Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Mike Michalowicz (Click to play or right click and "Save As" to download - Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Okay, I'll admit the title of this post is a bit odd for a marketing blog, but it relates specifically to the title of a book by this week's guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, Mike Michalowicz. Michalowicz has written a book called The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field As goofy as the title may sound, the book contains the essence of an idea I've been promoting for many years and that is - if you want to stand out you must narrow your focus and get really, really good at one thing. According to Michalowicz the idea for the book came about after reading an article about a local farmer who had dedicated his life to growing giant pump­kins. Michalowicz realized the same process could apply to growing a business. Here are few of the nuggets contained in this quick read. Plant the right seeds: Don’t waste time doing a bunch of different things just to please your customers. Instead, identify the thing you do better than anyone else and focus all of your attention, money, and time on figuring out how to grow your company doing it. Weed out the losers: In a pumpkin patch small, rotten pumpkins stunt the growth of the robust, healthy ones. The same is true of customers. Figure out which customers add the most value and provide the best opportunities for sustained growth. Then ditch the worst of the worst. Nurture the winners: Once you figure out who your best customers are, blow their minds with care. Discover their unfulfilled needs, innovate to make their wishes come true, and overdeliver on every single promise. The ideas contained in this formula may seem simple, and they are, but why aren't more people doing them? Take the advice contained in this book and you'll discover the best way to stand out in your field.

Marketing podcast with Phil Auerswald (Click to play or right click and "Save As" to download - Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Here's my take. There is no resource scarcity issue, dependence on oil, shortage of water, climate change, political gridlock or disease treatment that can't be solved by an entrepreneur that is walking the planet right now. It's easy to get sucked into the news that gets reported about financial turmoil, wars, oppression and political scandals. The thing you have to remember is the news is mostly reported by organizations that are laying off over 50% of their staff. It's a pretty negative work environment and it breeds negative spin. Two recent books spend a great deal of energy laying out the fact that this is the most incredible time in history. We currently have more prosperity, more innovation, more health, and more opportunity than at any time in our existence. We have the technology to eliminate most of the world's challenges and global entrepreneurs, the ranks of which will swell by billions over the next few years, are the ones that will make it happen. The two books I'm referring to are Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler and The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy by Philip Auerswald. I had the pleasure of speaking with both Peter and Phillip, Peter is in a mastermind group I belong to and Phillip for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. (Listen above) Both of these books should be on the short list of every entrepreneur that is trying to understand the opportunities rushing at us globally over the next decade. Diamandis is the founder of something called the X Prize Foundation, an organization that is addressing world problems by creating competitions where teams of entrepreneurs from around the world compete to solve a perplexing problem for a chance to win a cash reward. It sounds like a grown up version of a science fair, but the results so far have rocked the traditional innovation world and shown what can happen when you unleash entrepreneurs on a problem and give them the proper incentive to dive in with both feet unbounded by the traditional political forces that seem determined at times to keep us right where we are. There's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur - turn off the news, don't buy into the recession mentality, tune out the political rhetoric and let's get to work building an incredibly abundant future.

Marketing podcast with Ryan Holiday (Click to play or right click and "Save As" to download - Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Today, even the smallest business or individual professional has the ability to generate media coverage in the largest, most sought after channels available. The key is to understand and exploit some unwritten rules that have evolved over the last few years. Unwritten Rule #1 – Large blog networks needs lots of news every day in order to generate the page views that pay their bills. Organizations motivated by pageviews over editorial quality are easy to manipulate. Unwritten Rule #2 – Most traditional media outlets no longer have the staff to find the hottest news and rely on large blog networks and social media to identify trends and news Unwritten Rule #3 – If you want large media outlets to cover your story or idea focus on pulling them into your story by getting coverage in the large blog networks they follow. Pitching the New York Times, Techcrunch or CNNMoney with your story may be a stretch, but having them call you because of the trending story you got a blog they follow to run isn’t a stretch at all these days and it’s happening more than you might think. Think of it this way. Let’s say you have this awesome product that you want to get placed in Wal-Mart. You can go down to Arkansas and try to get the buyer to listen to your compelling story or you can get dozens of would be consumers to go ask dozens of Wal-Mart manages why they don’t carry your awesome product. This is referred to pulling sales rather than pushing them and it works in the new world of PR just as well. For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Ryan Holiday author of Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Holiday outlines the exact steps he’s used repeatedly to manipulate the media in the fashion described above for both good and bad. He shares what he describes as a systematic approach to media coverage as a way to inform the general public that not all media coverage is as truthful or simple as it may seem. The book should be a real eye opener to those in the media world and my guess is that Holiday has a few enemies among the bloggers and media companies he attempts to expose. The book is must read for PR professionals, bloggers, PR students, business owners and, I suspect, those that want to manipulate the media in this way. My guess is there’s an Internet Marketing guru out there somewhere dreaming up a get rich quick program based on Holiday’s book as we speak.

