At first I thought,

“Well… they grabbed a 4-letter domain name that’s easy to remember… they couldn’t possibly have intended to connect it to the Monty Python sketch…”

That was when I first started seeing the bing.com commercials about the tangential search results. The commercials are humorous, although for me they purport to solve a problem I don’t have.

But now… they started using the funny little high-pitched male voice saying, “Bing!”

And really… what Python fan in the world could forget this moment from The Meaning of Life?

Until Apple managed to emerge from the 1990s somehow still in business, I had always thought of Microsoft as a corporation that was brilliant in its marketing. In retrospect, my admiration was actually aimed at what I would now classify as business strategy. Apple is without question a brilliant marketing machine, and to say they’ve successfully trumped Microsoft in that department is like saying that Alexander the Great had some military victories.

But I must admit… the “Bing!” thing is a brilliant marketing move on many levels.

Whether the “new” search engine actually offers any unique value remains to be seen.

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It was an honest mistake. I wasn’t aware of his personal — and consequently, their corporate — policy to simply not use that word. It really got me thinking. After all, Zig has been responsible for mentoring and coaching thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of successful people to the top of their game.

So… from here on out, I’m dropping the word. It might seem like a silly or symbolic move, but I had already decided months ago that we — that is me (David Johnson) and my company (Epiphany Marketing) — weren’t participating in it.

So… we officially renamed the event that I’m privileged to be a part of next week with my good friend, Tom Ziglar. It’s new title is:

How to Attract Customers at Low Cost in this Tough Economy

Ziglar Webinar: How to Attract Customers at Low Cost in this Tough Economy

And perhaps a better title would be, “in any economy.” The fact of the matter is that we’ve systemized some processes that any business can use — after all, it’s the very process we’ve used an honed for years in our consulting work — to bring in a steady stream of new prospects, clients and customers.

Sound good? You can do it.

In fact, the Ziglar organization has been kind enough to permit me to invite you to next week’s event.

Go watch the video clip of Zig Ziglar, Tom Ziglar and yours truly, then register. But do it quickly — the space won’t last long!

I’ll see you there next week!

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I’ve actually had the opportunity to work with the company’s dictation service after recommending it to several clients in the past. It’s a great service for sales professionals, financial consultants, or anyone else who conducts meetings — whether face-to-face, by phone, or virtually — and needs to maintain notes or remember to take action based upon the results of those meetings.

How Copytalk Works

It’s really quite simple: you walk out of a meeting, and you dial a number. You talk. It listens. A short time later, an e-mail arrives in your inbox — or the inbox of the person(s) you specify — and your notes are typed and ready to be pasted into your CRM, personal information manager, customer/prospect database, or even printed and filed (does anyone still do that?). I’m not sure about what all the technology is behind the curtain, but I think Copytalk has some elves that listen to your message and do all the typing.

If you’ve never invested in dictation services before, the monthly fee can seem a little high. However, when you consider the lost opportunity cost of missing an important detail in a meeting — you know… the sort of detail that you remember 5 minutes after the meeting, but can’t begin to conjure up just one hour (or one meeting) later — it can easily pay for itself the first day of the month. My clients who have used the service have experienced significant improvements in productivity, effectiveness, and the overall quality of the service they in turn provide to their own customers and prospects.

The company was founded in 2000 and, by all appearances, has been experiencing steady growth ever since.

“The selection of a business to be honored as Industry of the Year is a difficult process,” said Nancy Engel, Executive Director of the EDC. “Our judges were looking for a balance of sustained company growth, adding new professional jobs for our workforce, contributions to the community, and likelihood for continued growth and expansion. Copytalk stood out as far exceeding our expectations in each of those areas. We are very fortunate to have Copytalk in our community and look forward to their continued success.”

Congratulations, Copytalk, on this well-deserved recognition!

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How’d we do?

