Scrappy Marketing

Scrappy Tweets Vol. 6

Jessica — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:27:24 +0000

We hope you all had a great first weekend of November and hopefully have all adjusted to the time change! If you missed us on twitter this week (follow us on twitter @scrappymarketing) we have rounded up our posts and have yet again categorized them especially for you. Be sure to check out the great links for improving your blog or for a good laugh check out the video link for the Security Camera Dance-off.

Digital/Technology/Web Tools

Think the Droid Launch Was a Let Down? Not so Fast.

Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Round 2

13 Excellent Mac OS X Apps That Could Be Really Useful

Say Goodbye to Voicemail, Hello To Ribbit Mobile

Search Til You Drop: Google Launches Hosted Commerce Search for Retailers

Google’s take on HTML5

Apple to Launch iTunes Powered TV Subscription Plans [Rumor]

Google’s New Music Search Will Be Getting A Boost From Your Favorite Bands

Thesis Theme for WordPress Upgrades to Version 1.6

Tweetie 2.1 Coming Soon With Retweet, Geolocation, And Some List Support

Blogs

Rumors of the Death of Blogs are Greatly Exaggerated

Blogging is Rocket Science

You Don’t Have to Be a Great Writer to Write a Great Blog

The Oscar the Grouch Guide to Building a More Remarkable Blog

19 Blogs You Should Bookmark Right Now

How to Think Of Blog Posts

Get Off Your computer And Become a Better Blogger

Why Stories are an Effective Communication Tool for Your Blog

The Quentin Tarantino Guide to Creating Killer Content

Interviews on Blogging & Productivity

How to Get Lucky With Content Marketing

Startups/Entrepreneurship/Leadership

6 ways to make more money as an affiliate

How to Be a Renegade at home

An Entrepreneurial Life

Beginner’s Guide to Finding the Right Business Partner

Frogbox Makes you Move Green

Lessons from Entrepreneurs Who Beat the Odds

Small Business

5 Tips for Effective Email Copywriting

24 Untapped Traffic Sources | Free eBook!

Is the Economy Really Improving for Small Business?

Finding “Answers” on Businessweek.com

5 Trends That Could Rock Your Industry

10 Things You Can do in the Next 60 Days to Market Your Business and Close More Sales

Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias

Social Media & Marketing

The 10 Biggest Social Media Stories This Week

15 Social Media Twitter Lists to Follow and Expand

3 New Social Media Studies Worth Reading

Top 5 Inbound Marketing Stories of the Week: Social Media Strategy

Twitter Starts Curating Trending Topic Tweets

Rollout of Twitter Retweet Feature Has Begun

A Little Perspective (Digg, Twitter, Facebook)

Useful Twitter Lists Resources

Social Media Influencers are not Traditional Influencers

Custom Print Magazines – Why Can’t MasterCard Produce Inc. Magazine?

Wiring Up Business – Two Channel Social

Web developers can’t sell

Sales vs. Marketing: Whose Job is it to Generate Leads?

3 Tips for Effective Social Media Strategy

Armano: 6 Social-Media Predictions for 2010

The Evolving PR Crisis: The Future of the Embargo

HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists

Wildfire Launches A Legitimate, Easy To Use Sweepstakes Platform For Twitter

Twitter Releases New Widget for Lists

An Inbound Marketer’s Introduction to Twitter Lists

Microsoft And OpenX Team Up Against Google AdSense In Web Ad Partnership

Are social gaming offers scamming users? Analysis of Techcrunch’s Scamville Article

10 Things Social Media Can’t Do

Design/Inspiration/Tools

Amazing 70-yr old color photos

Cool Optical Illusions

The 15 Best Man Caves on the Internet

Investing in the Grid

Fresh PHP Resources and Tutorials

Melissa Clifton’s great Photoshop tutorials

Creating Urban Fashion — Chinese-Style

25 More Free Photoshop Texture Packs

Video/Audio

Show Your Inner Geek

The Late Movies: Security Camera Dance-Off

How to open a bottle of wine with your shoe

Irrelevant but Relevant

Study Reveals That Online Searches Affect Emotions, Memory

Top 3 Tips to Motivate You While Learning a Second Language

10 Books Written by Presidents (of the non-memoir variety)

Scrappy Tweets Vol. 5

Jessica — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:14:22 +0000

Happy Halloween, folks. It’s time for our weekly roundup of tweets. If you missed us on twitter this week check out all the great links we have for Design Inspiration, Social Media, and Blogging.

