Market Today, Get Paid Tomorrow

I’m not sure whose idea it was for publishing and creative professionals to do work “on spec” before getting a job, but I’ll betcha it wasn’t a creative pro! It was probably a greedy CEO who didn’t want to pay for something that he might later regret. According to Answers.com, “spec” has been used to [...]

Measurable Marketing Helps Create an Effective Marketing Plan

When you decide you need to redo your marketing strategy, what do you do first? I hope you create a detailed marketing plan. Fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants when marketing won’t get you very far. You’ll never know if your marketing strategies have been successful if you don’t have a plan in place to measure your efforts against. So [...]

Using Traditional Advertising Over Google AdWords

I don’t have anything against Google, per se, but its AdWords program is getting worse. People just aren’t making more than beans off of most of their AdWords ads. When it first started it was easy, but now it’s gotten complicated and people aren’t clicking as much as they used to. And what about those [...]

Social Media: An Essential Marketing Element

Social media directly influences how we make purchases, according to research conducted by Universal McCann, a global media planning company. In their report, “When did we start trusting strangers?” the company interviewed 17,000 people in 29 countries to see how social media impacts their buying decisions. The leader of the report, Tom Smith stated “This [...]

Why Marketers Make More Money with Fee-Based Charges

Marketing professionals provide a service to their clients. The knowledge, time and experience of a professional needs to be figured into the final fee for a marketing project. The client doesn’t need to know exactly how much time you spent on her project to get it done; she just wants to know if it’s going [...]

Microblogging: The Next Big Thing for Corporations?

First, email was too much. Too much info, too much time. Then we used MySpace and Facebook to keep in touch with our social networks. Now, even those have gotten to be too much. Who has time to create personal, long blogs to let her social circle know what’s going on? IM-ing is too time-consuming [...]

7 Essential Characteristics of a Good Entrepreneur

1. You know all about money. Entrepreneurs have to know how much money is in their bank account at all times. Entrepreneurs also know a good deal when they see one because they know the value of things. Most good entrepreneurs have a lot of good debt (things that appreciate, like houses) and not a [...]

The Wizardry of Posters

Some of the most famous posters of modern times are the ones produced by the USSR during its communist era.  The Soviet propaganda machine was notoriously prolific, and thousands of posters were printed extolling the virtues of the “mother land”, while decrying the evil wishes of Russia’s enemies.
There were anti Hitler efforts during World War [...]