Marketing podcast with Chris Guillebeau (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Chris Guillebeau is one of the most fascinating people I’ve interviewed. Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of [...] Never Get a Real Job Just Like Chris Guillebeau is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Michael Hyatt (Click to play or right click and "Save As" to download - Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Every individual, whether business owner or employee, needs to understand the benefits of building a platform. The term platform has often been applied in the publishing world to the reach or audience an author has. Today, we're all publishers, or at least we can be, and standing out in the crowd by using a strategic approach to building a platform is as equally important to a 22 yr old starting a career as it is to a seasoned consultant launching a new venture. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Michael Hyatt, He is the Chairman and former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers and he writes and extremely popular blog at michaelhyatt.com. Hyatt embraced blogging very early on as a way to communicate with his organization and has turned this notion into one of the most followed blogs online. Even though Hyatt was considered a successful business person at the time, he effectively built a platform that extended his reach far beyond his role as CEO, aided the reach of his organization and opened the door to the creation of his own books and products. Hyatt took many of his blog posts and assembled them in the book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World The book is a thorough primer in the art of building a platform using many of today's online tools. If you've read and followed the likes of Chris Brogan, Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, or Jason Falls or if you've been blogging yourself for some time and are a fan of Copyblogger or ProBlogger, you won't find much in the way of revelations, but the book does a nice job of mapping out Hyatt's road to building a platform.

Marketing podcast with Martha Beck (Click to play or right click and "Save As" to download - Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device. The way that many people still think about work has its roots in the Industrial Revolution where workers were told to go to a place at a certain time and perform work to specific requirements until such time as the whistle blew signaling a time that we could now go home and be with our families. This concept of work then led people seek ways to create boundaries and balance that would allow them to then have a more fulfilling life outside of work. In many instances this simply led to an emotionless workplace where the clock was to be punched. The world has changed so radically over the last decade that the entire concept of work, and certainly the concept of workplace, has be been altered forever - the question though is have we caught up with these changes? The grand opportunity that exists today is that because you can choose to work in just about any way that suits your life, their is no reason to do work unless it feels like art to you. There's no reason to separate work from the things that charge and energize and fulfill you emotionally and spiritually. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is Martha Beck, life coach and author of the new book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want. Beck is a columnist for Oprah's O magazine and was a frequent guest on her show over the years. One of Beck's earlier books, Finding Your Own North Star should be required reading for every college student and perhaps every parent raising those college students. My favorite line from the interview is this: Love sells better than hate. Beck was talking about how your approach to what you're doing has a tremendous baring on the success of the venture. If you don't enjoy your work, it'll show. If you love what you're doing people will be attracted to that. So much of the belief about what is work and what our relationship to work should be is beaten into us as small children by school systems and even well intentioned, but equally battered, parents that breaking free sometimes takes years. My firm belief is that if you don't find a relationship with what you do for a living that also serves what you do for life, you'll constantly struggle with a false sense of teetering imbalance.

