The BUZZ Blog
The Buzz is a blog about small business marketing. Tools, tips, strategies and success stories. Subscribe and enhance your marketing position.
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What's Your "Active Ingredient '90' "?
When I was growing up in the 1950's, Shell, the gasoline company, was advertising that their fuel contained "TCP" an additive that increased horsepower and made your engine run better. There was no reference to fuel economy that I can recall—who cared? ...gas was about 20 cents a gallon! Anyways, Sh …
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Top three security concerns are viruses, spam, and data breaches but most companies don't have prot …
We like this article so much we recommend our IT clients send it out to all their customers!New Surveys on Small Business security and SuccessBy James E. Gaskin , Network World , 04/23/2009Understanding small business is tough because there are so many of them and they vary so widely. But all small …
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What's Your "Active Ingredient "?
When I was growing up in the 1950's, Shell, the gasoline company, was advertising that their fuel contained "TCP" an additive that increased horsepower and made your engine run better. There was no reference to fuel economy that I can recall—who cared? ...gas was about 20 cents a gallon! Anyways, Sh …
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10 Steps To Unleash Your Lead PR Machine
Take a systematic approach to small business public relations.PR is a powerful small business marketing tool. By PR, we mean getting positive press mentions about your firm in local, trade and national publications.These mentions are so powerful because they are seen to come from unbiased 3rd partie …
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Why do we ignore each other so often??
We are spending a lot of time, and some money too, working on ways to stay in touch with people who have said what we are doing is interesting.These aren't prospects, and frankly they may never be. They are just folks who for one reason or another have read something we've posted, or met Ken at a pa …
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We've been invited to become a Infusionsoft Certified Marketing Automation Coach
We are delighted that Infusionsoft has asked us to become a Certified Marketing Automation Coach (CMAC).Infusionsoft makes a pretty simple promise to small business users: you can double your sales. Guaranteed.It's a web-powered software program that helps you "Fix Your Follow-up Failure" and: * …
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Read this! Alan Weiss on why you never, ever reduce your fees.
You Can't Back Down When Your Back Is Against the WallOff the Wall: A Column by Alan Weiss, Contributing EditorOne of the most consistent questions I'm asked even when coaching successful entrepreneurs is, "What do I say when they want a reduction in fee?"What you say is complex and arcane, so you m …
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How to get the most from your subject line
We subscribe to Marketing Experiments for its marketing research results. We get to see data we can trust on issues of real importance to our clients - like this investigation into how to make the subject line of an email work best. It's common sense to say that emails reaching out to clients and pr …
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"Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money (And What to Do Instead)"
We ran across this terrific book by Aubrey Daniels in a Wallace Immen article in Friday's Globe and Mail. We hope you all run out and buy the book. We sure did!From Friday's Globe and Mail, Saturday, Jun. 06, 2009 04:10AM EDTWhen times are tough, managers are expected to reach into their bag of tric …
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What Really Triggers a Referral?
Posted by: John Jantsch on May 19, 09 Wish we had said this...but John said it better than we ever could!Referrals most naturally happen when two people are talking and one of the parties expresses a pain in the neck. If the other party just had her pain in the neck fixed, she may very well say some …
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How to earn the money you are worth
Yesterday I spent an hour with a new client we’ll call Jasper who is uniquely qualified in his field, which is coaching up-and-comers in the music business. He provides fantastic value, but his potential clients are switching careers and he’s not sure what to charge. What can they afford at this pre …
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Expertise and the Curse of Knowledge Could Be Killing Your Lead Generation
Our coaching clients are pretty diversified. On the books right now we have a consultant who helps high tech companies get new products to market; a coach for wanna-be musicians; a small-business technology provider; and the team at a training and development company. They come from Atlantic Canada …
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SMBs "less like a two-ton gorilla and more like a thousand four-pound monkeys, difficult to chase d …
Thanks to Rick Telberg for Tweeting this. It's a bit of a wake up call for service providers like accounting firms - this is where your SMB business is going, and if you want to reach small business, you had better be there too.SMBs Poised to Triple Site SpendAmerica's 14.6 million small and medium- …
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Why Small Businesses Won't Double Their Revenue This Year
Part of the fun we have in our practice is hanging out with small business owners. These people are smart, driven, competent and experts in their chosen industry. We always learn something, and we are always in awe of how successful they are at doing something we couldn't imaging even understanding, …
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What if the Roasted Pecan Syrup Fails the Taste Test?
Sometimes I'm so happy with a product I just have to tell the manufacturer. Unfortunately, sometimes the opposite is true.Case in point: Recently, I tried a new flavored syrup on pancakes. Pecan flavored. Mmmmmm! But hey, wait a minute, shouldn't this stuff taste like pecans? Unfortunately, not this …
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Geoffrey James: Top 10 Lies Customers Tell Sales Reps Part Two
We get a real kick out of reading Geoffrey James' posts on BNET. They are interesting and we use his thinking in our own business development. Have a read and tell us what you think.LIE #5: “I’m sorry I missed our meeting.”How often it’s actually true: If it happens more than once, it’s definitely a …
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Geoffrey James: Top 10 Lies Customers Tell Sales Reps Part One
We get a real kick out of reading Geoffrey James' posts on BNET. They are interesting and we use his thinking in our own business development. Have a read and tell us what you think.LIE #10: “We don’t have the budget.”How often it’s actually true: About 25 percent of the time.Why they tell this lie: …
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The Never-Fail Recipe for Ads That Work Like Crazy
It’s always surprising to us to see so much advertising, especially in print, which does not work. It simply doesn’t contain the ingredients needed to successfully communicate with customers.If you make a cake, you don’t leave out any ingredients — right? Then why leave out an important part of your …
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How Dave Could Write a Successful Sales Letter
My brother-in-law, Dave, called last night. He's started a new business—small engine repair. He's very good at it, been doing it for years working for various shops around town. Dave once installed a Ford 8-cylinder engine in his Harley-Davidson. His dad got angry when he found the Harley's engine w …
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Intuit Study Shows Small Business Owners Issues have Changed in 6 months
Intuit, has reissued a portion of a US survey originally conducted in July 2008 to see changes with small business owners and accountants in mid-January 2009.Small business owners' biggest concerns have changed. "Finding time to develop and run my business" the second largest concern in the summer …
The BUZZ Blog