Digital/Technology/Web Tools

Verizon: iDon’t Not want the iPhone | TechCrunch

Chrome, not Chromium, For Mac Has that Solid Feel

Deleted Tweets Finally Deleted from Twitter Search

A Collection of Useful Mac Apps

Find Keywords That Nobody Else Uses With Keyword Shack

5 Basic Tips for Video SEO

4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web

Upstream boosts Virality, Now Lets You Syndicate Your Comments Across the Web

5 Wi-Fi Hotspot Finders To Find Free Wi-Fi Spots Near You

We Catch Our First, Fleeting Glimpse Of VEVO On YouTube

Blogs

A nice recap of Blog World Expo

How Does This Share

Why Writer’s Block is Your Secret Weapon

Yes! A Great Book for Bloggers

How To Get Past The Blank Page By Creating Urgency

Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog — Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers’ Experiences

Three Ways to Make Your Competitors Irrelevant

The 3 Fatal Diseases that Kill Good Blogs

7 Bad Wriging Habits You Learned in School

Personal Branding Success in 15 Steps

6 Reasons Why You Need to Consider Email as a Communication Strategy on Your Blog

How to Diversify Your Site & Income

The Power of Being Personal on Your Blog

Using wireframes to bring your site together

Startups/Entrepreneurs/Leadership

The Rise of the “Homepreneur”

Do you have a business idea that you want to pursue?

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

While profits grow, brewery retains small feel

Mechanic Discovers Inner Picasso, Trading Gears for Gourds

10 Essential Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter

Small Business

Points to Consider When Choosing a Hosting Company

How Being Scrappy Made Grasshopper Profitable Within 2 Months

10 Lessons to Learn from NBC’s Failing Leno Strategy

5 Killer Press Release Tips for Small Business

3 Best Ways to Build Business Credit

Building lifestyle companies vs. VC backable startups: Is it walk before you run?

U.S IPO Market Shows Signs of Recovery

Make Your Web Site Work Harder

A little venture capital goes a long way

Does Your Brand Tell a Powerful Story

Study: Educating Your Customers About the Web Could Make Them Smarter.

Marketing campaigns that spread themselves

Your Company May Own Your Tweets, Pokes, and YouTube Videos

Tips for scoring angel funding

Social Media/Marketing

Twitter Lists Continue The Twitter Legacy Downtime

Not Sure Which Twitter Lists to Follow? Listorious Has a Directory of the Best Ones

Top 5 Inbound Marketing Stories of the Week: Educate, Enlighten, Entertain.

Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery

Does Your Social Media Experience Extend

Tweens Adopting Twitter

Social Media: Q&A With Former Twitter Exec Dom Sagolla

Finally, a solution for lazy marketers with money to burn

Could a Virtual Assistant be what you need?

How to: Measure Social Media ROI

The Cost of Tweets And Poker

Reading: Social media’s benefits are worth loss of privacy

Social Media Makes No Sense For My Company.

6 Ways to Create Opportunities on LinkedIn

Ford Tries Social Media for the Fusion

Social Media Accounts for 18% of Information Search Market

The Next Great Social Network? Your Address Book

Google Tackles Mortgage Market With New Comparison Ads

The Two Faces of Facebook

Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands

The Future of Social Web

Advertising is just the price you will pay for not being creative

Design/Inspiration/Tools

10 Ways to Analyze & Optimize a Site’s Performance | DesignReviver

Burned Out? Take a Creative Sabbatical

Photoshop Productivity & Learning Resources

200+ Textures, Brushes, and Fonts: Ultimate Grunge Roundup

How to Create Brilliant Light Streaks in Photoshop | DesignReviver

30 Inspiring and Beautiful Dual Screen Wallpapers

25 Great Free Photoshop Texture Packs

Scrapblog’s Quick Mix is a Dead Simple Tool to Make Digital Scrapbooks

Professional Photography: 18 Cool Commercial Photographers | WebUrbanist

40 Quality Photoshop UI Design Tutorials

Cashing in on Customization

Fantastic Commercial Photo Studios

Video/Audio

Banner Ads Attached to Flies Defy Gravity and Logic [Video]

