Seth Godin posted a short blog today on an article about himself in Business Week. It’s interesting to see the divide between people who are Godin addicts and those the think he’s nothing more than a self promoter. Personally, I thoroughly enjoy his books and have read every one of them but you need to go into them with a certain mind set. You can’t expect a step by step guide to Marketing. The truth of the matter is that there isn’t one. For example, how can you write a book about becoming a “purple cow” and then provide “five easy steps” to accomplishing it? If there were five easy steps and everyone followed them, then you wouldn’t be a “purple cow” would you? You’d be like everyone else. That’s the beauty of Godin’s books. He provides the foundation and the principles to great marketing. He gets the wheels spinning in your head. It’s then up to you, as the reader, to figure out how these thoughts and ideas fit your unique situation and develop a Marketing strategy that stands above the noise.
Archive for September, 2008
Seth Godin: Marketing Genius or Self-Promoter
Thursday, September 25th, 2008Track the Success of Your Promotions and Offers
Thursday, September 25th, 2008We’ve added a new link tracking option to the promotion form that allows Marketing for Mavens to track the success of your links. This will allow you to see how successful your promotions and offers are and compare them over time. Right now, the backend system is in place to track each link and display the results as “clicks” on the promotion page. Soon, you will be able to see which visitors clicked on your promotions and track whether the promotion led to a conversion (sale, lead, registration, etc.).
As always, Marketing for Mavens is in beta. If you find any bugs with this new feature, please email us at bugs@marketingformavens.com.
Promoting Campaigns Based on Site Visits
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008Currently, Marketing for Mavens offers 3 types of promotions; tags, visits, and individual. I’d like to take a moment to explain the visit promotions.
Visit promotions are designed to show different content based on the number of visits a person makes to your web site. For instance, the first time someone visits your site you may want a home page promotion that explains what your company does. Then for all subsequent visits, you can change the promotion to go into more detail about your products, events, and services.
Visit promotions aren’t distributed to your visitors based on their needs the way tag promotions are but they can be very valuable in certain circumstances. Just remember, a new visit is determined by the time in-between page views which is 30 minutes. When you test your visit promotions, you will need to wait 30 minutes between page checks for a new visit to be recorded.
Web Analytics is Dead
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008Web Analytics is the one thing that all web marketers do and it continues to be the least understood. Every corporate site uses some form of Web Analytics software. Whether it’s Google Analytics, WebTrends, WebSideStory, or some other package, companies spend thousands of dollars a year on these applications. The problem is that these packages record too much information with too little time to respond. When we do respond, it’s to make small changes designed to appeal to the masses that have already been to your site and that if we’ve even interpretted the data correctly.
If we’ve learned anything in the ClueTrain era it’s that mass anything no longer works. Just look at mass advertising, mass email, and mass mailings. These marketing techniques require that you hit as many people as you can because you’re only going to reach about 3% to 5% of them. Well what about the other 95%. Shouldn’t we at least try to appeal to them? Well we can.
To appeal to the other 95% on the web, we need to be able to customize and target our content directly to them. We need to learn about our visitors as they use our sites and we need to respond to their needs in real-time, not weeks and months later when we have time to analyze our reports. We don’t have the time. Many people will only visit our sites once to decide if they want to do business with us. These lost opportunities will never come back.
We’re now well into the Web 2.0 era but our web analytics software has done little to catch up. It’s now time to look for ways to communicate as close to a 1 on 1 basis as possible. I’ve been formulating these ideas for some time now and have begun integrating them in the Marketing for Mavens web application. It focuses on communicating with each of your visitors and I welcome you to try the free beta and let us know what you think.
Bringing Clean Water to Ethiopia
Friday, September 5th, 2008I was recently made aware of a campaign called charity water. They are trying to raise enough money to build 333 wells in Ethiopia to bring fresh, clean drinking water to thousands of people. Last year the founder, Scott Harrison, had the idea to use his birthday to raise almost $160,000. All of this money went to building new wells for 3 hosipitals and a school. This year, he’s expanding it in a huge way. Please join me in helping to raise $500 for this fantastic cause. Thank you and please spread the word.
Top 3 Business Books: Generating Ideas, Passion, & Energy
Thursday, September 4th, 2008I read a lot of business books. Usually, I read a couple at the same time which confuses my wife but the different ideas and view points I receive keep my creative energy going. Recently, I’ve been thinking about which books I’d keep if I could only read three for the rest of my life. These are the three that came to mind.
- The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann
- Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
- Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? by Seth Godin
I’ve chosen these three for their principles, readability, and creative energy. I can and have read these books several times. Each time, I get something new out of them. They inspire me and send my creative energy through the roof. If I find myself sitting around wondering what to do next, I’ll pick up one of these titles and start reading. The wheels in my head will start churning and I’ll be able to move past the mental block.
If you could only choose three books to read for the rest of your life, what would they be?
Google Chrome JavaScript Blazing Fast
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008I’ve just started using Google Chrome but I’m really impressed by how fast it runs JavaScript. I haven’t done an formal testing but loading the same page in both Firefox and Chrome results in a noticeable difference in the load time for content transferred from the Marketing for Mavens database.
Google Chrome: Browser Wars 2008
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008The browser war continues to heat up with Google jumping in in a big way. I suspect that we’ll see some market share taken from both Mozilla and Microsoft with Microsoft having the most to fear. Google has much better brand recognition with the late adopter crowd then Mozilla does.
I’m really looking forward to giving Chrome a try. I enjoy Firefox but 3.x has been a little buggy and there is always room for competition. The good news is that the current browser wars focus on standards so it doesn’t effect web developers as much as it use to. Back in the Netscape and IE 4 days, that was a real nightmare.
One area that Chrome is focusing on is JavaScript speed. This is what I find most intriguing as it’s no secret that Marketing for Mavens relies heavily on JavaScript. The faster the JavaScript speed, the quicker we can retrieve your content from the database and display it in your web pages. This is something I’ll be testing as soon as I can get my hands on the download which will hopefully be later today.
