No, I don’t mean to take them off the shelves, or rip up your catalog. Yes, I know that if we don’t sell things, we cease to make a living. I’m talking about a style of marketing that seems focused on nothing but the final sale, while missing all of the other steps of the process. You need to end this maniacal focus on the sale as being the only way you interact with your customers. Too many people have gotten the idea that search marketing is great for sales, but have forgotten everything else about search marketing, and maybe marketing in general. To succeed at marketing, even search marketing, you need to find a way to remember about the rest of the buying cycle.

Continue Reading…

I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with Marvin, who called me to discuss Network Marketing. Somehow we had become connected through Facebook or another social networking website and he thought that since we were tagged as being friends online he believed that that gave him permission to call me and try to sell me something. That’s a whole other blog post in itself, and a debate that could go on and on. My conversation with Marvin, a network marketer who is heavily involved in MLM (Multi Level Marketing) and network marketing, thought that he could sell me a domain name and website. Marvin and I talked about it, and I explained that buying a website wasn’t my thing: that it in fact was not a way to “get more leads” by simply buying someone else’s website content that they were selling. In fact, doing so is actually leaning towards search engine spam, and that simply copying someone else’s content was a no-no.

Continue Reading…