hard to keep the troops together. So, defeating the enemy is one goal, but keeping your troops loyal these days is an even harder goal.

If you have ever visited marketingprofs.com, you will quickly realize that they make masterful marketing simple and understandable to the masses. Marketingprofs handles a wide variety of popular marketing and social media topics that concern us all such as: How to write a better title for our sales emails or ways for marketers to be more data driven.

One of the aspects of the writing style which I like the most is that it is easy to digest. The writing is in clear English and no decyphering is necessary. Another thing that is cute is the constant integration of themes about puppies, kitties, snacks, desserts, childhood, or other relatable themes. It is much more pleasant to read an article that has themes you can not only relate to, but that make you feel good.

Additionally, there are many graphics, charts, and other visual aids that make the reading experience more three-dimensional. Right now, I’m reading a chart about how people express laughter online. Haha wins the game with 51.4% of the total laughter while lol only is getting 1.9%? Could this really be true? Of course emoji’s often follow the verbalization of the laughter. Next, the age of the laughers was analyze in yet another chart. As a marketer I find all of this analysis very interesting — and that is no joke — lol-not!

I’m reading another article about how to woo bloggers into long term relationships to promote your brand. What I’m seeing in this article is something I saw a long time ago — subheaders. The subheaders here all have a very simple type of grammar which I have found tends to make it easier for readers to stick on the page mentally. People who spend too much time online get mentally frazzled and have some degree of ADD. Here are some of the subheaders used:

1. Identify your audience
2. Find the right bloggers
3. Create a real relationship
4. Help bloggers to grow
5. Understand what motivates each blogger
6. Show respect
7. Live up to your commitments

As you can see, each subheader starts with a simple verb in the imperative conjugation. Then, a unique continuation of the sentence fragment follows. Not all of the verbs are calls for aggressive action. Some are more introspective like understanding and some are more philosophical or philanthropical like helping others to grow. I particularly like the point about living up to your commitments as many people in social media do not publish links on time (me included although I always do it) and many others are in such a hurry to get their link that they will disrespect you (point 7 on the list) if the link doesn’t go up in lightening speed even if the link wasn’t spelled out clearly in the text of the email.

What I don’t like about marketingprofs is that they password protect their blog. If you don’t login you can only see half of the text of each article — the top half which omits the bottom line (haha.) I have so many passwords for different accounts I had to use the password retrieval feature today just to get in. Also, their focus is very narrow. It is completely focused on marketing while I would prefer a small amount of diversion into the world of business, entrepreneurship, startups, and other types of business articles that I love so much to read.

But, in any case. Marketingprofs can take you to a deeper level of understanding about online marketing and social media and especially content creation. They create content in a fun and relatable way. I hope you visit their blog and enjoy it. Anyway, thanks for reading my article — hehe☺☺

As a marketer, I try all different ways of having promotions. I have tried cold calling, email newsletter marketing, auto-calling, having assistants call for me, and more. Each method of contacting people has its benefits. However, certain types of contacts are best made on particular mediums.

In August 2015, I called a few thousand people about upgrade specials on our directory. We were basically selling advertising. Roughly 5% of the people I talked to upgraded. I felt so happy that I was able to make more than seven dozen sales. Then, I decided to take advantage of the automated technology that I am paying for. After I sent out my newsletter blast which reached about 4500 people, I got a few dozen inquiries for quotes. I spent an hour giving quotes, but only three bought something. My automated system actually cost me a lot of time doing quotes, but without a result.

Cold calling got me 4x the new sales per lead compared to emailing quotes…

I also recall that a month ago, my assistant called a bunch of people for me. They wanted quotes too. I gave ten quotes by email to people who claimed they were interested and only one of them bought something. The lesson I am learning is that when a client actually talks to a salesperson who knows the product well, they are more likely to buy. When I talked to clients personally by phone I was able to sell to about 40% of them. However, the purchase rate of clients who got an email quote from us was only 10%.

So, what is the moral to this story? The best system I had for sales was to have my assistant sit in the same room with me and filter through the list of prospects. Every time she got one who was interested, she would have me call them immediately. I closed a lot of sales very efficiently this way and made a lot of money. The personal touch is critical in marketing. These days it is so hard to actually get to talk to someone knowledgeable by phone. People often appreciate being able to talk to a critical higher level person at a company. So, leverage that time that you spend with people and use it the right way.

Many higher level business people want a lower level assistant to do all of their busy-work for them. This is a mistake. The lower level people are good for filtering and busy-work, not for handling the critical aspects of a business conversation. Even if they know the right answers, they don’t have the special energy or mojo to give the client the satisfaction that they crave — the satisfaction of talking to a high energy higher level manager or executive for about ten minutes. Make each minute count and use it the most efficient way!

To wrap up the various contact methods, email marketing is good for general reminders and links to new articles in your blog, but not for sales (at least not in my business). Auto-calling is also good for more critical reminders as many people have emails that filter out critical messages. Cold Calling (or warm calling if your clients know you) is much better if you need to actually change a business relationship. In advertising it is common to renew your existing level of advertising. Contacting people for a renewal can be done through auto-call or email marketing. However, contacting them to change or upgrade their plan should ideally be done using a very specialized and targetted list and done by hand.