Category: Marketing Thoughts

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WordPress 2.7 – I’m Officially a Fan

Typically, when a new version of WordPress is announced — and particularly when there’s a lot of fanfare around it — I’m prone to delay upgrading. WordPress is, for the uninitiated reader, the software that runs this site as well as countless others that I own and/or manage (I’m serious… I’ve truly lost count).

Since I’m a classic “early adopter,” this behavior might seem a bit odd. I assure you it’s entirely pragmatic. The upgrade process, though not complex, can take time — especially if the number of sites you’re working with is measured in the dozens (at least). Then there are the compatibility issues (or potential compatibility issues) with themes (not usually critical) and plug-ins (sometimes these are dealbreakers).

For example, my favorite statistical tracking plug-in had problems with WordPress 2.5 for months. I found some workarounds, but it’s hard to complain or apply too much pressure to a hardworking developer who writes these plug-ins and gives them away. (Ain’t it great?!)

2.7: A Big Fat Exception

Like many, I’ve been paying attention to the previews and the news about the 2.7 release candidates. Like I said, typically this pre-release “hype” doesn’t move me.

I have, however, been seriously looking forward to the re-write of the user interface for the backend of the system. What that means in plain English is that the WordPress developers have given you — as the owner or author of the site — a completely new system to look at and work with. The whole experience of writing on and managing your site is new. Most significantly, they engaged in significant usability testing that incorporated laser eye-tracking and other sophisticated ways of measuring whether or not we’re all going to like it and find it easier to use.

By the way, you can find a nifty preview video posted here to take a look at the new management console.

So… after noticing that the final release had been posted yesterday, I decided to go out on a limb and upgrade one of my newest sites. It’s a personal blog for me (David Johnson) and it’s brand new and doesn’t have many plug-ins installed — nor complex customization — so it seemed likely to be be a good place to test. Very little stuff to break.

The upgrade process was quick and painless. I always back everything up first (good habit), which was what took the longest. And aside from an annoying message about my favorite tagging plug-in which told me I’d have to switch (and which thankfully turned out to be false), there were zero complaints. Initially, I had problems with all the nifty new Ajax features, none of which seemed to work in my browser. After rebooting and otherwise trying to make the problems go away, it occurred to me to empty my browser’s cache. Since I’m a Firefox user and have the nifty “web developer toolbar” installed, this was a mere mouse-click and a few seconds of waiting — not nearly as painful as doing the same thing in Internet Explorer. Voila! Everything worked as pictured in the video.

The result? Let me tell you… it’s gorgeous. It’s delicious. It’s easy to use. It’s very well done.

I’ve not yet tested every single plug-in I use and recommend for compatibility yet, but I’ve now upgraded 3 of my sites. I’ll be shooting a training video on the upgrade process for members of our marketing training program, so let me know if you’re interested in getting your hands on that video (we’ll have a new enrollment opportunity coming up shortly). The members of that program that are currently in training will have the luxury of finishing their training using this delightful new version of WordPress. It’ll be good!

How ‘Bout You?

What?! You don’t have a WordPress-based website yet? Hmmmm… that probably explains why you’re not ranking well in the search engines for your real prospects’ actual searches. Stay tuned for help on that! Or better yet… subscribe to updates over at the Epiphany Marketing site!

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How to Get Results Now in Your Marketing

Once question I’ve been asked frequently by friends and business associates is this: “How are you able to help your clients increase revenues when none of our marketing efforts seem to be working as well as they used to work?”

There’s no short, simple answer to this question. And about a year ago, I sat down and tried to figure out the best way to help show our clients, colleagues and friends with small businesses how to put all of this into practice. What resulted was a 12-week marketing training program that we implemented for the first time early this year.

Before getting into more detail, I want to mention that we’re taking the major highlights of this process and presenting them in Sarasota in a half-day seminar on September 27th. Visit Results Now Marketing to find out all about it.

The results have been nothing short of mind-boggling.  Instead of us actually providing services to these businesspeople, we’re simply showing them the process we use. It’s a strategic process, which means that it is transferable and can be adapted to just about any business.

