If you’ve been reading our other articles, you know we talk a lot about the importance of content marketing. With the media world moving away from traditional (and often expensive) forms of advertising like television, and more towards 21^st-century media like Twitter and Facebook and your website, content marketing has become more important than ever. It allows you to tell your story and the story of your company in a unique way. Who are you? Why should someone buy from you rather than the thousand other companies? Content marketing allows you to put a human face on your marketing and gives customers a reason to choose you.

Featured Resource this week - Time Fusion

Automate Your Appointments

Are you using TimeTrade or Full Slate to give your clients online access for setting appointments with you? If not, you should be!

TimeFusion integrates Infusionsoft with TimeTrade and Full Slate to automate your appointment scheduling!

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

Featured Resource this week - Digital Product Delivery

Digital Publishing for eBooks and Downloads

DPD is an easy to use digital publishing platform for selling and delivering downloadable content. Upload your products to DPD and start selling in minutes. With DPD, all sales are paid directly to you with no per-sale fees, bandwidth charges, or commissions.

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

Featured Resource this week - Grammarly

Grammarly is the world’s most accurate grammar checker. 

Grammarly makes you a better writer by finding and correcting up to 10× more mistakes than your word processor.

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

Featured Resource this week - Call Monitoring with Infusionsoft

Call Monitoring Integrated With Infusionsoft!

Novice marketers focus on getting the lead, but experienced marketers know that the job is only done when dollars exchange hands. You can cut the cost of generating a sale by 50% or more when you monitor and track how well incoming calls are being handled.

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

Even if you’re charging ‘enough’, are you charging the best way to support your business model and goals? Let’s consider some creative and profitable options.

Have you ever played Whack-a-Mole? It’s an old but simple game where players take a mallet and try to strike toy moles as they pop up from underneath the board. As soon as the player has successfully “whacked” a mole, it disappears and another pops up somewhere else on the board.

It can often be a frustrating and monotonous game.

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.

What is your procedure when you get a lead? When you get a customer? To retain a customer? Any other time?

Look, followup is the most important thing that you can do.

If you’re a sports fan, you’ve probably seen some great athletes in your time. Whether they’re scoring a touchdown, dunking a basketball or hitting a grand slam, they’re marvels of grace, speed and power. What do many of these athletes have in common? Well, they rely on their natural gifts to overcome their opposition, and of course most of them have worked incredibly hard for their success.

It’s finally warm outside! The birds are chirping, the sun is shining and the grass is actually green instead of the funky shade of brown it’s been for the past eight months. You can be forgiven if you’re a lot more excited about getting back out on the golf course or planning your garden than you are about your marketing plan. After all, half your staff is planning to be out on vacation, and summer is presumably the slow season for many businesses anyway. And really, the only holiday worth mentioning during the whole stretch is the 4^th of July.

Right?

“Freedom isn’t free.”

“Land of the free because of the brave.”

“Got Freedom?”

If you’re out grabbing your beer, hamburgers and charcoal in preparation for Memorial Day you’ve probably noticed some of these slogans. They appear on everything from beer cozies to T-shirts to flip-flops, and on a busy day you can see them in parking lots from Albuquerque to Zanesville. For the most part, we pass them on our way to buy and don’t give them any more thought than we might give an abandoned shopping cart.

The weather forecast for Houston was grim on August 24^th, 2017. Hurricane Harvey, weakened by its passage through the Caribbean, had regained its strength and was now a Category 4 storm. It was barreling across the Gulf of Mexico and had Houston dead in its sights. The result would go on to make history, and not in a good way.

Featured Resource this week - Copy Doodles

Handwriting and hand-drawn enhancements have been used for years in advertising and marketing because they are a proven way to grab attention and increase response and readability. There is NOTHING out there that matches the quality, expertise and level of support you get when you become a CopyDoodles member.  Their extensive library of direct-response marketing graphics features thousands of hand-drawn CopyDoodles, which can be easily downloaded to your computer and placed on any of the online or offline marketing pieces you are working on in a snap.

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

The workload really isn’t that big. It just seems that way at the moment. Your clients really aren’t that demanding. It just feels that way right now. The stack of projects at your desk isn’t that huge. It just seems like Mount Everest this morning.

Maybe what you need isn’t necessarily a way to squeeze a few more productive minutes out of your day. Maybe what you need is a vacation.