Irrelevant but Relevant

How to understand flow charts

Casinos saving face online

Quality Content Drives 3D Home

P&G Exec offers advice for newbies

Women’s Wages Outpaced Men’s During Recession

Fun Halloween Costumes

Scrappy Tweets Vol 3 and 4

Jessica — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:23:51 +0000

We have tweets on technology, improving your blog, finding inspiration, and some great videos/audios to read/watch/listen to this week. Check out these great links from our past week of twittering and maybe you will find something you missed this week! Enjoy the articles, blog posts, videos and more!

Digital/Technology/Web Tools

Now Planes are Tweeting, Too

The Future of iPhone Games

AT&T CruiseCast service said to be “up & running”

Google’s Latest Mobile Play: Defending Its Turf from Apps

Digital: Mergers Unlikely This Year For Mobile Ad Networks

Hidden Google Gems

Screenjelly: A new, easy way to share what’s on your screen

Layar: Augmented Reality App Feature Twitter & Wikipedia Now on iPhone

HDI develops prototype of 100-inch, laser-powered 3-D TV

No power, no problem for solar phones in poorer nations

Verizon Wireless has better hopes for RIM’s Storm 2

Getting Long Tail Traffic From Custom Google Maps

A Collection of Free iPhone Apps

Top 100 Twitter Publishing Tools & Services

Toshiba Debuts Windows 7 Line

Windows 7 Hits Stores

Upgrading to Windows 7? Easily Install Multiple Software Programs with Ninite

Waveboard: Google Wave client for Mac & iPhone is coming

Blogs

Lijit has a better approach for site searches on blogs

How to Blog Almost Every Day

How Cross-Dressing Makes You a Better Blogger

How 12 Experts Make Money Through Their Blog

How to Go from 1 to 1,000,000 Users (or Readers)

How One Blogger Made $3K a month Helping People

How to Backup Your Wordpress Blog in 3 easy steps

10 Lesser Known WordPress Features

Don’t Let Your Blog Readers Touch that Remote

Excuses for bad Web performance

IAB: FTC Blogging Rules are Unconstitutional

The Sideways L: How to Use Misdirection to Make Your Readers Laugh

How the Authority Rules Report Brought Me 234% more site memberships

What it takes to compete with top blogs: 3 to 10 posts a day

The State of Blogsphere 2009 Edition

SMB Lessons from BlogWorldExpo 2009

7 Things to Consider Prior to Launching Your Business Blog

5 Tips for Making a Corporate Blog Stand Out

5 Plugins to make your wordpress blog blazing fast

idea: have people subscribe to your business

Mario Schulzke — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:01:51 +0000

Having been influenced by my fair share of direct marketing campaigns over the past few years, there’s one thing I learned. Anytime you can charge customers more than once, you win. Acquiring new customers can be very expensive and hence it’s much smarter to get someone to buy again than to get a person to buy for the first time. Best case scenario, you get all your new customers to be repeat buyers – which really is the foundation of the subscription model.

From a business perspective, it’s simple. You increase the lifetime value of a customer which allows you to spend more money to acquire new customers. That equals a true competitive advantage over your competition.

Subscriptions don’t necessarily mean that you’re shipping people diet pills or skin care products on a monthly basis. Even though, those are two obviously very profitable categories.

So are software subscriptions, and to an extent even magazines.

Netflix forever revolutionized the movie business.

But you can also build a subscription business with everyday products and services.

I am no girl, even though every once in a while I get to talk to one, but for a good example of an interesting subscription service, check out Shoedazzle. They call themselves the world’s premier shoe society and for $39.95, they send you a new pair of shoes every month. Free shipping included. That is smart.