One company put the techniques to work for them and, after having a website for 7 years that never made it anywhere near the top of the search engines, they put a brand new website on the front page of Google (for actual searches that their potential customers would run) in just a matter of a couple of weeks!

(They did it!  We simply showed them how!)

That’s just the beginning… some of the strategies we show have multiplied the revenues in some of our clients within a matter of a few months.

I want to show you how as well. Join us on September 27th for Results Now Marketing in Sarasota.

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Congratulations, Gemesis!

It’s an absolute pleasure to spotlight local companies making a splash outside of our region, and so imagine my delight when I spotted this piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on our very own Gemesis Corp.

Published today, the story casts Gemesis in quite a positive light as an industry leader in cultivated diamonds, noting that Gemesis’ Stephen Lux was in the Bay Area to hold a show centered around the lab-grown stones. Judging from the Chronicle piece, the stones were received somewhat favorably by area jewelry retailers, and may be making some appearances in display cases in the coming months.

Hope everything goes well in your new test market, Gemesis… and on behalf of Sarasota, thanks to Stephen Lux and crew for representing!

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Have An Epiphany In Your Marketing

With so much talk of recession… and some actual slowdowns — some of them serious, especially within certain industries — businesses have a tendency to cut back in areas that can make matters worse.

Marketing is at the top of the list.

If you know me, then you know that I’m not in favor of untracked, unmeasurable and expensive advertising anyway.  So, don’t get too upset if you think I’m thinking mainly of advertising… I’m not.  What I’m referring to are the systems in your business that produce new prospects and/or customers on a regular basis.

You do have some of those, don’t you?

If not, then the time has come for you to put some in place.  And fast!  If you do, then it’s important that you proceed with caution if you’re eyeing them in your budget.

2 Big Announcements

First… we are happy to unveil a shiny new blog site that just launched. It is focused on small business marketing and already has a few posts on it (some of which were gleaned from other publications for which we’ve written).  This reflects the renewed focus in our business: Epiphany Marketing.

Secondly… there are a couple of big things coming in the next few weeks.  So, this is an announcement about our coming announcements!  But there will be some significant new opportunities for you as a business person to learn how to use applied strategy along with some free and low-cost technology to make sure that your future customers find you instead of someone else.  It’s going to be big!

Here’s a hint: there will be something happening in Sarasota.

If you’re one of our many readers from across the US and around the world… not to worry, we’ve got something coming for you, too.  Keep your eyes glued to this spot… and the new marketing blog, too!

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Is Ad Surf Daily a Scam?

I’ve gotten a lot of questions from friends and business associates about the Ad Surf Daily Cash Generator program. Now that the US Attorney’s office has seized assets and filed suit, with Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum right behind, it seems likely that the program will not continue.

A Few Facts

Initially, I was approached by people who wanted me to look at the program to see if it seemed legit. My friends know that I do not join multi-level marketing programs, nor anything that seems like it might be a network marketing venture. Nonetheless, I took a peek at this program to find out if there was anything suspect about it on behalf of those friends.

The first clue that there might be something “up” was that people were wondering if it might be a scam.  Why? Well… the good old adage, “If it sounds too good to be true…” comes to mind.

Here’s the premise: you sign up for the program (even with a free account, if you prefer) under a sponsor. You then begin to “auto surf” ads every day. There are rewards for doing this, including the right to place a website of your own into the ad rotating system so that other people will be forced to view your site.

At this point, it sounds a little bit like a modified version of Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC).  With PPC, which most people are familiar with because of the right-hand side of your Google search results, advertisers bid to have their ad show up on certain sites and then only pay when someone “clicks” on their ad.

Ad Surf Daily seems to provide a cost-effective way to do this… at first glance.

But what you quickly learn is that the vast majority of people who join (and later “purchase ad packages”) don’t actually have anything to advertise. So… the question becomes, “Why are they signing up?”

It turns out that if you “purchase ad packages,” (which the US Attorney’s Office has now labeled “investing”) you have the opportunity to “earn rebates” by faithfully viewing advertisements every day.  I won’t get into the mathematics of it, but let’s just say that this appears to be highly profitable because you can earn more in rebates than you “purchased.”

