Pictures in your emails – your marketing messages, articles, and blog posts – they increase readership and response rates, right? Well, maybe.  And then again, maybe not. The default setting in most email programs is to not download pictures.  Your reader has to specifically request that the pictures be downloaded before he or she can [...]

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The temptation to be cute and clever – to use clever wording, cute analogies and metaphors, clever design techniques – can be overwhelming. There’s just one problem. Cute and clever tend to create confusion on the part of your audience. And a confused audience is a vanishing audience.  A confused audience leaves your website, walks past your [...]

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I have a confession to make. I’ve never clicked on Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Why?  Because I don’t know what it will do.  When I’m searching for something on Google, I don’t want to waste my time going somewhere that doesn’t get me closer to my goal. Several years ago, I worked with a [...]

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Networking.  As small business owners, we have to do it – whether online or in person, and whether with enjoyment or resistance. But when we do it, what is it we’re really trying to accomplish? I imagine you’ve experienced those crazed networkers who – quite literally in some cases – charge into events with a [...]

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I’m in the middle of writing an article about how to talk with your referral partners.  And I realized that there’s one step that most people don’t do, or don’t do effectively. It’s an important step, it’s a very simple step, and it also doesn’t fit with the rest of my article – so here [...]

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I got an email from American Express on Thursday.  Seems my account had been compromised and there were fraudulent charges on my card. Theft, in other words. But this isn’t a story about theft, or even about my overwhelming curiosity about how in the world did they know those charges aren’t mine?  (Kind of creepy, really, even though it’s nice [...]

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Marketing is very simple. It’s just a conversation.  A conversation about how you can help someone. As business owners, we make it so complicated. We tie it up in our anxiety about money, about being liked, about being good enough, about being successful.  It’s no wonder that it becomes this Huge Big Thing we feel [...]

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Lying on the floor this morning between sets of push-ups, it occurred to me that what I was doing has a lot in common with marketing.  (Both the lying-on-the-floor part and the more active doing-push-ups part!) That might sound a little far-fetched, and maybe a lot weird.  But bear with me, because I think there are some [...]

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A client gave me a gift today - a gift that, as a word nerd, I absolutely love. It’s a new word:  site-itis. We were talking about how some sites have relevant, powerful content … but the design makes it so difficult to read that visitors can’t recognize or take advantage of the value.  And the flip side of the coin:  [...]

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Networking is like throwing stones into a lake. It’s a really big lake.  So big that you can’t see the other side. It’s a calm, still lake.  And every stone you throw creates ripples that spread gently across the surface. After a while, as you patiently keep throwing stones … after a while, even though all [...]

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