Days have an annoying habit of only having 24 hours in them. Your email is full of important messages, and reading time is in short supply. The bottom line is that if you’re going read a business or marketing blog, it had better be time well spent.  

Not to worry. These are blogs that you won’t mind taking up space in your inbox, including a few about some of the greatest marketing geniuses of all times. And why not lead off with one of those geniuses?

Featured Resource this week -

 Whether you are a dentist, salesperson or office worker, there has never been an easier way to send a genuine thank you, reminder or follow-up card. Greeting cards can be powerful business tools to help make sure your business clients and customers know just how important they are!

Here's an added bonus: To totally integrate your SendOutCards into marketing campaigns through your Infusionsoft or other CRM, check out Fix Your Funnel too! It's the glue between your SendOutCards and Infusionsoft.

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

The best way to relieve the stress that always accompanies the holiday season is to have your plan in place early—the sooner, the better.

Start circling days on the calendar. Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday are the big shopping days. While your business may not depend greatly on Halloween sales, remember that customers are already thinking about Christmas shopping, and it's another opportunity for promotions.

You know the old saying, "If you don't know where you are going, then any road is as good as any other." The same is true of a marketing and sales strategy. If you don't have a strategy that you are executing against, then any kind of marketing is as good as any other. Cost and ROI be damned!

Jordan Hatch, my long time friend at Infusionsoft wrote a great blog post a couple of weeks ago on "How To Create A Sales and Marketing Strategy" that I want to share with you.

In a recent blog post here, we talked about "Building A Fence Around Your Herd." One of the strategies there was having a membership site. I recently wrote an article published in the July 2015 issue of the Joomla Community Magazine, that offers 10 reasons why you NEED a membership component to your website. Check it out by clicking here to go to the article.

If you have a membership site, how do you use it? Paid? Free? How do you use it to drive traffic and revenue?

Well since Jordan* (www.jordanhatch.com) is still on the email kick, I thought I'd stick with it as well. Again just like Jordan*, I often get asked, "How does email actually work?" or "How come my email is not being delivered when Infusionsoft says it is?", or "How do I measure my email deliverability rates?". Or many variations on these themes.

Well ,as Jordan points out in his excellent blog post (http://www.jordanhatch.com/email-deliverability-i-dont-think-that-word-means-what-you-think-it-means/) how email actually gets out of your system (your Outlook, Gmail, Infusionsoft, Mail Chimp, whatever) and into your recipient's email server is pretty complicated....and it hasn't even gotten to your recipient's inbox yet.

Google’s Mobile Update is Looming! Are You Ready for April 21st?

On April 21st, Google is planning to rock its mobile search results with an algorithmic update that will change everything. This update is expected to affect more sites than Penguin and Panda combined because searches from mobile devices are estimated to make up more than 50% of all Google searches. To be clear - there is no site that is safe so do NOT pass over this update thinking it isn't relevant to you.

With a chill wind blowing and snowflakes filling the air, thoughts of warm spring may seem like a distant dream on the horizon. Even though winter may be seem like a frozen eternity, it’s never too early to start planning your marketing for Q2. What are your goals for spring, and how will you reach them?  

The marketing calendar may look a little bare at first glance, what with Christmas and the other winter holidays receding in the rear-view mirror, but the spring and early summer months have plenty to offer.

In April, there’s Easter, Thomas Jefferson's birthday and April Fool's Day for starters. Throw in Tax Day, Earth Day, Administrative Professionals Day, and Car Care Month, too.

The Christmas tree has been secured in its box for another year, the tinsel has been taken down and the colored lights are already a fading memory.  Yes, the holidays are over, and it’s time to get serious about your marketing for 2016. Right?

Well, not so fast. For smart marketing people, the holidays are never over. Even though the major ones like Christmas and New Years have passed, there are still plenty of smaller ones throughout the year. Each one of these presents an opportunity for creative marketing.

If the thought of what to do for your Halloween marketing this year has you yearning to hang a “Gone Trick-or-Treating” sign on the door the first day of October, then this post is for you!

Marketing for Halloween is a must, of course, if you're selling Halloween-related products.  Even if you’re not however, it's a great way to generate goodwill, keep your name in customers' minds, and kick off your other holiday sales. Besides, everyone needs a little Halloween fun!

Long before October 31st you should be posting some Halloween related content on your website and through social media.

A few years ago there was an article on using email to increase your revenue on the Glazer-Kennedy Insider Circle (GKIC) site, an online entrepreneur marketing network.

The article emphasized three important ways to maximize the returns (ROI) of e-mail marketing:

1. Setting up automated email campaigns
2. Gaining valuable information from email
3. Using email to build brand loyalty

Not getting the results you want?

There probably isn't a week that goes by when you don't notice an ad on a website or in your email talking about “creating killer content”. So what does it really mean, and why do you need to do it?

Content marketing is often sought out by customers. It offers them the information they’re looking for when they need it the most.

Here's how to make it work for you:

Herding cats is hard work. Just ask any of the ranch hands in the award-winning EDS ad made back in 2001. The slippery felines gave them all they could handle and more. Proud, independent and stubborn, every cat wanted to make its own way whether the ranch hands wanted it to or not. Does it sometimes feel like keeping your customers happy is a lot like cat herding?

A key recommendation by Dan S. Kennedy, the marketing expert, is to build a fence around your cats (customers) to keep out poachers and to prevent them from going off on their own. Just because your customer has made a purchase from you in the past doesn't mean he or she is your customer forever. It's important to try to offer your clients extra products and services -- extra value -- that will keep them coming back to you.

For years now, anyone of my marketing coaching or Infusionsoft clients who asked me about open rates of their Infusionsoft emails (or emails in general), I have said something along the lines of: "Open rates are very unreliable....if it says that the email was opened, then it was, but if it says it was unopened, you have no idea if it was opened or not."

On top of that, many email clients (Outlook and Apple Mail for example) are configured to have a preview list on one side of the window and the email itself on the other. If you use your arrow keys to move up and down the preview list, then as you pass emails, they become "read"....you know that you haven't read them....you are passing them so you can get to the latest comment on your cat video Facebook post. But all the ones you scrolled through will be reported back as read.

The beginning of each new year often brings cold, chilling winds, hailing the promise of another long dreary winter. And just when that wintry depression threatens to take hold, we often find ourselves temporarily saved by that army of precocious females: the Girl Scouts and their annual cookie sale. 

Originally a money-making scheme for a single troop during World War I, Girl Scout Cookies have become a much-anticipated institution for girls and customers alike. According to Wikipedia, sales of these cookies average 200 million boxes per year.