Marketing podcast with Austin Kleon (Click to play or right click and "Save As" to download - Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Perhaps steal is to big of a word for some, but the concept of learning from, borrowing from and gaining insight from the ideas, failures, successes, styles and approaches of others as a way to build something truly unique is a proven path to entrepreneurial success. So many entrepreneurs believe that success lies in some audacious innovation that is destined to revolutionize an entire industry. While that kind of result happens every now and then it's actually more often a case where someone borrowed from many influences, learned how to make it there own and along the way accidentally tripped on an audacious innovation that changed the world. In this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Austin Kleon, author the book Steal Like An Artist and certainly the inspiration for the title of this post. As I shared with Austin I don't believe entrepreneurs are any more creative than other people, I believe they just view the world, concepts and ideas through this lens that forces them to ask - "How could I take this and make it better?" Kleon's book, subtitled 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, started out as a presentation given to a group of students and grew to be a bit of a movement. The book's main premise is this: Creativity is in reality a form of "remixing." According to Kleon creativity isn't some flash of brilliance, but more of a collaborative process of combine existing ideas into innovative ones. To me that's about as close to the definition of the art practiced by most entrepreneurs as I can summon. Note that the kind of stealing Kleon refers to is not the same as copying. Copying only allows you to create an inauthentic replica of something that already exists. The creativity that Kleon refers to is the kind that is inspired by others but becomes authentically your own. This practical, stylish, dare I say, hip book offers even more entrepreneurial advice and truths about creativity: Nothing is original, so embrace influence, collect ideas, and remix and re-imagine to discover your own path. Follow your interests wherever they take you. Stay smart, stay out of debt, and risk being boring—the creative you will need to make room to be wild and daring in your imagination. There you have it, go ahead and steal like an entrepreneur. By the way, check out Kleon's first book too. Newspaper Blackout is a book filled with art created by simply blacking out words in an article to come up with a creative saying. The image in this post is from the book.

Marketing podcast with Lee Odden (Click to play or right click and "Save As" to download - Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Some years ago smart marketers latched onto the idea of something they referred to as integrated marketing. The idea behind this concept was to make all aspects of marketing such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a single force, rather than allowing each to work as a stand alone. The concept made complete sense, but then something really big happened. The relationship that our prospects have with our marketing communications has changed dramatically. Marketers are no longer in control of how a message is consumed, who consumes it, when they consume it or even who produced it in the first place. Social media, search, TiVo, and little things like the “do not mail” list altered the practices of lead generations through broadcast marketing forever. As marketers started to discover the new reality of the need to be found, a new word started to creep into the marketing lexicon – optimize. The term itself has been with us since the dawn of search and has been mostly applied to the practice of search engine optimization or SEO. But now it must be applied more broadly than the notion of keyword rich content and high quality backlinks. Today, every element of our marketing must be optimized to take advantage of the fact that it may indeed need to work in isolation. This doesn’t throw off the notion of integration; every element of your marketing working in tandem is still a good thing. It adds, however, the reality that much of your marketing may be encountered in ways that you no longer control and every element must be able to do the job of moving a prospect forward on its own. Today’s marketer must rely on outposts, such as social media networks, to open up new paths of entry for a prospect. They must rely on educational content to draw the attention of those researching online. They must participate in communities that exist for the sole purpose of building trust and providing proof. They must optimize every brand asset and put them in places where prospects might stumble upon them. Few marketers online have shared my longstanding belief about the optimization mindset so thoroughly as Lee Odden, publisher of the Top Rank Blog. Lee has been urging SEO types to embrace the marriage between search, social and content for as long as anyone I can remember. This month Odden released what I think is an absolute must read for anyone that wonders about the practical realities of the new world of marketing. The book is simply titled – Optimize. Optimize introduces the concept of the optimized mindset and in opinion says just as much about how you need to think about your business as being a guide for how to turn practical social media and content marketing advice into action. Odden stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast to talk about Optimize and the future of marketing online. Here are just a few things that you need to consider in the optimized mindset: Your listening, especially to your customers, must be optimized Your brand assets, such as images and videos, must be optimized Your content, tailored to serve specific purposes, must be optimized Your customer experience, beginning with the end in mind, must be optimized Your social media participation Your product and service delivery Your customer service Your store or office Your advertising Your referral generation Your public relations Your sales system Your partnerships Your analytics You see, integration isn’t enough anymore - Today’s marketing requires the optimization of every element and it’s a mindset as much as it is a tactic.

Like this? Share with friends. TweetMarketing podcast with Rhonda Abrams (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) No matter if you refer to the way you work as using the cloud or just getting more done virtually, or [...] Making Sense of the Cloud for Small Business is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Guy Kawasaki (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen) Update: Guy offered 500 free copies of his book What The Plus and they were snapped up in a matter of hours. We’ve added another 1,000 [...] Free Copy of What the Plus Book and Interview with Guy Kawasaki is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing