Articles on Digital Entrepreneurship, Product Design, and Sales and Marketing Strategy

The Rule of Niche-Market Marketing: Agile Monopolize

What if you could paralyze the minds of the people visiting your website – so they do your bidding?

To understand the difference between brand messaging and copywriting, read on

Your messaging has to punch in the gut, not the hip bone, to have power

Business books contain wisdom and perspective, but sometimes it’s hidden. To solve this problem, start thinking about business spectrums

What is the very core a business model?

The expertise business model delivers three kinds of work: strategic advice, implementation work, and creative work

Buzzword-speak is mockable – yet necessary. Learn to master it in your thinking, writing and speaking

Marketing is a way to work on both your product and your business model

How tell whether its’ part of your business model or your marketing plan?

What can you help your prospective customers assess?

How do you capture, “your voice”? You don’t

How do you make your customers more successful?

The most important business decisions deserve a second opinion

Beware of theories

Expertise yardstick: can you elaborate entertainingly in response to trivial questions about your area of expertise?

To prove you have a solution, you must be able to explain it simply

You don’t need multichannel marketing – at least not the technologies or automation behind it

Beware of overlooking advice from amateurs, also-rans, so-called failures, or those who score less than others

The best way to be clear in conversation is to write about it

Instead of finding your passion – learn how to consistently cultivate a flow state

Marketing gurus make things to complicated. Keep it simple.

Value pricing is basically a perception game

How to use the ProfitWell pricing interview matrix to set a good price for productized services

AI can write, yes. But can it think? Not yet

How do you know what to charge for a productized service? How can you raise that price?

Niche B2B expertise businesses have the opportunity to truly partner with clients, by taking on financial risks

Niche consulting firms have to work on tomorrow’s business as well as today’s. In doing so, you can also help prior versions of yourself

One of the valuable by-products of publishing is being more effective at selling

Why is discipline is at the core of great independent consultancies?

What kind of certainty has the most business value?

Use a wireframing tool to create messaging; messaging is partly UX design.

You have to learn to master the push and pull of marketing and use them both simultaneously

Like software products, consulting products need “customer success” treatment

Is your instinctive tone of voice the one that will make your life easiest?

Be careful of over-emphasizing conversion. There’s a balancing act with Churn

For a lean, expertise-drive B2B business, consider using a lightweight cloud spreadsheets as your CRM

Content marketing needs to speak truth – tell your audience to stop doing things the wrong way. How? By infotaining

Tech startups competing with GSuite have billions in valuations because they package their expertise into template libraries

ROI calculators are useful props but they miss the point: that you transform your customers into something better

Use the success of your business to create something apart from it that represents your business well

Websites are the most valuable business asset for 80% of businesses. You should always be redesigning your website.

It is profitable to polarize. But how do you do that?

What can independent B2B businesses learn from Amazon about keeping customers coming back?

A formula for profitable advice giving

Don’t let jargon poison your copy; it doesn’t make you look smart, it makes you look wonky

Plotting change/optimization v revenue/costs – where does your services firm fit?

If you are a change business, you have to define what that means

Everything we make, do, and sell is made of words – so what’s your writing practice.

The eternal challenge is to translate your expertise into copywriting

Ben Settle’s secrets aren’t new – but the way he tells them are.

Go beyond content marketing

What are the five component parts of a business manifesto?

A explanation of why Karl Marx would have discouraged you from hourly billing

A knowledge worker is an independent manufacturer of intellectual assets

We must learn to cultivate surprise if we are to become skilled marketers. Start with the details.

You have at least 50 How-To posts in – here’s a simple roadmap to extracting them from your mind and turning into short blog posts.

Here’s a catch-22 – you don’t get to have ideas until you write about them

Sometimes you just publish huge emojis on accident – hopefully along with some insight

This post is about creating a product line out of your flagship product and when to use an infoslogan

Warm advertising, also known as remarketing, remains a unique opportunity.

There are so many ways to win, every time we play the game of business

How to cultivate business beliefs that fuel your content marketing

What do you do when he half-time show if life is so sad and scary?

Make happy fans, not angry rioters – by noticing what they think and feel

What does a sales call (or calls) actually look like? Here’s a 4-part outline.

Getting started with your own content marketing

Can Edith Eger’s words of mental emancipation message and love apply to your business?