There are numerous incentives and rewards built into the program that are designed to get you to purchase more ad packages. Also, as a member of the program, you are incentivized to leave your earnings in the program because the higher your “cash balance,” the more rebates you’ll be able to earn.  You can even increase your rate of earnings by paying for a monthly membership at several different levels.  There are even big rallies where you can obtain much larger bonuses by “purchasing” ad packages on the spot…

And… of course, there are commissions.  This is where some of the biggest incentives are.  This is the part where you convince your friends and family (or even random acquaintances, like some of the people who have spammed my inbox about this) to sign up under you.

I Smell A Rat…

If you’re around the participants for very long, you hear amazing stories of large cash payouts. You hear about credit card debt being wiped out, even millionaires being created.  All of this occurs in short periods of time.  You hear about the explosive growth.  You hear about the founder, Andy Bowdoin, and his impressive award that was given to him by the President of the United States.  You hear about his many successful businesses over the years.  You also watch videos online which focus repeatedly on “we’re good guys” without providing any substantive information about why you should expect this program to continue.

But I have a fundamental question:

If the bulk of the customers have no need for the item they are purchasing, where is the value that this company is actually bringing to the marketplace?

In other words, they claim their goal is to be the biggest seller of online advertising in the world. They even claim to be threatening Google’s position as market leader.  But one thing I’ve noticed… the people/companies buying ads from Google (and other PPC establishments) have one thing in common: they all have something to advertise.

One friend of mine has a local contracting business.  My question for him was, “What are you advertising in the ASD system that people might be interested in purchasing?”  The answer: his local contracting business.  My next thought is, “What the heck does someone in Bolivia do when they see an ad for a contracting business in Florida?”

As a marketer, my next thought after that is… that’s a little bit like buying a billboard on a California freeway for your McDonald’s in Memphis.

Poor use of advertising dollars.

Not so poor, perhaps, for those who have a digital product with universal appeal, or perhaps those selling something that can be purchased and then shipped anywhere in the world.  Again, however, the key would be that it has universal appeal.

Like… toothbrushes.  We all need those, right?

Anyway…

Is It Sustainable?

Back to my fundamental question.  How long can this program carry on — even if they’re careful not to promise to pay out too much money in “rebates” — when their basic product is not needed by the people who are purchasing it today?

Can it be that the only reason they are buying advertising is so that they can earn a rebate?

The answer is: absolutely, 100%, unequivocally, “yes!”

And that, my friends, creates a problem: as soon as the market figures out that:

a. there are better ways to buy advertising, and

b. this is only sustainable as long as there are more people willing to buy something they don’t need,

the whole thing comes tumbling down…

…not unlike a Ponzi scheme.

Precisely, by the way, what the US Attorney in Washington D.C., otherwise known as the Attorney General, concluded.

Is anyone guilty of a crime here? Well… that remains to be seen.  In the meantime, no one is surfing the “ads.” No one is “purchasing ads,” and nobody is spending the $53M in cash that was seized while the investigation and the lawsuits proceed.

Bad news for those who used their life savings to buy something they didn’t need.

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Sarasota Real Estate Market: Rebounding or Not?

Ever the optimists, Real Estate brokers always manage to locate a silver lining… no matter how far and how hard they have to look.  And, with a number of friends and business associates connected to the real estate business, I certainly am personally hopeful that their optimism has its roots firmly cemented in reality.

But alas, this is not always the case.

Take, for example, the blog published by Michael Saunders & Company.  Here’s a great example of a company reaching as deeply as it can for data — any data — to support the notion that somehow the market is on its way back to normal.  Is their data pulled from the number of transactions in the MLS, you ask?  Perhaps it’s based upon some newfound trend in the tax rolls?

Nope.

In fact, it’s taken from their Google Analytics account.  Yes, that’s right folks.  Now we’re basing the real estate outlook for Sarasota on the performance of Michael Saunders’ website according to the ever-so-reliable folks at Google.

Now… don’t get me wrong.  I’m a big fan of Google.  Chances are you’re here thanks to one of the many Google searches that we rank well on.  But… as we know, their analytics package — feature-rich though it may be — is fraught with inaccuracies.  And… even if it were 100% accurate, the Michael Saunders blog post smacks of a self-congratulatory webmaster more than it does market realities in the real estate business.  After all, our traffic is way the heck up, too!  Doesn’t say anything about the consulting business, though…

But… I digress.  (By the way, business is better than ever!  Not a touch of whining here!)

