If you’re in business, you’re in the marketing business. And you’ve been handed a gift worth $8.4 B (that’s billion!). In fact, this is a gift that repeats annually and has increased in value by 60% in the past 10 years. Run all the way to your bank with it!

Halloween is big business and there’s no reason you can’t cash in on some of it. Think about your audience and how to creatively engage them using Halloween to promote your business, your products, your services, your brand.

Summer is coming to an end, and your marketing calendar is about to get a lot busier. Starting with Labor Day and continuing on through the end of the year, there is a virtual cornucopia of great holidays. Is your marketing ready for the blitz?

Do you have the resources you need? Unless you have an exceptionally large marketing budget you can’t go after every holiday, or you’ll risk spreading your resources too thin. What about some of the new marketing holidays that have sprung up in recent years?  Events like Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday may not appear on a traditional calendar, but they may be extremely valuable to you.

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.

When our son calls, his daughter almost always wants to get on the phone, saying “Daddy, I want to see Grandmom and Granddad!” (make the call a FaceTime call) and once we are visible, odds are she will say “Can you read me a story?” She usually asks Kerry, I guess her storytelling is better than mine, at least in our granddaughter’s eyes.

What’s the point, other than a cute antidote about Eva? The point is that we identify with stories from the time we are very young… we’ve been reading stories to Eva since she was just a few months old. We relate to stories, we learn from stories, we start to better understand our world through stories. Stories help us see things that cold hard facts would not allow us to see.

One of the most fulfilling things you can do is share your knowledge and experience by mentoring someone who is passionate to learn what you know. Sharing what you know as a mentor can be just as powerful for you as it is for your mentee.

There are different scenarios for the mentor-mentee relationship. Sometimes mentors and mentees are actually employed at the same business, and the relationship may develop informally or by mandate. Other times, the relationship develops between two people who are not commonly employed and don’t work together in any way. On occasion, you’ll find a paid mentoring program such as our Infusionsoft Mentor Program. Often the relationship is initially pursued by the mentee when they have defined a need and know you have the skill and experience to help them meet that need.

We all love our gadgets. From our classic kitchen appliances to the latest and greatest cell phone app, we’re surrounded by them. They’re great when they work. It’s when they don’t work that things begin to get complicated.

Technology giveth and sometimes technology taketh away it seems. 

Featured Resource this week -

Change the RULES of Mobile Marketing.

Before now, mobile marketing was severely limited. You could only send a single text in response to a single incoming text message. This caused people using mobile marketing to settle for less than effective marketing strategies.

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It’s about a month until Q4. Do you have your marketing strategy ready to roll? Without a plan, you’ll flounder for one more quarter and be in exactly the same position at the start of Q1 as you are today.

We just created a simple checklist for you and your team to put some clarity and organization around your Q4 marketing, with an eye towards getting better results for you.

Get the checklist.

Here’s to a brilliant Q4!

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.

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Last week, our article was about how storytelling has worked for thousands of years to get a message across and have it stick. I got to wondering why it works so consistently, so I did a little research and here’s what I found.

Stories are fun or interesting or engaging or profound or touching or scary or, well, you get the picture. But why they ‘stick’ in our heads was an interesting question to me and my research taught me about the physiological and chemical changes that happen in our brains when we hear a story.

In a previous article, we took a look at making a five-year plan for your business. The next step is to put that plan into action. What resources do you need? What steps do you need to take to get started? To make it even more challenging, you’re also trying to predict future events you might not fully be able to control.

Getting started is pretty simple though, and it begins with writing your plan down. There are many good reasons for writing down your business or marketing plan. This makes you take the time to think your plan through and will make you feel more confident in it.

Do you remember all those predictions for the future? Some of the wilder ones included flying cars, colonies on Mars and personal robots to cater to your every need. What about your prediction for your business? Where will you be next year, or in 5 years?

While the future is always a little murky, it’s important to create long-term goals for yourself and your business. The best business plans are more than just documents you create and stick in a drawer somewhere. They’re more than just simple vision statements. Instead they’re living roadmaps for reaching your goals.

Featured Resource this week -

 One Click Upsell

If you sell products, services or entry to events, using Infusionsoft's order forms, and you are not leading the new buyer to an immediate up sell, YOU ARE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE!!!

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Happy New Year! I know I’m 4 months early but I just had to share this killer personal practice with you so you can use Q4 to get a powerful jumpstart on 2018.

If you’re not already one of the elite business leaders in the world, you can borrow their best personal practice that got them where they are and keeps them there.

The chill wind rustles through the paper-dry remnants of summer leaves. A hollow moon peaks out from scattered clouds. And below are a sea of ghosts and goblins, pirates, ninjas and would-be superheroes all vying to see how much candy they can accumulate.

Halloween has grown to become the second largest retail holiday behind only Christmas. In 2016, an estimated 171 million people in the U.S. spent nearly $8.2 billion dollars celebrating spirits and spooks.