Archive of posts from December 2020

Do you have “that day” in the month?

The one you know you should have, that doesn’t “feel like work”, but would catapult you toward your goals faster.

The one where you think, rather than do – to review what’s working and what isn’t, and create critical course-corrections.

The one where that’s all you do that day.

The one you’d miss if you missed it, because the months would only start feeling the same as each other, with seemingly little...

What illusions are you falling for?

North Koreans believe the illusion that South Korea is “the part of the nation overrun with American Imperialists”.

Many small businesses our teams talk to initially believe the illusion that they won’t be able to effectively compete against established competitors.

Many of those same businesses initially believe the illusion that advertising is supposed to be quick and easy, because gurus said so.

Get-rich-quick schemes and communist regimes alike contain illusions designed to throw unsuspecting...

I wouldn’t recommend trying to operate on yourself.

If you offer IT services, it’s probably really easy for you to provision IT solutions to clients. Yet your own IT setup is probably more complex, ill-defined and not quite finished. Why is that?

If you offer branding services, there’s likely a science to your work that makes every client engagement smooth and simple. Yet your own brand is probably a mess rebrands with several generations of logomarks scattered across your collateral....

Do you like figuring things out?

Me too.

Not everything needs to be figured out though:

There is process for getting traffic to your blog. Many processes, in fact. It doesn’t need figuring out because it’s already been figured out.

There is process for getting people excited and engaged on your website. We wrote a book on it. It’s already been figured out, so nobody needs to start from scratch.

There is process for most things. That means we...

There are a lot of these.

They’re the web shop that hack a free theme on top of another free theme, drag-n-drop the rest and call it “development”.

They’re the design team that copy whatever’s popular on Dribbble, tossing the target audience aside and call it “design”.

They’re the lead gen vendor that cold-call from a phonebook, bill you per call and call it “a tough market”.

Digital cowboys are everywhere.

The bar is set low. Mediocrity is the most...

When do you say, “Thank you”?

Most of us thank others when we appreciate something nice they’ve done for us.

We’re thanked for a sales call when the call changes someone’s world for the better. Not for an expected or typical result, but for a result and an experience that far exceeds what they expected.

We’re thanked for a product delivery when the product completely rocked their world. When it’s not merely a fulfilled transaction, but an experience that far...

Do you demonstrate your values?

HEY.com’s “Dumpster Fire” lets people fed up with receiving spammy emails have them printed and burned before their eyes. For an email service designed to fight invasive, spammy emails, this is a great awareness campaign. They demonstrated their values.

Microsoft’s promise of a more integrated, collaborative approach to product and ecosystem development was reflected by creating a massive open source portfolio and the acquisition of leading open source platform, GitHub. They demonstrated what they...

I didn’t even notice.

365 x 3 = 1,095 days. This post is daily post 1,104. My 3 year anniversary of writing daily posts about marketing and business to people doing work that matters happened 9 days ago.

That’s what happens when you get into a flow and build good habits. You lose track.

You stop counting the reps, the lap times, the days without missing a day.

It’s simply a part of what you do, as is waking up...

Do you need to hear you’re the best? Or that you have still have things to learn?

If you prefer the former over the latter, this ones for you:

We don’t learn much when we win or when we pretend we won. Instead we’re left soothing egos with coddled delusion.

We learn a great deal when we lose or when we admit there’s still room for growth. It’s why success follows failure and the successful routinely seek out new challenges.

Every idea I’ve worked on was born as a scribble.

Each started as a passing comment in a casual conversation that was dignified with a scribble (carrying a notebook with you helps with this).

For example, the Narrative Workshop was born as scribble when quipping it’d make a great stand-alone product rather than being tethered to the Narrative Pages service that expresses it. It’s now one of our best selling products.

That might never have happened were it...

When you buy a physical item, it normally comes in a box.

You get to open the box.

If it’s well designed, it’ll be an experience in itself, leading you to understand and appreciate what you’ve bought. You’ll understand instantly and clearly what’s inside. It’s fun.

What about digital products and services?

You don’t get a box. But you could still make the “digital unboxing” fun.

If “digital unboxing” is done right, it too will be an experience in itself,...

When do you need to get fancy?

When you’re not clear enough. Fancy words hide the lack of clarity you’d have shared with us were you to have been clear. They’re a lousy substitute designed to throw us off the scent instead of win us over.

When you’re not good enough. When our offer isn’t compelling, we add whiz-bang to try to impress, instead. Features get added and ads become more sensational, instead of sharing a better offer that attracts...

Seen Adobe Photoshop?

Let’s talk about relative simplicity:

We don’t think of “simple” when we think of Photoshop, we think of “complicated”. We compare it to cheaper products that can do many of the same things.

But what Photoshop does is bring previously-very-complicated image manipulation actions into press-this-and-its-done territory.

It makes almost-impossible activities accessible.

There are many products and services that inhabit this same space. They’re called complex because they have many buttons, when the number of buttons isn’t the...

Speed.

Getting things done fast.

Everyone doing work that matters loves the idea of working at speed.

But why is that?

Speed kills. It kills good ideas because they didn’t germinate properly. It kills great work because the details that make things shine were all cut out to make room for the next thing.

What we need isn’t speed. What we need is tempo.

Tempo: the rate at which a piece of music should be played. A steady pace of...

After five minutes of scrolling through Facebook:

“What if you could ethically hijack your competitors traffic?”

“Want to see how we generate 60+ high ticket coaching clients per month from our free Facebook group?”

“My new webinar gives away the keys to the kingdom for selling courses”

“How to jump from 2 new clients a month to 20 to 1,200 new clients a month, fast”

If you would like to attract desperate get-rich-quick-ers, please, continue. These ads are great at...

Ever ran (or seen) an online ad?

A loud and disruptive ad that sacrifices market bonds or your integrity, is a bad trade. If having people notice you but lack trust engage you, lighting yourself on fire in a city centre would be considered ‘good marketing’.

An ad that people notice for the right reasons – because it cared more to speak more intimately to the needs of those you serve, rather than because it was loud – is a...

There is something.

And there’s an easy way to spot where it’s probably hiding.

If you have a sales background, your sales system may be elaborate and nuanced, requiring expert training and advanced skills to pull off consistently. And so frustration kicks in – why isn’t everyone creating the one-call cold-close you were expecting?

If you have a development background, your development toolkit may be elaborate and nuanced, requiring a battery of skills to negotiate or understand. And so frustration kicks...

We chose to live in a world of monopolies:

When just one region of Amazon’s web services infrastructure goes down, everything from your online video streaming to your Roomba vacuum cleaner stops working.

When everyone chose Gmail for their email, we wonder where all the competitors in an otherwise free market went.

When developers focused their efforts on just two mobile operating systems, they wonder where all the other budding platforms went.

We chose this.

If we want different, we...

You wear a lot of hats in your business.

Perhaps you create product. Maybe you manage others, as well as yourself. Maybe you work on process or you’re involved in marketing efforts.

There are no shortage of hats to wear.

Here’s another:

Narrator.

That product you work on? Keep your Narrator hat on: you’re creating something that represents a step in somebody else’s story. Remember that and inject an empathy for that fact into everything you do.

Those people you...