B2B tech entrepeuners and experts belong to many waves – which one(s) do you belong to?

I know, I know – you never thought you’d be doing business with a neophobiac. But is their leader your most important client?

Zoom lets us spread ideas with aid of one-to-one facial expressions. Will that help them travel faster?

The more empathetic you are with your customers, the better the results. Two examples.

You just had an idea. Should you search the Internet to validate that it’s unique – or to validate that it’s not unique? 

In Alan Weiss’s world, a consultant earns trust through degrees, credentials, and a whiteshoe resume. Here’s some advice for the rest of us.

Can you categorize all 8 billion human beings into one of 16 personality types? Follow up question: how do those types of people like to interact?

Some people want to see prices before they talk to you. Some don’t want to talk to you at all.

You have an idea for a new product or service. But how do you know if people will want to buy it – before you build it?

People avoid marketing because it’s hard. They pay someone else to do it, or buy ads – with mixed results

MS Excel is one of the most effective business software products in history. But if your clients use it excessively, it becomes logistically defective. Then what – workarounds?

A good metaphor for creative enthusiasm is fire. Applying that fire to your product marketing is essential – but do you have any left over if you talk about it?

Every day for the last, oh, 2 million years or so, we name things – places, animals, plants, Gods, each other. But how?

In the short time frame, the most effective marketing ideation approach is holistic prospecting

We might think of positioning as (a) a newer concept, (b) a linear process, with start and a finish, and (c) a matter of formulaic business logic. Here are some alternative perspectives to help you position your business and its solutions

Amazon is putting the squeeze on digital content publishers, reminding us that it’s risky to let Big Tech be your middleman

We’re moving towards leaner, rougher, more authentic marketing materials, combined with more polished (and also more authentic) remote versions of ourselves

Congratulations, you’re part of the world’s largest distributed social network: email.

Andrew Keen and others have decried the massive power and privacy-grab of Big Tech, including in digital advertising. But maybe the pandemic will teach us we don’t need them as much as we think.

We accept the premise of learning through doing. But when it comes to marketing – learning what? There’s too much to learn. Here I explain why you should put prospecting on your learning shortlist.

Make marketing less confusing to you by telling a story. Your story is the main character. Read on to see the role you and your products play.

Schumpeter’s gale is blowing pretty hard and knocking many business models flat. Tech innovators can handle that but what about our customers?

How do you react when our culture starts to all of a sudden use Internet technology in a brand, new way?

If you put effort into your work, there’s something in it to salvage. But how to do so?

How many times – and over what time period – does someone have to meet you before they’re comfortable with you?

People are fond of saying that financial crises present opportunities. Here’s a small one I’m seeing.

When a recession is coupled with widespread changes in norms and behavior, marketing strategies will change too.

Business pundits say a crisis a great business opportunity. Maybe. But careful using it as marketing opportunity.

Testimonials now take much more work and authenticity than in the past. Which is good news for you.

How do we do a better job (than our septuagenarian politicians) at audio-visual marketing?

In retrospect, this week was all about Coronavirus and its impact on our businesses. Digital sales and marketing just got way more important.

COVID-19 or not, we’re all going remote and Internet-based. This post is about the invaluable art of listening to and seeing others on video conference calls.

Producing valuable marketing materials costs us money, effort, or both. But what does that effort look like?

Make your footer a large, thorough map of your entire business and marketing operations

In the wake of coronavirus, I want to talk about two types of viruses that I think are at odds with one another. One attacks the immune system, the other attaches itself to human enthusiasm.

Beware of marketing by committee. Instead, use an expert to edit marketing decisions, ideas, writing, and other creative work.

I’m issuing a correction on how to create copy and UX for your homepage

Garbage in, garbage out, they say. And so on. I want to share with you the daily publishing influences that shaped and inspired this list.

How do you create an original, valuable product? By asking the right questions about who it’s for and the problem it solves.

This article synthensizes “About us” advice from Peter Drucker, Simon Sinek, David C Baker, Seth Godin, William Strunk Jr, Donald Miller, and Derek Sivers

As our world gets more complex more rapidly, is it time to deepen our “demographic” positioning with psychographics?

It’s worth it to try to understand the size of your market. One approach is the addressable market theory, aka TOM, SAM, SOM. A nice compliment is psychographics

Your content marketing strategy should strike a balance between letting new people discover you and letting those already familiar with you deepen their relationship

If someone asks you for a free trial, sample, pitch, or consulting, you can ask them another question, “Why us?”

