Niche Marketing Matters

People prefer blogs over books. While there may be many different reasons for this preference, my guess is that the most important blog characteristic is that most blogs are short — probably less than 500 words.

Shorter is better.

First, let’s examine books. According to an Associated Press Poll and The Washington Post, “One in four adults read no books at all in the past year. Of those who did read, older people (mostly women) were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.”

Similar studies tell a story that the average American reads one book a year and only half bought a book last year. Books are in trouble. (Note to self: I may need to reconsider this book writing thing.)

Blogs are a different beast:
• 133,000,000 blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002
• 346,000,000 people read blogs daily (worldwide)
• 77% of active Internet users read blogs
• 81 languages are represented in the blogosphere

My theory is that shorter is better in our “Adult ADD culture” — time is just too precious to allocate it to any written material beyond 500 words. Blogs fit our pace.

Word quantity can be a significant weapon — ask any lawyer. If you want to confuse someone, just throw a lot of words at them. For instance, the current health care bill that just got through the House of Representatives was over 400,000 words long. My bet is that you did not read it and nor will you. If you did, you would only be confused anyway.

Yet, if you want to communicate, brevity is everything. For example, the Gettysburg Address was only 272 words. Most Americans have read it and many understand it (more or less). Lincoln would make a great blogger.

People prefer blogs because blogs are shorter. Long live blogs.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

As you know, the recession has taken its toll on workers. Those who remain employed are openly unhappy about things. A recent study found that 71% of employees intend to find a new job when the market turns around. Sales people are no exception.

Of all the job categories, sales reps are under the most pressure to perform in this tough environment; the mantra has been work harder and make more sales calls. To make it worse, many commissioned sales people have taken significant pay cuts—I know some reps that have seen their income cut by 50% or more. Candidly, it is likely your sales reps are very angry and will consider changing jobs soon.

In response, here is what I recommend:

1. Wake up and smell the coffee. Anticipate turnover and prepare for it.
2. Spend some quality one-on-one time with your sales staff to access their vulnerability.
3. Investigate and/or revise employee retention strategies; this could include a personal development plan for each rep. Find out what they want and need.
4. Consider the creation of long term incentives. Investigate golden handcuffs to keep them.
5. Invest in training your sales staff to help them get ready for recovery.
6. Time to review your succession plans including sales management.
7. Consider upgrading your sales staff with better reps. The upside of this market downturn is the great inventory of available quality reps who need jobs.

Finally, hug your sales reps daily. They need love too.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

Source: CNN 2009

Google is the big dog of search on the web. No other firm really counts. Here is why.

ComScore, a leading score keeper on the web, just released its tabulation of the U.S. search marketplace. According to ComScore, “In September 2009, Americans conducted 13.8 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 64.9 percent search market share. In September 2009 there were over 13.8 billion searches.”

What this means to website owners is that the other search engines don’t really matter. To be found on the web, you need to build a website that is Google friendly. In the search engine optimization community, SEO experts jokingly suggest that websites need lots of “spider food” to feed the hungry search engines and to keep them coming back for more.

Spider food includes inbound links, SEO copy, proper tagging, searchable URLs, and lots of fresh, original content. Google spiders can never get enough to eat and their tastes can change. Beware of offering the same menu as last year.

Remember that only Google matters when it comes to search.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

As many of you know, I have been a big fan of article marketing as a way to position yourself as a thought leader while creating some great publicity. I softened this position about a year ago when Google started making deductions to site rank for duplicate content.

In the old days (about two years ago), an easy way to boost your website rank was to publish articles with article directory services like www.ezinearticles.com. The directory services sell your article to ezines which create multiple locations for your article. If you distributed your articles to multiple article directory services, you multiplied the impact. Your website rank would then go through the roof. Unfortunately, Google inadvertently squashed this practice in an effort to penalize site owners who steal content from other sites.

While I use other organic SEO tools such as blogging and links, article marketing is still a very viable tool. For example, I just got a report from www.ezinearticles.com for the life time views of my articles on their site (not including the sites that they sell to). This report showed that I have received over 156,000 views of my articles, which is effectively the number of “click throughs” or people who have read my articles.

In fact, I had one article called “Product Positioning Strategies” which secured 21, 516 views! Each those views included a call to action to visit my site. Many did.

If you like to write, article marketing is free and effective. Try it out.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

“If current life expectancy trends continue, more than half of babies born in rich nations since 2000 will live to 100 years of age, and they’ll have less disability than elderly people in previous generations. That’s the conclusion of researchers who found that increases in life expectancy evident in rich nations since 1840 show no signs of slowing.”

