The Strange Story of the "Crackpot" Mail-Order Prophet
by Dr. Joe Vitale
www.mrfire.com
Are you having trouble selling your product or service? Are you feeling like the chaotic state of the world prevents you from succeeding? Are you wondering how you can increase your sales in the most cost effective ways? Are you feeling like your competition is breathing down your neck?
Many of my clients feel the same way. They want to succeed, to make a nice living in their business, but they feel overwhelmed, uncertain, and even despondent. They feel they have too much competition. They feel marketing doesn't work, or takes too much work. They feel people don't have enough money today to spend on what they are selling.
The Web 2.0 Nonsense - On Marketing And Salesmanship
After listening to people (mostly geeks) wax rhapsodic about the wonders of “Web 2.0″ for, oh, almost two years now… I decided to go deep and see what the fuss was about.
The reality?
Nothing much to see here. Move along. We’re just tearing down the set, getting ready for the next act.
Web 3.0 and 4.0 are getting dressed and ready to take the stage.
2.0 (or “The Tooster”, as his friends call him) is pretty much history. The term was really just a glib marketing gimmick meant to separate “today’s” Web from the bad old “bubble” Web circa 1999 and 2000. The mainstream media — clueless, as always — decided the bursting of that bubble signalled the death-blow to this “Internet-nonsense fad”, and promptly found other things to be ignorant about.
The Self Destructing Email
Classic Video Games
Classic Video Game
Video Game Tester
A controversial new service makes it possible to send electronic messages that leave no record of their existence. VaporStream is a web-based recordless e-mail/IM hybrid messaging service. Messages sent using VaporStream can be viewed but can’t be forwarded, copied or otherwise recorded. The sender and recipient information never appear on the same screen as the message, so VaporStream subscribers’ identities remain completely private.
How To Make Money With Extreme Bartending
Scott Young likes to captivate his customers, so it’s fitting that he spends so much time behind bars.
Young is the president and head instructor of www.extremebartending.com Bar Smart – The Performance Bartending Company, which he founded in 1993. He laughs when asked if he and his “extreme bartending team” are to bartending what the Chippendales are to exotic male dancing, but then realizes there are many parallels.
“We have style as we’re serving drinks,” Young, 33, said from his office in Vancouver. “We’re throwing bottle, glasses, limes and straws, basically being performers behind the bar.
Business Heros - Bob Parsons
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- To get a sense of how Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons leads his life, just ask for a ride in Mad Max. That's the vehicle he keeps at his office, deep in a nondescript business park amid the sprawl that is Scottsdale, Ariz. Max, as Parsons affectionately calls it, is a customized Jeep Rubicon Unlimited: Quarter-inch armor lining makes brushes with boulders a nonissue. A steel bar on Max's front end prevents somersaulting on steep drops. Fifty-degree inclines? Bring 'em on.
Parsons is weaving among the evening commuters on a busy Scottsdale thoroughfare when, barely tapping the brake, he swerves off the road, jumps the curb, and swiftly leaves the orderly world in his rearview mirror. "This is Botswana style," mutters the 56-year-old Parsons, in a voice gruff from decades of hard living that include a combat stint in Vietnam. He plows through the shrubs, weaves between patches of mesquite and sage, and then barrels into a ditch before swerving around a 12-foot cactus in search of another path.
Megaprofits with engagement rings
Groomed for Success
Description: Jeweler, focusing on engagement rings
Founders: Skip Robbins, 52, and Steve Robbins, 49
2004 projected sales: Approximately $80 million
http://www.robbinsbros.com
Ring Reinvention: When the brothers saw a multitude of mall jewelry stores crop up, they decided to take their family-owned William Pitt Jewelers out of the malls, change their image and become Robbins Bros., focusing exclusively on engagement rings. Their first free-standing store opened in 1995. "There was no going back," recalls Steve. "We had to convince the bank and vendors. Everyone thought we were crazy."
Justifiable Arrogance
In the half-century I’ve been around, I’ve seen arrogance be variously acceptable and unacceptable in mainstream culture.
I grew up in a post-WWII family that prized humility and distrusted showboating. One of the biggest putdowns was to be told you were “too big for your britches” — a metaphor akin to a swelled head. The fifties were as close as America ever got to a kind of quasi-cooperative equality — rich people kept pretty quiet about their wealth (CEOs earned a modest mulitple of the average worker)… brainiacs played their cards close to their vest to avoid suspicion (and girls played dumb so as not to threaten the boys)… and athletes were expected to be uncomplaining models of sporting gentlemen.
When None Is Best
By: Noah Goldstein
Noticeably absent from this list is cigarettes, a product whose advertisements were banned from the airwaves by the Federal Government nearly thirty years ago. What seems most perplexing at first about the ban is that the executives of Big Tobacco enthusiastically endorsed the proposed regulation. Why would the chief officers of the tobacco industry agree not just to curb, but to completely eliminate, the promotion of their products from a medium which best facilitated efforts to gain and retain customers?
A few years earlier, the Federal Communications Commission had enacted the "fairness doctrine," which ordered radio stations and television networks that broadcasted controversial messages of public importance to also provide free air time to those with opposing views. Anti-tobacco groups capitalized on this ruling by initiating an ad campaign that provided viewers with effective counterarguments that refuted each purported benefit of cigarettes "demonstrated" in Big Tobacco's commercials. The anti-tobacco commercials' potency was further enhanced by the ads' inclusion of mnemonic links to easily recognizable characters, settings, themes, and narrations that were appearing in cigarette ads at the time. The counter-advertisements proved to be enormously successful; per capita cigarette consumption dropped almost 10 percent in the following three years, most of which has been attributed to the counter-ads (Simonich, 1991). It is not so surprising then, that the industry's leaders decided it would be more profitable to reallocate their advertising budgets to media to which the fairness doctrine did not apply, such as billboards and print ads.
How To Market Your Products At Craigslist
From e-commerce websites to furniture wholesalers, small businesses both online and off are realizing the marketing power of Craigslist.org. Founded in 1996 by Craig Newmark, Craigslist.org gets an estimated 10 million unique visitors per day. With an online classified ads format organized by either region or city, Craigslist connects buyers and sellers in more than 300 communities; for the most part, posting on the site is free.
If you've never heard of Craigslist or never considered using the site to market your business, the following tips will help you determine whether it might be a good fit for you and offer another outlet for marketing your products and services.
What Ails GM and America?
"What's good for General Motors is good for America," so a saying goes. I believe that statement is truer today than when it was first said some years ago.
Right now, the carmaker is struggling. "The reason GM is in trouble is because its cars aren't that good," commented a friend of mine. I replied: "GM's problems go deeper than its cars. GM's problems begin with how it is managed."
The company's problems strike me as very similar to those of the U.S. government -- management, or rather, mismanagement.
Fuzzy Math
