Beginning February 1st (through February 8th), the Do Good and  Make Money Super Summit is taking place on a computer near you…hopefully yours. 🙂 It’s a wonderful Summit with 75+ speakers sharing wisdom that I think is among the most valuable for marketers…on how to be benevolent, generous and caring while not apologizing for making money ...

During Titans Mastermind meetings, like the one this past week, I look for themes that flow through multiple discussions, speaker presentations and hot seats.   This time it was an oldie but a goodie: It’s easier to keep a customer than to get a new one.  And there was also the kissing cousin: Promote to cold traffic ...

Two years ago at our Titans Mastermind in Miami, the genius marketer and email innovator Dean Jackson coined a phrase that has become part of my regular “riff” when it comes to using email for good as opposed to evil:  “Fishing without bait”  For Dean it is just one of many observations that eventually become part ...

You’re probably sick of me calling this list my “online family.” You need to know it’s not lip service…and since we know words matter, how you “name” anything is the first step to treating it with the proper respect. That’s why I do it…because I am especially respectful of the word “list.” My first job in ...

Overdeliver is not a word. I just checked again to make sure on The Google, The Wiki and with Merriam-Webster—it’s confirmed. And I have no plans to lobby the two Merriams or Webster (all deceased since 1880 anyway)…or Encyclopedia Britannica, who bought Merriam-Webster in 1964…or anyone else for that matter…to reconsider their folly in not recognizing this wonderful ...

Don’t worry…this is not a post about why clicks are more important than orders.  I would never subject you to that…especially at the beginning of a new year.  This post is about another kind of “click”…and whether you have heard the expression “clicks on a dial,” before or not, buckle up.  Because, if you ...

During my many years at Boardroom (the iconic publisher and direct marketer) we never met an idea we didn’t like. That can be a huge burden…you know, “too many ideas, not enough time.” But looked at another way, “too many ideas” might be the single, most important reason we became so iconic (and so successful). The ...

The “marketing battlefield” is constant and demanding. It’s an endless war that requires stamina, continuous (lifelong) pivots…and of course, a ton of testing. ☺  But this endless war of marketing, unlike other endless wars that involve devastation and casualties, is obviously not as “serious”; and I want to stop the comparison before I equate a ...

Be nice to those you meet on the way up because you will meet them on the way down This lifetime rule of thumb, adapted to real life situations, requires some thick skin when you realize you weren’t nice all the time on the way up.  But rather than beat yourself up over it, ...

List building is the key to growing a business…so says every online marketing guru who knows what they are talking about. Those gurus often take it a step further–by offering a “list building secrets” bonus as one of the key add-ons that accompanies their latest software or technique (where their deliverable is a program ...

Thinking back on Thanksgiving’s past (don’t worry, this is not a Scrooge flashback!), I recalled the “post-Thanksgiving/before Christmas period” during my  freshman year in college—when I was thinking about my first set of final exams followed by an entire month of vacation. Unfortunately that led me to that same period after my senior year when I ...

Two years ago on Thanksgiving (it feels like 10 years after this past 2020!), I was sitting at my dining room table with 20+ relatives.  The guests included my Mom (who was a spry 93 and is now a spryer 95), my wife and kids, siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces. There might have been ...

Stephen King said “…writing is telepathy…” and more specifically: “…It’s amusing when you stop to think about it—for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists—and all the time it’s been right there, lying out in the open… All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe ...

Email open rates are important…I will not argue that…but there are other metrics that may be far more important than looking at whether your online family is simply opening your emails.  In fact, I maintain that if you built that family in all the right ways–by delivering value, useful information and relevant sales messages consistently ...

I was having multiple conversations this week about how much we can learn from gangsters (and not because they are O.G.’s or “Original Gangsters”). And not because they are “gangstas” either. I’m talking about the most notorious bad guys ever…REAL gangsters. Black hats of the highest order. Guys who you would never want to break ...

A lot of people are on Facebook. Obviously. And they are on it a lot, sharing their most recent meal, offering up advice (whether you want it or not), showing before and after pictures of their incredible weight loss or how they achieved shiny new 6-pack abs in 6 weeks…or just ranting about something you may agree ...

There are many ways to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing messages…and while it is sacrilegious for a serial direct marketer to put marketing material (sales letters, email, display ads, Facebook ads) out into the marketplace simply “hoping and praying for responses,” without measurement, it happens all the time. Sometimes it’s due to irresponsibility. ...

I’ve got a 10 minute video to share with you this week which I delivered two years ago…and it’s still very timely today. Actually it will be timely forever.  I’ll explain. Fundamental marketing principles haven’t changed much over the past two years, despite what you might hear from your “friendly funnelers” or “pandemic pivoters.” ...

I was sent an article by a friend this week written by Joseph Epstein, one of the world’s great essayists and author of 31 books, so I thought it had some merit. The premise of his essay is: Every superior writer I have known, or known about, was a slow reader. That’s an intriguing ...

The B.Y.O.B. session If we held Titans Mastermind while I was in college (I don’t know how that would have ever happened!), I guess I would make it a “B.Y.O.B.” event (“Bring Your Own Beer”)…but we are far more civilized now that we have graduated, for the most part, into adulthood. First of all, when we ...