Well, we’re happy to report that the auction ended last night. We’ve already been in communication with the buyer (a “mate” from the land down under — howdy, Dan, if you’re reading this!). He seems like a great guy. We’ll be shipping his new purchase out to him tomorrow.

More interestingly, however, are the results we managed to achieve on our search keywords. We got into the top 10 (read: 1st page) of results for these words: antique armor cuirass. Here’s some photographic proof for those of you from Missouri:

The lesson? If you’re trying to get noticed, you can’t beat a nicely-placed business blog. From an internet marketing standpoint, this is nearly magical. If you have a business and you aren’t blogging, you’re missing out on a phenomenal opportunity to communicate with your existing and future customers.

For those of you wondering about our traffic, I don’t have any other armor auctions to compare things to, so I can’t speak intelligently to that. But on the blog site itself here, we had a significant spike in traffic looking for armor. Ironically, much of it seems to have come from Digg!

Get busy blogging!

And, by the way, we happen to specialize in getting you off to the right start. Contact us today!

If you can’t wait, here’s a great article we just found from the folks that put together the snazzy new design for Michelle Malkin’s blog.

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I’ve come to believe that most of them (the businesses) are suffering from dysfunctional strategy.  Perhaps hypo-strategy is a better way to look at it — a sort of neglect where it comes to developing any overall business philosophy or vision.

Why would I say this?

Most small business websites do just about everything except what they should be doing.

Websites should do 3 4 things for a business:

1. Get you noticed
2. Turn prospects who notice you into raving lunatics who will stop at nothing to buy your products or services.
3. Give those prospects multiple ways to: contact you, interact with you, buy from you, and (depending on your business) receive their purchases immediately
4. Get you noticed some more.

If I were to reverse engineer the strategies behind most of the websites put up by small  businesses, I would conclude that the driving business goals were (in no particular order):

• Duplicate our print brochure (from 4 years ago) in HTML
• Show our competition that we can do do that (have a website) too
• Throw uncle/cousin/nephew/grandchild/friend-of-a-friend who “knows about the internet” a bone
• Show the world our lack of taste by giving us a crack at designing (rather than paying for real design work)
• Set it and forget it
• Make it as hard as possible for anyone who might need or product(s) and/or service(s) to actually find us
• Create yet another piece of marketing for which we have no means of measuring effectiveness and ROI

Hey… if you don’t need any more customers or any additional revenue, then by all means, build your website with some of these goals in mind.

But if you’d rather get some results, then there are a couple of things you need:

• Your own self-managed hosting account running Linux or Unix with Apache, PHP, and MySQL
  • There are lots of hosts, but I recommend 1and1.com
• WordPress
• A couple of hours to download, upload, install, and tinker

Why WordPress, you ask?  Two Three reasons:

1. It will get you noticed (as long as you have decent content)
2. It is user-updateable
3. It will get you noticed

Full disclosure:  it would be impossible for me to own any stock in WordPress, because it’s open-source (and they give it away), and the link to 1and1 is an affiliate link (meaning after you buy your account with them, they’ll issue me a small credit).

 ”But David, we don’t have anything worth putting into a blog… and we don’t want to have to keep writing all the time.”

Then just do us all a favor:  close your doors now.

Plus, you can use WordPress as a “content management system” in addition to using it to publish your frequent blog posts.

There’s a lot more to internet marketing than what we’ve mentioned, of course, but in a world where content is king, where frequently-updated content is the supreme king, and where everyone who needs what you’re selling will search for you (most likely using Google), you absolutely must turn on a customer magnet… or watch as your competition gets your future customers instead of you.

By the way, here are some snazzy examples of businesses using WordPress:

• Michael Pink at Selling Among Wolves
• Mountain Lighting Galleries, Hiawassee, Georgia
• Nourish The Dream (OK… a little shameless self-plug)
• Justin DeStoppelaire at C Service Consulting
• Dr. Kassicieh at Sarasota Neurology

There are lots more, of course.  But the main thing to look for is whether a particular business is getting noticed!

Are you?

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