marketing

The Future of Personal Brands

Dru Riley of Trends.vc covers personal branding in the latest edition of the Trends Report. He outlines some predictions and opportunities for building your personal brand with more links for background information. I like the simple format of his newsletter. The free version has limited information but it is still a great read every week. Trends.vc is another good example of a paid newsletter business model. The free version offers a lot of great value, but you need to subscribe for the full reports.

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To Build a Business Empire, Own an Opinion (Not a Marketing Budget)

Ali Mese explains how opinion marketing can help you stand out in crowded markets using Basecamp and their new email platform Hey.com as an example. “By owning an opinion, you can still create value in industries most write off as finished — and you don’t have to employ shady tactics to do that, nor do you need hefty marketing budgets.” “Anyone today can copy your features overnight, yes. But they can never copy the YOU in your product.” It’s also worth reading Mese’s “How We Got 11.3 Million Pageviews without the Growth Hacking BS.“

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The Power of Real Marketing

MarketingExamples.com has some great examples of how talking like a real person in your messaging can help you connect with customers. One example shows an artist’s painting that gets 300 shares, compared to a photo of the artist holding the painting that gets 70,000 shares. Check out the other examples. It’s very valuable. I love the format of this newsletter. Every issue has many examples of actionable ideas you can implement. I recommend subscribing.

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Extensive Cold Email Guide from A to Z

If you do cold email outreach, Lemlist has a guide that is worth reading through. It covers some of the technical aspects of ensuring your emails get through, as well as, tools to make your emails stand out. You can add custom images with the recipient’s name, website image, etc. to increase responses. There are some interesting ideas here.

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The Seth Godin Encyclopedia

Here is a large resource of Seth Godin’s key ideas. If you don’t know Seth Godin, he is a massively famous marketing guru, best-selling author of 18 best-selling books, and has been blogging every day for more than two decades. Even if you know Seth’s work, this overview is a good reminder.

Seth Godin is an amazing storyteller, watch some of his videos listed at the end of the post.

Marketing Idea: Resource pages like this are a good way to get on the radar of influencers and get some search engine traffic. I was planning something similar for IdeaEconomy, but changed my mind because of how time-consuming they are. I think it would be more effective to focus on less famous people.

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20 Quick Tips learned from a lot of A/B testing!

Gonzalo Mordecki has a list of ideas to improve your website, landing pages, calls to action, etc. in this post on IndieHackers. This is very timely for me as I’m trying to maximize the effectiveness of the IdeaEconomy.net landing page. In the comments, he gave some great advice for this site. Small changes can lead to big improvements over time. Check out his A/B testing tool as well. Very slick!

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13 Tips for Promoting Yourself Without Sounding like a Jerk

If you want to grow your business, you have to promote yourself. There is no escaping that fact. Many try a spammy approach in forums and with cold emails, but there are better ways. ProBlogger offers some advice.

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How to Learn Digital Marketing for Almost Free in 6 Months

Nat Eliason shares detailed, actionable advice on how to build your digital marketing skills with many good links to other resources. (Open in a new browser if you are past your limit on Medium.) I love the strategic process he recommends for gaining the skills in the three main areas of digital marketing: acquisition, retention and conversion. Getting good at anything takes a lot of work, but it is very achievable. This is a good article to bookmark for future reference.

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The Marketing Genius of Harry Dry

One of my favorite newsletters is MarketingExamples by Harry Dry. The simple format with lots of image examples make it easy to read and always provides many actionable ideas. His newsletter has just passed 27,500 subscribers and is growing at more than 100 per day.

Harry got a lot of buzz by promoting a dating site for Kanye West fans and renting billboards asking Kanye to call him. He has since been featured in The Hustle’s Trends community and mentioned by Noah Kagan in his recent networking video.

Harry is active on IndieHackers and does a great job with his Twitter threads, but I’m most impressed with the quality of his MarketingExamples posts. It’s clear that a lot of work goes into every issue.

Business Lessons: The publicity stunt was interesting and got some press, but I think the real lesson is that good ideas, executed well, win. The MarketingExamples newsletter has a great name, simple format and the content is very actionable. That is a winning formula. I definitely need to work on clarifying my focus for this IdeaEconomy newsletter.

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How to Become Truly Iconic with Scott McKain

Chris Ducker interviews author Scott McKain on moving past distinctive to become Iconic. We live in a hyper-competitive world where most competitors are good. How do you become exceptional and really stand out from the competition? Scott explains these 4 factors:

1. Clarity – becoming clear on what you are and what you are not. What is your 6 second phrase?
2. Creativity – creativity comes after clarity. Find the one thing that makes you unique. Something like going to your customer, rather than your customer coming to you is enough.
3. Communication – We are story junkies, but we run from our own stories. We need to communicate our own struggles.
4. Customer Experience Focus – What’s the list of what customers can expect from your company? Are you offering something exceptional?

Scott McKain defines business as when you profitably create experiences so compelling to customers that their loyalty becomes assured. Does your business offer compelling experiences?

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Triple Profits in 4 Hours with an Income School Website Makeover

This is a short 25-minute video that is well worth your time. Income School spent 4 hours making changes to DiscGolfNow.com and waited a month to see the results. Profits went from $492 to $1632 for the month. This is a great example demonstrating the key skills needed to succeed online. Here are some of the key changes they made:

Increased the ebook price from $5 to $14.
Simplified the ebook sales page.
Added a countdown timer on a sticky header across the top of the site.
Focused on the key benefit of the ebook first.
Changed the WordPress theme, reduced the number of plugins and greatly improved page load times.
Simplified recommended gear to only 3 from each category, instead of a long list.
Created an email sequence of three emails, recommending content pages and offering a discount.
Top 10 pages get 40% of traffic. Interlinked the key pages with relevant anchor text and made some minor optimization.