January 31, 2008 – 11:51 am
Stan and Sara are well established baby boomers. Their adult children are in their early twenties and actively pursuing professional careers like their parents. Married to Sara for thirty years, Stan is a CPA (age 55) and met Sara (now 52) in college when she was studying nursing.
Sara and Stan are pragmatic, conservative, and principled [...]
January 25, 2008 – 7:52 pm
You hear business owners say things like this all the time:
“I am my market”
Sigh…
If there’s one thing I wish people would understand (well, that particular list has about a zillion items on it, but whatever) it’s that you most definitely are not your market. The reasons are simple but apparently not very obvious, or fewer [...]
January 19, 2008 – 9:02 pm
How much do you know about your customers? I mean really, how much do you really know about them? I am not talking about a generic customer description, demographics, or “I am my market”.
No I am talking about something deeper and more meaningful.
What I am talking about is really understanding the personality, characteristics, drivers, and [...]
January 19, 2008 – 2:35 pm
Imagine you run a small downtown store. You put a big sign up front in the window that attracts a huge number of people in off the street. You’re so busy all the sudden! People are everywhere! They say “Nice store,” and then…
They leave without buying a damn thing.
That’s what typical blogging advice will do [...]
January 16, 2008 – 6:30 am
Storytelling: Tapping into the Desire for Success
Storytelling is powerful blogging. It’s also powerful marketing and sells without selling — in other words, storytelling isn’t a “hard” pressure tactic form of selling. It isn’t selling at all! The whole point of storytelling is to make it easy for potential customers to envision their own success by [...]
January 13, 2008 – 8:36 pm
Selling the Vision via your Unique Value Proposition
In Gateway blogging, you show your potential and existing customers what you’re all about by how you blog so they can make or reaffirm a decision to do business with you. If you don’t uniquely position yourself and shine like a lighthouse in the foggy night across an [...]
January 8, 2008 – 8:11 pm
Content Framing is the process and practice of speaking to your intended audience in a way that is designed to connect with them and appeal to them. In order to do that, you have to know who they are generally. One key area in which business owners fail is that they don’t understand who their [...]
January 4, 2008 – 12:34 pm
I have always told my clients that you “need to know your client” and encouraged them to identify their ideal customer. While every client I have worked with felt that he or she ‘knew’ their clients they struggled putting it into words. Therefore, I began developing this persona concept to try and bring some clarity [...]
January 1, 2008 – 9:51 pm
The Advantages and Problems with Blogs are One and the Same
One thing that makes blogs different from other types of website is that blog content is listed in reverse chronological order and is archived after it drops off the home page. This is great for keeping up with news. But unlike a more “traditional” (I [...]
