[thelist] Online Marketing Resource

john at johnallsopp.co.uk john at johnallsopp.co.uk
Thu Jan 6 15:28:12 CST 2011


> good marketing isn't poured on top after you've built a business, it's
> baked into everything you do. it's a mindset.

Agree with that :-)

> he could spend 2 hours reading Seth's "Linchpin" or my "The Commonsense
> Entrepreneur" and he'll know that either it makes perfect sense and can be
> easily (though not necessarily instantly) implemented, or that it's a
> lotta
> hooey. he's invested a couple hours to know whether a fundamental shift in
> thinking will work better than asking someone else to do his marketing for
> him.

>> Well now if we read Godin and then Canfield, what about Mike
>> Michalowicz and Steve Krug and Tim Ash etc. etc. I'm not trying to be
>> difficult, but it's hard to find one's way around a field that one
>> doesn't know.

> I understand completely. this is a field I *do* know. consider this: if he
> reads a book a week, next year by this time, he's read 52 books on
> business
> and marketing. even if half of them are nonsense, he's got 26 books full
> of
> great thinking in his head.

OK, here's where I feel differently. I'm presently marketing to small
companies .. people who don't even really know how to drive a computer
never mind Internet marketing. And you know, Joel, how much **stuff**
there is out there, some good, some not so good, some out of date.

I think, if you don't know much about Internet marketing, you do need
someone to guide you, to give you their opinion about what will work, to
put together a best guess of a plan and evolve and manage it forward.

The people I'm marketing to right now want to do what they set out in
business to do. They want to outsource their accounting and their Internet
marketing and get more time to do what they wanted to do in the first
place .. make cheese or mend cars or whatever.

>> If someone asks me for advice about a CMS, I can provide excellent
>> professional advice, backed by solid evidence of number of users,
>> community members, forum activities, and number of large and small
>> successful sites using the tool etc.. I feel this is all concrete, but
>> this marketing stuff is all abstract and seems (to me anyhow) mostly
>> based on anecdotal evidence. Sure maybe Joe's Worm Shop increased
>> sales by 50% because they read a book, but maybe anyway they would
>> have--this issue you also noted in your first sentence to me. :)

Fred, I'm a scientist at heart, so I like to test everything and back up
my decisions with evidence. I once heard a presentation from a chap
telling us about the brilliant Internet marketing he'd done, and frankly
it was bullshit because he had a great product. He would have succeeded if
his marketing strategy was to chalk messages onto the sidewalk. Lots of
Internet marketing advice is like that .. evidenced by "it worked for this
guy" who existed in a different country, different time, different market,
different product, different customers, and so on.

What's scary, actually, is how malleable and predictable people are. The
latest discoveries in neuroscience are getting close to saying we have
almost no free will at all. Actually what they are saying is that our
subconscious makes all the decisions. All this consciousness stuff just
makes up a great sounding story to back up what we decided at root, in our
heart.

So marketing is about making great stuff, delivering fabulous service,
telling awesome stories, being a trustworthy fellow and being fair and
reliable and not letting anyone down. Your subconscious likes that stuff.

Internet marketing is about arranging the pixels so that truth comes
across. It's gotta be the truth tho.

:-)

Cheers
J




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