Or, how about Flying Noodle. What started as a Fruit Club (they deliver you fresh fruits on a monthly basis) has now led to several “club” driven business models. There’s the lobster club, the hot sauce club, and even an Olive Oil club.

Subscriptions work. Can you sell your products or services on a subscription basis?

Image credit.

Scrappy Book Publishing Decisions

Jesse — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:04:37 +0000

I would like to think that I am pretty scrappy person in general. I typically won’t think twice about doing something myself to save money, I use open source or free tools when I can, and I will go shopping at Costco on a Saturday in order to skip lunch. But being scrappy isn’t just about bootstrapping, it’s about using the best available solution at the lower price. This mentality can also be applied to the many choices you make when writing and publishing a book (a very scrappy marketing idea in itself). I spent the last six months writing and publishing a book so let me walk you through a few scrappy decisions I made along the way.

Choosing a beverage

Writing a book deals with, well, a lot of writing. For me it was essential to leave my apartment and go somewhere that I didn’t have distractions. This ended up being the local coffee shop. Not only did they not have Internet, they also kept their bathroom locked so I was forced to sit and write. This was essential for actually finishing my writing. My first scrappy decision came with the coffee shop beverage selection. Not a coffee drinker, I do love Chai. My first week of regular visits to the coffee shop and ordering my favorite drink left me with a quickly diminishing credit limit. Tea was the answer. At less then half the price I could still leave a big enough tip for the baristas to tolerate my multi-hour occupation of their window seat. I drank a lot of tea the following six weeks.

Choosing a design app

The second scrappy decision came a few months later. While my manuscript was away being edited I needed to figure out how I wanted to do the layout of my book. The two suggestions I kept hearing about where, Adobe InDesign and Apple’s Pages app. Costing $700 InDesign is the industry standard, however, at about one tenth the price Pages is a very scrappy solution. Pages worked very well for me. In fact it was probably a better choice because the learning curve was much less steep and I was able to almost immediately jump into it.

Choosing the cover art

While not necessarily a writer I am definitely not a graphic designer. Because people still choose books by their cover I knew that the cover design was going to be an important decision. Unfortunately, I made a mistake at this crucial junction. I elected to hire a graphic designer. A week after settling on a price the first design came in. It was horrible. Same with the second. It took a lot of rounds to finally get something solid and it wasn’t my designer’s fault. I was to blame; I didn’t really know what I wanted when we started. Since we took more then the initially anticipated three rounds to get a working design my final price was more then I was happy with. The scrappier choice would have been to use a service like Crowdspring where I could have set a price and seen a lot of different options before choosing one. Oh well, live and learn the scrappier way.

Things were really starting to come together at this point. My editor had kicked some butt and now the writing was coherent. I had a good, but expensive, cover design to set the stage and the layout was looking very professional. My next decision was about how to sell the digital version of the book.

Choosing an e-Commerce platform

A friend had previously recommended a service called e-Junkie. With a funny name and varying reviews I decided to do a little research on my own. I found Fast Spring. While e-Junkie was cheaper (flat monthly fee vs. per transaction fee) my decision was to go with Fast Spring. Although I’m scrappy to the core it is okay to pay a little bit more when you get a lot more service.

Choosing a self-publishing platform

I now leave you now with my final decision. One I haven’t made yet. I need to decide on a self-publishing platform. I have narrowed it down to two: CreateSpace and Lulu. What do you think would be the better scrappy choice and why?

Jesse Lakes is full of relief after his book, Mastering the iTunes Affiliate Program, has finally gone on sale. Living in Colorado, Jesse is now applying his scrappy smarts to a new start-up – GeoRiot – where he hopes to offer affiliate publishers a more efficient way to monetize their international traffic.

Scrappy Tweets Vol. 2

Jessica — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:43:53 +0000

This week we covered a large variety of topics which in turn has evolved into. . . a plethora of fun filled categories with awesome info! What were some of the big stories this past week? Where can I go on the web when I’m bored? What are some tools I should be using with my website/blog/etc? How is a pickle like an OLED display? Interested? Read on and check out these links!