We’re all lexicographers now. Everyone needs to write their own dictionary of the ideas that are most important to their business – and their marketing

In the future, most of us will perform at least some of our sales and marketing online and less and less in person. Can we exploit that fact?

A content marketing strategy and a business strategy might look different. But in one respect they should be identical: lifespan.

Without curiosity, your marketing lacks fresh ideas. So it’s a shame that McKinsey put the kibosh on the world’s most impactful curiosity test.

If you can’t stand the idea of marketing, try teaching instead

Can you challenge your customer’s thinking on what they need to buy – while still building warm, empathetic rapport?

You hold tremendous quantities of familiar, business-related information in your mind. Is there value to looking at it in a new way?

Most B2B marketing advice fails to recognize the economic value of (a) positioning, (b) the cultivation of expertise, and (c) content marketing. All three are continuous processes fueled by new information and ideas.

A deck confers several advantages that a document/report or website do not. It’s become the ideal format for your sales and marketing collateral – and the perfect compliment to your website.

If marketing is about creating trust AND changing your tiny corner of the Universe, then we should cultivate expertise. I wouldn’t want a non expert trying to change my corner of the Universe.

How do you create brand messaging – and simultaneously set product strategy?

What does your business do? You get that question, right? What if you could answer it in an easy-to-consume (but detailed!) way by responding with just a link. 

I hope your marketing makes a difference for you this year – but also over the next 5 years.

Creating a pricing page is an ideation tool for refining the design of your products and services

A reader asks about ideation and I end up talking about doing research – and Graham Wallas

It’s one thing to craft a positioning statement. But they usually read like cardboard tastes. So how do you express positioning in a way that’s effective and readable?

How do you decide how to position your business in the market?

The “profile positioning” hack is the most superficial of a half a dozen other ways to express your positioning

Positioning doesn’t mean you have to be a purple cow, or go viral. Or occupy a market niche over the long-term. It means you let someone else define you

Why did I shut off analytics on my website and email newsletter? To focus on marketing metrics that matter

Use productized services to increase the value of your solutions – and the revenue they generate

Here’s some specific, step-by-step advice on how to create a free product, which is a content marketing asset

If you’re still thinking about productizing services, focus on low-touch. And consider offering a hybrid of productized and custom services

Productize your services to make it easier to sell and deliver your expertise – and easier for your clients to buy it

We encounter the word ‘strategy’ too many times a day. How do you evaluate one?

Building the “content marketing bridge” for your customers to find you: not comfortable, not easy, but safe (in the long term… if you do it right)

A reader writes that his purpose is not to sell a skillset, but to create a bridge between where his clients are and where his clients’ customers are

There’s so much bad advice on how to design a content marketing strategy. Here’s some fact-based advice: a case study of the popular chatbot product Drift

It’s easier to sell something specific than to sell the value of your business in general. Here’s a hack: write someone a letter about it

Being as clear as possible in your marketing gives you the chance to think clearly about the value your business creates

There’s a write way and a wrong way to structure the layout and messaging for your business’s homepage

The creative brief was invented by ad agencies but it can be used for any kind of project work. The key rule: it’s not a specs doc, it’s an ideation tool

When you put your name and your marketing behind your new type of solution.. product, content, service… do you feel like an imposter? Maybe you should

In theory this newsletter’s per diem is one little-but-worthy idea. Hard to pick just one idea when you’re on a “Godin-bender”, because he says things like: “if you think people are paying you for your secrets, you’re crazy”.

Notice the details, figure out how they are connected to the problem you solve, and create originals solutions

The US and the global economy are dominated by a handful of companies with ever increasing advantages. If you are somewhere between 1 and 100 FTE’s, this is a problem

In which “lead pool” does your ideal customer exist? The one you imagine by mashing together known lead pools until inspiration hits

A trigger bundles together your problem and a solution to it, and it does so *just* for you. Learn the difference between a compact trigger and a deep trigger – and why it matters for your business

A marketing campaign runs on good ideas. An idea board is a pretty useful place to incubate emotions, research, and other marketing idea building blocks

When you get stuck replying to an email, use the mirroring technique. And when you get stuck writing anything, just reply