Remember the great depression movie, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It’s about folks paid to dance till they dropped for the entertainment of the lucky few. In today’s economic madhouse, what do they do to desperate suckers trying to get rich online? Answer: bombard them with emails promising financial nirvana in the next 24 hours, all for a mere $1,999. The unifying message in these wretch...

The lifeblood of your business is your list of customers and prospects. Wouldn’t it be great to grow it faster? According to the Internet Marketing Center’s 2006 survey, online advertisers are capturing contact information from an average of between 5% and 10% of the people who visit their websites, and of those, only 1% to 2% become paying customers. That SUCKS! How would you like to uncover ...

FREE AUDIO PODCAST! Every day thousands of business owners miss out on easy marketing opportunities to attract customers who are eager to spend money – even as banks fail, gas prices soar and consumer confidence dwindles. “Not marketing when the economy struggles is like waving the white flag and surrendering your company’s future to luck,” said Tom Trush, a copywriter and author of Busi...

I trust you’ve been attending the World’s Greatest (Free) Branding Seminar, aka the presidential election. Put your preferences aside for a moment and measure the campaigns by one criteria: message consistency. Who wins the consistency contest? And who is likely to win the White House? Fellow marketers, let us all learn from this spectacular demonstration of a rudimentary rule. In our chaotic...

This past weekend on our way to Sedona we stopped at a Chipotle restaurant for lunch. One thing I love about it, besides the tasty food, is the simplicity of their menu. Burrito, tacos or salad. That’s it. They do a few things very, very well. Your small business website can benefit from these lesson too. I see too many small business websites that are cluttered with senseless, ego-driven st...

This is a reprint from Tom Trush’s Write Way Solutions Blog. It’s an interview I did with him a couple weeks ago. My interview with Andy Renk is now available. Andy is the co-founder of Click for Clients, a training company focused on teaching entrepreneurs how to build web-based marketing systems at minimal cost. He began playing with the Internet in 1993 while working as a corporate ...

The negativity drives me nuts! A quick glance at CNN.com shows the usual doom and gloom “highlighting” the latest headlines. Gators, dead cows may hide Ike victims … Which jobs will get cut first? … Cop commits suicide after stun gun death … America’s chilling future … X-ray shows knife stuck in teen’s skull … Mets pitcher sought after fatal hit-and-run …...

Posted by gillian Last week, as the US financial powerhouses began to pay the price for their lack of fiscal responsibility, I was on the road in Seoul, Nanjing (for SMX China 2008), and Tokyo. I had a great time! I haven’t felt such excitement, vigor, and potential in a long time. SEOmoz sponsored the water bottles. Chris Sherman took a shot of me showing it off before the keynote speech. ...

Posted by willcritchlow We fall on the very search-engine-friendly side of SEO (I hesitate to use the phrase "white hat" because I think all the lines often blur). Despite this, I have a lot of respect for well-executed darker tactics and find it fascinating to watch and deconstruct them. What I don’t want, however, is to take the blame on a client project for shady tactics employe...

Posted by randfish If your job or current tasklist includes building a social media strategy for your organization (or yourself, personally), you should be thinking about the branding created by the profiles you create. The profile name, the image you use as an icon or avatar, the webpage you link to and the words you use to describe yourself have a significant impact in how you’re perceived...