Recently, it became clear to me that I was not walking the talk.  That as a marketer, I was using excuses like: “I spend my days marketing others” and “I am very fortunate that I get so many referrals, so I don’t need to be marketing myself.”  But then, it occurred to me I couldn’t ask other folks to be investing their time to doing email marketing, blogging and social media, if I was putting it on the back burner, myself.
I understand how hard it is to find time, and …

I was checking out this article on WebDesignLedger.com called “40 Tasty Restaurant Websites to Inspire You” and two things immediately occurred to me.
First, I was really really hungry looking at all the amazing food on these sites’ home pages – great job on most of them to really highlight their food well in a very appetizing way!
Second, my marketing head kicked in.  Fortunately, many of these guys do a great balance of graphic art (look of the site and displaying the food well) along side complementary marketing (making sure people …

Two of my favorite things are food and marketing, so a blog post about how restaurants can cost-effectively market themselves was bound to happen.  Here are a couple of quick ideas that have either been percolating in my head or I’ve noted area restaurants doing:
1. Twitter and blogging:  There are endless possibilities for using twitter and blogs to promote your restaurant:

Today’s Specials – I don’t know about you, but if I was following twitter posts and I saw that my favorite restaurant was tweeting their daily specials, my mouth would …

When you hear the words “keyword” or “keyword phrases” do you know what they mean to you, your business and especially your clients?
So many times, when I begin to work with a client, the first thing they say, before they even have content for their home page, is “I just want to rank #1 on Google.” So, I naturally ask them which keyword or keyword phrase they plan to rank #1 for? And, that is when I often learn that they hadn’t thought much past the desire to …

You know that feeling, you are unhappy or frustrated with a product and you finally get to the point where you have to call the company to get a resolution. So, you pick up the phone and you get:

A recording telling you to either wait or leave a message
A customer service person who isn’t able to answer your question, because they don’t know the product well enough and therefore they aren’t listening to your specific question
You get that one guy who thinks you are the problem, not the company’s …

I thought I’d write a follow up for my last post entitled Oprah, Skype and the Book Club:
I did have a chance to watch the taped version of this ‘premiere’ use of Skype for Oprah’s Book Club with author Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awaking Your Life’s Purpose
If you haven’t read my last post, it was not a review about the book, but (since this is a marketing related blog) more an examination about the marketing behind the event. I am still fascinated by this campaign, it …

I am always looking for interesting ways to market something, so when I got the email (pictured left) from Skype, I had to check it out.
After all it seemed to be about Oprah and her Book Club using Skype to conduct a chapter by chapter reading of bestselling author Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awaking Your Life’s Purpose.
It seemed, from this email, that Skype was hosting this virtual book tour/club. Every Monday for 10 weeks, starting yesterday (Monday, March 3rd), they explained, Oprah and Eckhart would be reviewing a …

Amy Gahran of Contentious.com shared a great podcast that I felt was important to share with you:
Chris Anderson – Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine and author of the New York Times bestselling book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” – gave a speech in June of 2007 about his upcoming book called “FREE: the Economics of Giving Stuff Away“.
The speech is available as a free podcast on IT Conversations
And to show his allegiance to this concept of FREE, Chris Anderson plans to give …

DO YOU SQUIDOO?
Well, it was bound to happen, wasn’t it?
Any of you who have spoken to me personally over the last year – about ways to increase your online exposure – have heard the advocation of building a lens on Squidoo.
“get in now and get the advantage, because – for some reason – the search engines love it!”

That is what I said and that is what I meant.
If you listened and built a lens in the last year, you probably saw 1st page (maybe even first place) organic listings on …

See that blue box that states, “Say Hello”?
Over there on the…….far right panel……………….>>>
Yeah, that’s right – it’s a way to chat with me.
I put this IM (instant messenger) box up for those of you that have a marketing question that can’t wait.
So, if you see I am online – which I am as I post this note – I will be glad to chat with you!
It’s a cool widget I am trying out from Meebo. So far no one has taken me up on it, but this blog is …