- HealthDay News Oct 2, 2009

Think of that! Half our children will live to 100 years of age. The implications to our society are extraordinary. This is especially true for marketers. Our present marketing strategies won’t apply to this new generation.

For instance, how about life time guarantees? This practice began in the late 1950s when consumer marketing was born. Back in 1955, the life expectancy for Americans was only 69.6 years. Essentially, the bet was that we would die before the product did. Now marketers have to add another 30 years to their guarantee.

What are the other implications of your customers living to 100 years?

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

LONDON, England (CNN) — Demand for the world’s largest, most expensive yachts is on the rise ahead of the Monaco Yacht Show this week. “We’ve gotten the strongest forward order book that we’ve ever had. It’s the best outlook we’ve ever had since we’ve started the company,” said Toby Allies, Sales and Marketing Director for Pendennis, a leading British manufacturer and re-fitter of super yachts. Amid the global recession, the worldwide market for luxury goods has plummeted over the last year, expected to shrink 10 percent for 2009 according to global business consultants Bain & Company.

The above “news story” was posted on CNN today. This reminds me of what my friend and Public Relations expert, Nick Leighton, told me a while back. To paraphrase Nick, “Behind every news story is a PR effort”. Note that he emphasized EVERY news story.

Here we are in the bottom of the worst recession in 80 years—and CNN is telling us all about Super Yachts. Oh, really?

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

“Every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. … Only when you have substantial unscheduled time will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem. Managers’ typical response to my argument about free time is, ‘That’s all well and good, but there are things I have to do.’ Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.”

– Dov Frohman

The above quote is very powerful. Entrepreneurs, in particular, get so involved in “the chase” that they seldom take time to access things. The things that don’t get addressed include long term strategy, relationships, personal health & well being, and employee development. The consequences are obvious.

My long time friend Jim Kelton of Altius Technologies blocks out every Friday afternoon to plan, think, and dream of what he might do better for his business and for himself. He takes that time off-site from his work so that he can be uninterrupted.

How about you? Isn’t it time to schedule some free time?

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

If you are not a believer yet, you will be after you watch this. Socialnomics

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

Now that is a heavy question, is it not? Yet, there must be some reason that you are here on this planet at this time.

This type of question can motivate some to study philosophy and others to enter the seminary. Or, you could consider good old fashioned denial and avoidance to dodge the question—why bother answering a question that cannot be answered anyway?

To save you that trouble, here is the simple answer. You exist to fulfill your own unique purpose—whatever that may be. That is why you exist.

You have a unique responsibility to live out your own personal script. Maybe that purpose is to invent things like software or music. Your purpose could be to lead or teach others. You might have one purpose, a few, or many. Whatever it is, it is exclusively yours. It does not matter what your purpose is as long as you do it.

Alas, here is the rub—you must uncover your purpose before you can do it. One way to discover your purpose is with the creation of a personal mission statement. A personal mission statement addresses three questions:

1) What is your life about?

2) What do you stand for?

3) What are you doing to fulfill that purpose?

Using no more than 30 words, a personal mission statement says what you wish to accomplish or contribute and who you want to be. Your mission statement speaks about what you are doing today to fulfill that purpose. Don’t confuse your mission with vision. Vision statements describe what could be in the future while a mission statement lives in the here and now.

Yes, answering these questions may not be easy. Here is an exercise that might help get you going. Imagine that it is your 80th birthday and you are having a grand party. All your family, friends, co-workers in your profession, and neighbors have gathered to hear you speak. What would you say to them was most important in your life? What did you do for the last 80 years? Why? How?

As the Greek philosopher Epictetus wrote, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.
(this blog is being republished by request)

A good domain name should have the following elements:

1. It should be easy to spell. Avoid hyphens, double letters or funny spellings. Hyphens get confused with underscores. Double letters can cause confusion. Unusual or clever spelling gets us all in trouble.

2. Domains ending in .com are preferred but .net and .us are becoming more common. This ending suffix is called a domain extension.

3. Two word combinations are preferred. Longer combinations can be hard to remember. I regret to inform you that it seems that almost every two word URL has been taken. Three words may be the only way to go.

4. Made up words and acronyms have been the rage—think Google, Yahoo!, and Zappos. Still the cost of creating a brand for a name like this is astronomical. Interestingly enough Google gives higher rank to URLs that use searchable words. For example, www.nichemarketingmatters.com contains search friendly terms.

5. Short is always better, but good luck with that. It is not easy with .com prefixes.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.