LOL, just got home and saw this mock movie poster starring ME! The post is good too, but the graphic cracked me up. I’ve been cast as Demi Moore! Wow, what could be cooler than that! Check it out, and if you want my autograph, just let me know.

Original post by DazzlinDonna

My previous post slammed marketing for using too many buzzwords – and received several comments to the effect that marketing materials should emphasize “benefits.” That sounds like Marketing 101, but it’s also dead wrong. In fact, there’s only one type of marketing message that gets through to prospects, and it has nothing to do with abstract benefits.

The problem with product “benefits” is that they’re always the same. Take Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, for instance. Every package has identical benefits: increasing sales revenue while decreasing average cost per sale. Every CRM prospect already knows that, so why bother telling them? Same thing with consumer products. For example, every automobile gets you where you’re going. Why bother to point it out?

What does work for demand creation? Short answer: testimonials. Long answer: real customer narratives with high emotional content, where something unique about the product either saves the customer from massive pain or creates massive pleasure, preferably both. (Read that sentence twice, because it’s really, really important.)

That formula is nearly universal in consumer product advertising. Drive a Volvo, and you’ll escape an accident (avoid pain), and look upscale while you do it (gain pleasure). Drink a Budweiser, and you’ll date a hot chick (gain pleasure) and prove you’re not just some bar bozo (avoid pain).

The same technique works in Business-To-Business sales. I recently ran a focus group for Dell Computer to determine what influenced small/medium business owners to buy. Of some three dozen attendees, not ONE was influenced to ANY degree by press releases, vendor presentations, analyst reports, product-oriented advertising or any other traditional demand-creation method. The ONLY thing that drove buying behavior was a positive recommendation from a peer.  In other words, a testimonial.

Let's look an an example. Examine the following “benefits” paragraph, lifted verbatim from an actual press release:

“By embedding business rules into Siebel CRM, businesses are able to achieve new levels of cost containment, time-to-market response and long-term competitive advantages. Haley technology is a key part of the Siebel Privacy Management solution within Siebel Universal Customer Master, a comprehensive customer data hub that unifies customer data across multiple business units and functionally disparate systems to provide a trusted authoritative source of customer information across the enterprise.”

Here's how that same information might look as a testimonial:

“When our company doubled in size in less than year, our corporate data was a mess. We couldn’t service our customers. Placing an order was nightmare. Sales went down the toilet. As sales manager, I was taking all the heat.  Fortunately, Siebel brought in the expertise and technology to help us glue our different systems together. Now sales are up and our customer satisfaction ratings are twice as high as before the merger. And now I'm new VP of Sales.”

Assuming that the second paragraph isn't BS, which demand creation paragraph do you think is more likely to work?

Original post by Geoffrey James

Number One on the Google is the title of this brilliant video created by PushON, an Internet Marketing firm. It does a glorious job of encapsulating the typical thought process of a man thinking of promoting a business via the “interweb”, as he calls it. We’ve all seen this type of thing in […]

Original post by DazzlinDonna

Are your eBay profits getting sucked up in paying for shipping costs? Trim your expenses with these helpful tips.

Original post by Malcolm Fleschner

Learn how you can get and keep the power and use it to close more sales, today!

To learn more, please visit NeverColdCall.com

To download a high-quality version of this video (warning - large file size), please use this link: The Reality Factor in Sales

Original post by fjr@nevercoldcall.com (Frank J. Rumbauskas Jr.)

With the recent release of Microsoft Office 2007, you may be wondering whether you should upgrade to the latest version of PowerPoint. We wondered the same thing, so we put that question to PowerPoint expert Ellen Finkelstein, author of How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 (M…Read More

Original post by Gerhard Gschwandtner

Creating a blog is EASY. If you use Blogger, for example, you can set up a blog in less than a minute, and write your first blog item in five minutes. What could be easier than that? It takes me at least as long to write an email message.

Blogging Is Easy, But…

Blogging is easy because the blogging platform does all the hard work for you. There’s no design required, and useful tools like RSS are built-in to your new blog.

However, despite the fact that creating a new blog couldn’t be easier, new bloggers tend to make some fundamental mistakes which are difficult to correct later. These mistakes also consign the blog to low traffic. Eventually, the new blogger will give up blogging, because “blogging doesn’t work.”

The Top Five Blogging Mistakes

Let’s look at the top five mistakes new bloggers (and some experienced ones) make when setting up a new blog. I know all about these mistakes, because I’ve made them too.

Mistake One: No Clearly Defined Purpose For The Blog

This is the primary mistake that many new bloggers make. They start blogging without thinking about why they’re creating a blog. Is the blog personal, professional, or is it a money maker?

Mistake Two: No Keywords Selected For The Blog

The second mistake flows on from the first. When you haven’t decided a blog’s purpose, you haven’t chosen any keywords. Your primary keywords (no more than four to six for the first month or so) are vital.

You’d never make this mistake, would you? I could and did. A couple of years ago I set up a blog and although I had a purpose for the blog, I managed to blog for around 700 posts before I realized that I’d never focused on my primary keyword.

Mistake Three: No Clear Path To Monetization

There are many ways to monetize a blog. However, if no advertiser is advertising products using your primary keywords, and no one is buying anything related to your topic, then your blog has no way to generate income.

Mistake Four: No Marketing Plan To Get Traffic

While a blog has natural traffic generators like RSS built-in, you’ll still need to market the blog. Decide on two or three ways you’ll market this particular blog, and then do it. You’ll get the traffic you want.

Mistake Five: Focus On Traffic, Not On Content

It’s a natural mistake to want all the traffic you can get. But what if there’s nothing on the blog to snag interest once the traffic gets there? Focus on content, then on traffic, and when you have content, focus on both - you can never have enough traffic, but your it’s your content that draws your visitors and makes money for you.

So there you have the top five blogging mistakes - avoid them, and all your blogs will be successful.

Want to make money as a pro blogger? You can. Blogging is easy and fun, and many bloggers have quit day jobs to blog full-time. Veteran blogger Angela Booth’s ebook Blogging For Dollars is your guidebook to blogging success. Read the ebook’s blog - it’s updated every week.

Original post by The Internet Cashflow Guy

Want to snag a big client? Here’s how to do it.

Original post by Malcolm Fleschner

Now that I’m doing videos on a regular basis, I set up a separate video blog where you can find them all in one place:

http://nevercoldcall.typepad.com/salesvideo

I’ll continue to post them here. That page is just a convenient way to access them all in one place.

Enjoy

Original post by fjr@nevercoldcall.com (Frank J. Rumbauskas Jr.)

Sneaky devils! It appears as though Yahoo is sneaking in some paid ads right into the regular organic SERPs. A fellow SEO alerted me to the possibility, but I agreed that I would attempt to find a different example than the one he showed me, since I didn’t want to do anything that […]

Original post by DazzlinDonna