Tired of all those product placements on reality TV? Well, stop watching them and turn on HBO instead.
Or, check out Subservient Donald, a take-off of Burger King’s Subservient Chicken.
Yes, you can make this Donald Trump look-alike bow to your every whim…and jam a product placement in each task he completes. My personal favorite? Make him eat.
Found via Adrants.
According to E-Newsletters Must Survive the Preview Pane at ClickZ, more than half of B2B email newsletter subscribers use the preview pane to read their email. The research was performed by EmailLabs.
To me, it’s second nature. Why open up a new window to read an email when it displays regardless? After years of surfing the Web, I’m OK w/scrolling.
But this does mean that some people will decide whether your email is worth reading based on the first couple of inches of available monitor space. The question is: have you given them a compelling reason to scroll on?
Since people are driven by benefits and not features, craft your headline and opening sentence to appeal to your subscribers’ needs, and not what you’re trying to sell.
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!
–Theodore Levitt
I hate when "somebusiness.com" won’t get you to a Web site but "www.somebusiness.com" will. It shows a lack of understanding of the Web from the business or a poor hosting environment.
It also means lost business.
So imagine how frustrated I was when for months I couldn’t get flyteblog.com to resolve to www.flyteblog.com. Up until this weekend, flyteblog.com took you to a GoDaddy coming soon page.
Twice I posted a request for help to GoDaddy and twice it went unreturned. When we finally had to call GoDaddy tech support for another client we asked about the domain not resolving. The tech guy had no idea what we were talking about or how to fix it.
Like the hole above the light in my bathroom, I just learned to live with it, noticing it less each day.
However, thanks to Tara McGillicuddy, an ADD Coach and fellow blogger, I’ve got my solution.She pointed me to an article called How to Setup Your Advanced DNS with GoDaddy that has step-by-step instructions. (Even if you don’t use GoDaddy, you should be able to figure it out with these instructions.)
So, if you’re looking for a solution to get your www-less domain to resolve to your blog, check out the article. If you’re looking for ADD Coaching, check out Tara’s blog.
Or, if you live outside the U.S., Happy Thursday!
Maya Brooks, age 3
Thanks to Kevin Ruddy who uncovered the biggest mistake in The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make…that there were only 10!
It turns out there was no number four.
I went back and looked at my original notes and discovered what I had done. I’ve have since uploaded a new copy, complete with all eleven mistakes. If you downloaded a copy before 9am on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005, go ahead and grab a fresh one on me.
You might want to keep the original…it’s sure to become a collector’s edition like that upside-down stamp.
As before, registration is required, but free. Plus, once you’re all signed up you’ll also get 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Web Site and The 11 Commandments of Writing Web Copy for Non-Copywriters. (Yes, I’ve checked…the numbers all add up.)
Anyone who’s heard me talk about legitimate methods of increasing your email subscriber base knows that I’m a big proponent of commercial white papers.
Cut through the marketing clutter by writing an article of interest to your target audience. Then tie your article into a subscription to your free email newsletter. This way you can quickly build your subscriber base with people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
When I saw the article "How to Write Compelling White Papers (Your Audience Will Really Want to Read)" by Sandra Clutter at MarketingProfs I just had to read it. Besides talking about white papers, it uses one of my current favorite words: compelling.
Ms. Clutter provides good examples on how to grab and hold your reader’s attention, and reminds us all to end with a strong call-to-action.
No, I’m not on some kick trying to point out everyone’s mistakes. (See my recent article The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make.)
However, I did just finish posting our newest podcast called Five Home Page Mistakes Small Businesses Make.
Too often I see small businesses making obvious, easy-to-fix mistakes on their home page. A Web site is often a small business’s marketing hub, and yet owners shoot themselves in the foot because they haven’t taken the time to do things right, or they value flash over substance.
Included in the podcast is a special offer to receive a free home page review from flyte; however, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to get the "code."
So please, take 13 minutes from your busy schedule,
download and listen to the most recent episode of flytecast: web
strategies for small business. Find out if you’re guilty of any of these common home page mistakes.
If you’d like to subscribe to flytecast through the iTunes Music Store, be sure to check out this little instructional QuickTime movie I made. (4.3MB).
Last night flyte launched a Web site for Dr. David Sanford, a marriage counselor and coach here in southern Maine.
The site is MarriageSupport.com, and it is chock full of amazing resources for individuals and couples looking for help. What type of services?
Free sample articles on coaching and relationship skills.
Free email course called Five Steps to a Successful Relationship.
A free email newsletter called Living Together (subscribe from Dr. Sanford’s home page.)
A free teleclass entitled Relationship Coaching and You.
A blog for couples at CoupleSupport.com.
An ebook called The Pleasures of Good Conversation.
A "Relationship Store" selling over 600 articles on a wide-variety of relationship advice. Search by topic or keyword.
Smart Relationship Courses that include weekly online lessons, teleclasses and limited class size, all run by Dr. Sanford. The first two courses are Listen Better and Working on Your Relationship – Alone.
"Couples Vacation Intensives" where you and a loved one get "positive-breakthrough coaching" with Dr. Sanford while on vacation in San Miguel, Mexico.
A member-only community blog for people working on their relationships. Kind of an online group therapy for the new millennium. (I’ll blog more about this after it’s gotten some traction.)
Relationship Coaching & Counseling with Dr. David Sanford.
And there’s probably a couple of things that I’m forgetting, but you get the idea! This is an amazingly rich resource for people looking to improve their relationship, and are committed to working on it.
Besides all the hard work done by the flyte crew and Dr. Sanford himself, I’d like to thank Quita Ryder, who handled the ASP programming.
eMarketer reports that nearly 5 million people will have downloaded podcasts in 2005, up from 820,000 in 2004 according to research done by Bridge Ratings.
Bridge’s press release suggests that podcasting will hit critical mass in 2010 with 45 – 75 million users.
Some other interesting facts:
You can view the study presentation here.
It’s easy to get started blogging…today’s blogging software is inexpensive, easy-to-learn, and does most of the heavy lifting for you.
However, it’s a lot more difficult to build a successful blog: one that attracts prospects and clients, establishes you as an expert or an industry leader, and helps you attain search engine "findability."
I wish the "today" me could go back and talk to the "then" me (November 3, 2004, to be exact) and give him some good advice on business blogging. It would have saved me a lot of time and frustration over the past year.
If you’re interested in learning from my mistakes, check out The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make. It’s a free download.
Plus, if you’ve got some of your own mistakes that you’d like to share, please take advantage of our comments and trackbacks below.
Rich Brooks
Mistake Free Since November 16th, 2004
Damn, I meant 2005.
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