News

Digital Marketing: Get Ready for Google’s New Wave Act

100,000 Invites: Everything You Need to Know About Google Wave

Want a Google Wave Invite? There’s a Website for That

Google Launches Mobile Local Search: more Bad News for Yelp

Social Media & Marketing

Forget Skype: TinyChat Launches Dead-Simple Video Chat

Group Mentality: Twitter to Debut Lists

5 Social Media Lessons I Learned from Working with a Hollywood Actress

10 Tips to Make More Money with Sponsored Tweets

Communicating Values: Show, Don’t Tell

5 Twitter Tips for Staying Authentic & Transparent

Advertising Research Foundation Set to Unveil New Process to Improve Online Results

Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

Why Social Media Should Welcome Location Based Services

100 tips and tools for teaching social media to students

Blogger Relations is a Two-Way Street

Twitter Marketing Guide – Tips on using Twitter from the Twitterati

How to use Twitter for Marketing & PR

Social Networks not a Threat to Email

3 New Facebook Strategies for Building Your Personal Brand

The Top 5 Misconceptions About Social Media

Chefs Shop for Fish on Twitter

BBC Plans Social-Media Makeover

Social Web Opening up Government Services

Improve Your Lead Generation: 8 Takeaways from the B2B Marketing Summit

Revealing the People Defining Social Networks

The Next Great Media company won’t have a Web Site

Social Media Tools that Save Lives

10 Commandments for Writers Using Social Media

Small Business

How are Business Books Like Restaurants?

Mobile Coupons Get Customers to Work for You

STUDY: Social Media Leads to More Time Spent on Email

Clever Tools To Improve Your Online Marketing Efforts

Good or Bad Product Review Yield Sales

What Does Google Place Mean for SMBs?

7 Tips for Avoiding Legal Issues

New Challenges Keep Boston Chef’s Head in the Game

Web Videos Create Sales –and stars

Entrepreneurship/Leadership

3 Keys to Successful Negotiations

Online Retailers: 99% Plan to Have Facebook Fan Pages

7 Steps to Boost Productivity and Profits by Up to 40%

5 Ways to Grow w/o Going Broke

Building Real Businesses on Friction

Digital/Tech/Tools

Digital Marketing: Unilever’s So-Called Crowdsourcing

Digital Marketing: How Can We Fix Online Display Advertising?

Apple Shakes up Trational Video Game Space

CNN’s iPhone App Does That (And Much More)

13 Wordpress Plugins You Need to Know Exist

Smarter Transportation: 10 Social Media Tools to Navigate Your City

40+ Desert Island Web Development Tools

How to Optimize a Flash Website

Crafting a Killer About Page

Should You Use a Localized Domain Name?

Sync Google Search History With Your Mobile

The inside scoop on performance compensation

Mario Schulzke — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:41:54 +0000

This week I was supplying notes to a reporter who is writing an article on agency compensation. Being in the world of performance marketing, I appreciate that more and more clients wants their agency to work on a performance basis. It makes us look like smart, forward-looking thought leaders, which doesn’t happen very often.

However, there needs to be a big disclaimer.

If you want to pay your agency on a performance basis, then:

Whatever they’re doing for you needs be very quantifiable
You need to be willing to pay out a hefty bounty in return for the agency’s willingness to invest in your business

There are very few initiatives that can realistically be run on a pure performance basis. A hybrid model where the agency works on a lean(er) fee in addition to some defined bonus metrics is a much more viable option in most cases. Here are some examples of where a performance structure makes sense, and where it doesn’t.

If you’re going to hire someone to design a brochure for you, there is no way that can be done on a performance basis. You can’t measure success.
Paid search could realistically be run on a pure performance basis. But I actually believe it’s in the client’s best interest to pay someone for their time and then bonus them based on some key performance metrics such as cost per conversion.
At Quillion, we’re usually willing to run an online display campaign on a performance basis. Heck, we’ll even get publishers to do the same. Just know that there needs to be some real financial upside for everyone involved.
Creative services. TV ads, print ads, radio ads; I don’t think it makes sense for an agency to be compensated on a performance basis. There are just too many variables that the creative partner can’t control and their compensation shouldn’t suffer because of such.
Media. You can pay for performance in the world of media, however, only if you’re set-up to truly measure the impact of media. That means you need custom urls, 1-800 numbers as well as the ability and willingness to correlate media impact across other channels. For example if you’re running a TV campaign, you need to measure sales through not only your custom 1-800 number and url but also look at the uplift on your main e-commerce site as well as dig deep into your retail data.