What Michael and gang aren’t really interested in pointing out is the simple fact that, by every measure, the housing crisis is only deepening.  Even if transactions are up, prices are down.  And this is based on real data from none other than Standard & Poor. Granted, the data are not local to Florida.  But then, we the unwashed don’t have ready access to the data for our market.  This is part of the classic information asymmetry associated with buying and selling real estate.  Your broker knows more than you do.  Perhaps someone with readily-analyzed data would be willing to step forward and comment.

In the meantime, I’m going back to my web analytics to look for more optimism…

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Finally… Small Business Marketing Made Simple

As most of our faithful readers know, this company was founded as a marketing consultancy. Marketing strategy is and always been our core competency. And, although we’ve done quite a bit of strategic work over the years that has been focused more at leadership and overall performance, in the last 24 months or so, we’ve been doing more strategic marketing work than ever before.

In fact, the work we’ve been doing has been so effective and is in such high demand — particularly among small business owners — that we’ve been forced to bring a shift to our business. Here’s an idea of what I mean:

“When David told me that I could start using the internet as a primary method for marketing my Neurology practice and obtaining new patients, I didn’t believe him. I did not understand the power of the Internet in reaching thousands of people daily with information about my business and services we provide. However, having prior experience of working with Dave, where he made outrageous claims that I didn’t believe, I proceeded with designing a completely new website and blog site.

His predictions came true, where now my Internet presence is responsible for a large number of new referrals. The initial investment cost of the project was rapidly recouped and as an ongoing service, my website has added significant revenue to my annual bottom line. Within 6 months of implementation, I was ranked on the top four pages of Google. Almost 50% of my new patients were (and are) coming in after finding me on the web. I was a busy physician when I started down this road – but I was able to use the techniques he showed me to make my business even more successful. With the excellent response to the website, I have been able to cut our yellow pages advertising budget by fifty percent. David is a skilled IT person and is very knowledgeable about marketing and creative uses of the Internet.”

– V. Daniel Kassicieh, D.O., founder of Sarasota Neurology, P.A.

One client (with a well-established business) multiplied revenues by a factor of 5 just last year alone!

We’re having such tremendous results that we recognize the need to share what we know. The good news is that any business person can implement these strategies right away.

So… I have 2 critical announcements to make.

  1. Effective January 1, 2008, we have no longer been offering any consulting services not related to marketing. The epiphanyconsulting.net site will be redesigned (when we have time) to reflect that change.
  2. We are formally announcing that we are not accepting new Epiphany Marketing clients at this time. The EpiphanyMarketing.com site has already been changed to reflect this fact. We will continue to evaluate new strategic marketing projects only from existing clients and Epiphany Marketing subscribers on a first-come, first-served basis.
  3. This means that the best way to access what we know is to participate in one of our training programs. A new round of these is starting up shortly.

Consider this your personal invitation to join me and my good friend (and client) Michael Pink on a conference call this Thursday or Friday. There are currently 4 time slots to choose from, but a couple of them are already nearly full (we can only accommodate 200 callers on each call), because Michael has been inviting people through his blog. We will consider adding additional slots if these fill up completely.

Here’s where to go sign up for these important calls.

I look forward to talking with you very soon!

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Update: Selling Armor on eBay

We told you previously about the armor we listed on eBay. This isn’t necessarily all that unique — people sell interesting things on eBay every day. What was unique was using a proven platform such as a blog in order to promote the listing.

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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And Now For Something Completely Different…

Well… we said we’d occasionally write about things that might be useless or trivial!

Here’s the skinny on some fascinating armor (breastplate & backplate) that we have listed on eBay. Know anybody who is a weaponry or militaria buff? Perhaps they’d be interested?

We plan to report back on how this process of using eBay in combination with some other internet marketing techniques actually works out. Watch this space!

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Are You Getting Noticed?

Why do small businesses build websites, anyway?

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.

Continue reading “Are You Getting Noticed?”