Monday, January 30, 2012

Case Study: SurePrep Estimates $50K Saved by Switching to MakesBridge

Greg Pope is a marketing manager at SurePrep and as he describes it, “three years ago, our website and really all of our electronic marketing efforts were really pretty antiquated. The website was really outdated, we weren’t tracking in any way and all of our email marketing and all of our electronic marketing was just blind, so we couldn’t tell what was working and what wasn’t working.”

Monday, January 9, 2012

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Fix "browser clutter" in Google Chrome

A quick little trick to help you with "browser clutter" in Google Chrome. Since I live in the internet world, browsers are the new King. (long live Netscape!!!)

http://www.addictivetips.com/internet-tips/permanently-pin-tabs-in-google-chrome/



Thursday, December 29, 2011

Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Investing in a Marketing Automation System

I've had the privilege of speaking with individuals around the world about email marketing and marketing automation. When we reach two critical junctures - determining total cost of ownership and modeling return on investment - I've found the following questions to be instrumental to construct the business case and an adoption roadmap. You see, by answering these questions we expose opportunities and risk and can game plan and help structure projects accordingly. The typical result is a roll out plan with immediate action plans, identified actors, and in some cases a tentative 120 - 365 day game plan for deeper deployment.

Read More Here: Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Investing in a Marketing Automation System


Friday, July 29, 2011

Want to write a newsletter? Great Article

Entrepreneur.com Article on Creating eNewsletters

Dont take your eNewsletter lightly. You project your competancy and your passion publicly so make it awesome...dude! (and dudettes)

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Why Marketing Automation Is Your Best Friend

After two decades in marketing and sales, I've seen technologies, fads, and best practices come and go. Admittedly, there have been methods I've learned and embraced, and there were others that I intentionally ignored or discarded.


We have all been hearing about marketing automation for quite a while now and some of us have the systems in place. For me, I can’t help but be awed by the potential and the convenience that marketing automation systems offer.

But what is marketing automation? It can mean different things to different people, but for me, it is very simple: It is a way to sell more and maximize your leads. It is using tools that can help you gain top of mind recall from your prospects and clients, prodding your leads to buy, which could otherwise take weeks, months or years. And the beauty there is that you do not spend a lot of time on it.

Once you have your system programmed and tested, you barely have to lift a finger. You do not even have to be there to market your products and services. Sounds too good to be true? Not really. Marketing is actually just about relationships. And no, I am not talking about the provider-seller relationship. In today’s age where you face a lot of competition around the world, your success in sales and marketing hinge on your relationship with your clients and leads.

I am working on a system that allows you to be the first one that people think about when they need your products or services. How? By allowing you to have constant communication with them.

And yes, you do not have to constantly monitor your activities. You do not have to waste your time updating your CRM, nor do you clutter your calendar with reminders to email this and that prospect. You just decide what workflow a certain prospect belongs to and everything goes smoothly from there. The beauty is that you can design workflows to be interactive. If a certain contact does something like look at your website or click on anything in your email, that person gets transferred to another workflow that is relevant to that trigger event.

And this is why marketing automation is your best friend. It allows you to effortlessly and conveniently move your leads down the pipeline with a little time and effort invested on your part. Your leads qualify themselves through their actions on your emails, web pages and Social Media "click" behavior. If they click on a BLUE car, your system stops sending them down the RED path for example. It keeps BLUE in front of them because after all, they clicking on BLUE. If they go back to RED, the system either sends them messages weighted with RED content, with some BLUE in it or no BLUE. You do A vs. B testing do determine which content converts better and let it roll!

I urge you to look into marketing automation as it could save your professional life and free up your time. If you are ready to choose, make sure you keep these guidelines in mind on how to choose a marketing automation service provider.

The only thing you have to loose is your anxiety.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Facebook - You get what you pay for. Such is Life.

Facebook now has 600M users and is now more used the Google, who would have
thunk it. Lets admit it, Facebook allows us to share photos, jokes,
thoughts, videos etc. easily and quickly to our "friends". We all know that.
But they have to pay for all this. They just took in an investment of $500M
and whether we like it or not, they need to make money on this capital.

So to do that, they are hoping that ad revenue will allow them to give
Goldman Sachs a monstrous ROI and they are going to use OUR data to target
ads. Sometimes this is good. I want ads on skiing and wine, etc. I like
these things, though not together. But using ME in the adds? Sorry Charlie,
not me. Any photos of me could actually hurt sales! I want to opt-out and
Facebook allows me to do this.

so....here is my quick post from Facebook that I put on my status.

"Facebook will start using your photos in ads appearing on profile pages of
your contacts. It is legal and is mentioned in the fine print when you
create your account. To stop this do the following: Account, Account
Settings, Then click on Facebook Ads ( tab...), choose "No one" on the 2
drop-down menus and save changes. Copy and use in your status update."

You decide what you will do. Guess what my choice was?

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Cloud Computing part deux?

It been a long time, and yes I have been busy. Here is an interesting article about the next iteration of computing...Cloud Computing

Friday, May 22, 2009

Great Article on Competing with the Big Boys

The problem we all have is how do we stand out.

There are too many emails, too many things that take up our time.

Check out this Article on StartUpNation.com


Thursday, May 14, 2009

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Future of IT and Cloud Computing - Article

When we look at current IT systems/management it jumps out that the whole purpose of IT is to use TECHNOLOGY to access, digest and disseminate INFORMATION to its biggest advantage to the user.

Read - TechRepublic Article

Cloud Computing allows economies of scale, without the investment of time and money into resources that are only used a portion of the time.

IT is now completely scalable with its usage and the value it brings.