So, yes, there are absolutely occasions where clients can engage with an agency in a performance relationship. It does take a strong commitment from both sides. When you introduce performance to a relationship, you’re not just hiring an agency. You’re adding a long-term business partner.

Picture credit. No, we don’t work for fruit platters. Yet.

Scrappy Tweets – Vol 1

Jessica — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:52:24 +0000

We’re taking a different approach this week with our weekly recap. Here are many of the stories that we covered on our Twitter feed this week. Next week we’ll even break them out into categories for you.

Google’s Newest Attempt to Make the Browser Social
Twitter: A Vampire That Can Legally Suck the Life Out of You
You Tell Us: What Should Twitter Do With a $100 Million?
Is Branding Dead? | Copyblogger
The Black Hole of Marketing
The platform vs. the eyeballs
Build a Better Business Online Business with Wordpress
Is Seth Godin Protecting your Brand or Just ‘Brandjacking’ It?
Place Pages: Google Launches Rival to Yelp
Don’t forget about Real Customer Service
How To Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire
Negate Competition by ‘Owning’ Your Space
Don’t forget about Real Customer Service
Reducing Costs While Boosting Sales Revenue
Taking Advantage of Google’s Small Business ToolKit
The Details: Preparing for Your First TweetChart
Product Review – Google Docs for a Book Manuscript
Building a Business from Scraps
Launching Brands in Public
Middleman Businesses Thrive During Recession
Stinking It Up: Lessons From a PR Failure
Everyone Gets Paid on Commission
How did Johnathan Morrow get 294 Comments with 1 Blogpost
What Men’s Health has Learned from 50,000 iPhone App Downloads

Is social media killing customer service?

Mario Schulzke — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:51:49 +0000

I love that companies are finally starting to pay attention to what people are saying about them on the web. That’s great. They get it.

But, and this is a big but. Just because you’re paying attention to social media doesn’t mean you can stop delivering excellent customer service.

Case in point, I have been trying to reach out to WebTrends and Omniture for the past couple of weeks to get some questions answered about a major analytics inititiative that we’re managing for a client – a very big client. So, you would think that I would get a quick response regardless. There is money to be made.

Nope. No email, no automated messages, no phone call. They must be too busy. Webtrends eventually emailed and send me some brochure, which is not what I asked for. I had a number of specific questions that I had submitted, which I then emailed them again.

Silence. Again. What is wrong with you people?

Then I tweet about it on both my personal and Scrappy Marketing accounts. Ten minutes later I get a response from #OmnitureCares apologizing they hadn’t tweeted back sooner.

Actually Omniture, your response to my tweet was plenty fast, and hopefully someone will answer my questions now.

The lesson is a different one, however. Listening and responding to social media is commendable. But, much more importantly, companies can’t forget to focus on world class traditional customer service in the first place – especially not service providers. Most consumers are very reasonable and if you deliver a quality service, few will complain.

So, before you go out and build your social media monitoring program, please take a hard look at your current customer service practices. Social media can teach you what you need to fix. It can’t fix a problem. Great customer service can.

Scrappy Marketing

Scrappy Tweets Vol. 6

Scrappy Tweets Vol. 5

Scrappy Tweets Vol 3 and 4

Digital/Technology/Web Tools

Startups/Entrepreneur/Leadership

Small Business

Social Media/Marketing

Design/Inspiration/Tools

Video/Audio

Irrelevant but Relevant

idea: have people subscribe to your business

Scrappy Book Publishing Decisions

Choosing a beverage

Choosing a design app

Choosing the cover art

Choosing an e-Commerce platform

Choosing a self-publishing platform

Scrappy Tweets Vol. 2

News

Social Media & Marketing

Small Business

Entrepreneurship/Leadership

Digital/Tech/Tools

The inside scoop on performance compensation

Scrappy Tweets – Vol 1

Is social media killing customer service?