Content Marketing Today

Stephanie Diamond lays bare mysteries of online marketing for small business executives.

Hyperbole?  Maybe.  But, this is a terrific book.

Marketing is probably the biggest challenge for small business owners and executives.  We typically spend so much time running the business day to day that establishing and maintaining a marketing focus just doesn't happen.  The accelerating pace of Internet marketing change makes it all that much more challenging. 

Happily, Stephanie Diamond has written that rare book which both forces us to think in new and different ways about marketing issues--and simultaneously provides a detailed roadmap so that we can put those thoughts into action. Once you have finished the book, you will be ready to develop and deploy a successful Web marketing strategy. 

Her new book, Web Marketing for Small Businesses, is a much-needed addition to the literature of online marketing.  This book enables us first to grasp complex concepts and then to put them into practice with easy to follow steps.  Even solopreneurs will find significant value in Stephanie's book.  I know that I have already begun to implement several of the strategies about which she writes so knowledgeably.

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A salesperson is a salesperson is a salesperson. Not so.

Because selling and sales professionals are fundamental to your in person content marketing strategy, you must develop just the right team for your company and your market.  However obvious this might seem, here's why so many companies get it all wrong.

Identifying great sales people isn’t as simple as you might think. They don’t all look alike, think alike or act alike. One category of salesperson would die rather than get friends together to sell them Tupperware. Another breed thinks that the purpose of having a lot of friends is so that you can have lots of Tupperware parties.

Difficult or not, selecting the right sales candidate for the right sales situation is fundamental to building a successful company.

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Our British content marketing cousin highlights key lessons from great new book.

According to a new book by Gerry McGovern, content in and of itself is not king. It's got to be customer-centric first and foremost.

In a most useful review on the Relevant and Valued blog, Pete Shemilt draws the following conclusion , "time spent on developing quality, impactful content is a worthwhile investment. The analogy he uses is that we should treat content on the Web as 'a hidden asset, it's gold', not as 'coal - a low-grade, low-cost commodity best published in bulk.'  Put simply: Killer not Filler!"

Or, in other words, creating great content may not be easy, but it is absolutely essential.  Why? Because it's worth its weight in gold. 

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Content marketing represents an upcoming tsunami that you must learn to surf. Our eBook, Get Content.GetCustomers. teaches you how with to-the-point, put-it-to-work content. We tell you why you need to do it, give best practice examples, and give you a blueprint to follow. Best of all, it's FREE!. Read More

Figure out how to persuade your web visitors to become buyers. Dogs are easily motivated to respond to stimuli. Cats aren’t so cooperative. Potential buyers used to behave pretty much like dogs—responding to advertising by running out to buy a product. Even in the B2B world, a sales rep or an ad campaign could [...] Read More

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably an optimist. Otherwise, why would you start a business knowing that most small companies fail in their first few years? Yet many small business owners choke when it comes to growing their companies. In his book, Be the Elephant, author Steve Kaplan offers useful, practical advice to help businesses [...] Read More

Love 'em or Hate 'em, You Can't Forget 'em. “Where’s the beef?” “So easy even a caveman could do it.” What is it about these phrases and accompanying images from Wendy’s and Geico commercials that make them so memorable? In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath explain brilliantly why such “sticky” [...] Read More

Powerful Lessons from Strengths Finder 2.0. If only you could improve on your areas of weakness, you would optimize your performance. Right? No. Wrong! And, if you work really hard, you can achieve anything you want. Right? No. Wrong. Most conventional wisdom about optimizing our performance is dead wrong, according [...] Read More

How to Be Brilliant Rather than Boring. We’ve all sat through presentations that seemed to drag on forever and ended nowhere. What’s worse, we’ve probably even given a few. As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, “The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story [...] Read More

Timeless. That's the best word to describe the wisdom of Peter Drucker (1909-2005), widely considered the father of modern management. Born in Vienna, he chose the United States over Europe in 1937, because he believed that's where the course of the future would be invented. His insights helped shape companies throughout the 20th century, and [...] Read More