CoolMarketingStuff

Here are the best marketing books for 2009 listed in order of awesomeness: 1. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah Why and how to market your business online through inbound marketing rather than outbound marketing. 2.Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson Can free be an effective marketing strategy? Anderson explores the history of free and how companies are using free as a winning strategy. 3. World Wide ... Read More

1. Having a blog helps you create more content on your site, which often leads to more pages showing up in Google search results. 2. Every new blog post is a potential source for inbound links to your site. 3. Blogs give you a platform to speak directly to your customer. 4. Blogs are a place to publish content that solves problems of your buyer persona (the types of people who are likely to buy your product) 5. Blogs allow you to cover a wide range ... Read More

Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk is a business book about how to be successful from Gary's perspective. Gary Vaynerchuk has built one of the strongest personal brands on the internet with his successful Wine Library TV video show and a Twitter following of over 800,000 (@garyvee). If you haven't heard Gary Vaynerchuk speak, prepare to be taken aback by his unmatched enthusiasm and passion. Primarily through social media he has been able to build the Wine Library brand from about a 5 ... Read More

Tom Asacker argues that Toyota lost its way when it shifted its focus away from an obsession with making quality cars and more towards the numbers and Wall Street. That loss in focus by the company may now result in a loss of focus in the mind of the consumer. See the following article from Tom Asacker's blog, A Clear Eye. Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota and grandson of the company's founder, testified today in front of the House Committee on Oversight ... Read More

I asked top minds in marketing what the best marketing career advice they have ever received. Here are their responses. "Get involved in the process." Oddly, I learned this from Senator John Montford in the late 80's. We were flying back to Austin from Lubbock and I asked him about impacting the legislative process: At the time the state was beginning a new push for insurance regulation. I thought it was a simple matter of having the best products. He said, "No, it's ... Read More

Whether you love them or hate them, Apple has been one of the greatest business success stories of our time and it can be argued that most of their success is attributed to their marketing. Here are the top 7 things marketers can learn from Apple. Create suspense around new products Apple is known for its obsessive secrecy of new products which helps build anticipation and excitement for new releases. There is such a strong thirst for information about what's next that fans of ... Read More

It is essential to know what keywords your customers enter into Google or other search engines so that you can show up on the first page when customers are looking to fulfill a need or want. This requires research to find the most important keywords for your business. The following tools can help you create a list of these important keywords to focus your search engine optimization efforts on. Google Keyword Tool Google Keyword Tool is a free tool by Google that provides estimates ... Read More

I am excited to be talking to Bob Gilbreath, author of The Next Evolution of Marketing which outlines a new approach to marketing called marketing with meaning. He has also worked as a brand manager for P&G where he was recognized by AdAge for his turn around of the Mr.Clean brand. He is currently Chief Marketing Strategist at Bridge Worldwide, a digital and relationship marketing agency and blogs at Marketing With Meaning. 1. Your book has a ton of great examples of companies ... Read More

In The Next Evolution of Marketing, Bob Gilbreath describes an alternative approach to marketing called "marketing with meaning", in which marketing becomes a product or service in of itself that people choose to engage with. Gilbreath provides a ton of examples of how marketers can create marketing that is meaningful, like Nike's social network for runners that tracks member's runs and Charmin providing luxury restrooms in Times Square. While some marketers have been trying to invent "innovative" advertising that cuts through the ... Read More

Jason Fried describes how educating consumers can be an effective way to market a product or service. By educating your customer you are providing value for your customer which often encourages them to keep coming back to your website or store. Fried advocates giving away as much information as you can about your craft or industry so that you can build an audience that keeps coming back to you, and are likely to seek you out when they have a need for ... Read More

This week's marketing pick is SEO Moz, an informative resource for learning about search engine optimization with a suite of free and paid tools to enhance your SEO efforts. Read More

I like the idea of marketing making selling unnecessary. If you have to do a lot of personal selling of your product or service, then perhaps your marketing is not very effective. I also like Tom Asacker's point that marketing should deliver value to people in exchange for their time and attention. Check out Tom Asacker's blog, A Clear Eye for more insightful marketing ideas like the ones below. by Tom Asacker What is marketing? What is its purpose? The AMA defines ... Read More

JKR is a marketing design firm from the UK that has worked with brands like Guinness, Mars, and Molton Brown. They have put together a book of their past year's blog posts on marketing design titled Is Brad Pitt a fishfinger and approached me to give away some copies. I think it is a smart idea for serious bloggers to put their blog into a book format so that they can spread their ideas through a different medium. I would be willing ... Read More

The internet has fundamentally changed the relationship between companies and customers which means marketers need to take a different approach to marketing if they want to effectively grow revenues. One of these new approaches is to shift from outbound marketing (advertising, telesales, direct mail) to inbound marketing (search engine optimization, content generation, social media). A very good book that explains how to effectively execute an inbound marketing strategy is Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. I thought the book provides a ... Read More

A lot of blogs take advantage of free blogging sites like Blogger or Wordpress.com to publish their blog posts. While this is free and easy to get started there are significant drawbacks to using free blogging platforms. You Don't Really Own Your Blog When you blog at yourcompany.blogspot.com or yourcompany.wordpress.com, you do not really own your site. Google or Wordpress owns the site, including all the links and search engine authority. Yahoo recently shut down Geocities, erasing everyone's site. People who had sites at ... Read More

Do small businesses need marketing research? According to the new book More Guerrilla Marketing Research they should consider the benefits. Some of the benefits that the book describes are: Finding out what will get your customers to buy more often Knowing what will get customers to buy from you more frequently can help you increase revenues by taking actions to encourage repeat purchases from existing customers. 50 % of the profits of most companies come from products that didn't exist five years ago Through marketing research ... Read More

by Ran Nir Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume of traffic to a site from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and Bing via unpaid search results. Fundamentally, the higher your site is ranking for a particular search term, the more traffic you'll get. Therefore your goal is to increase your ranking within the search engine guidelines as it will directly influence your revenue. 1. Save On the Site's Development - Whether you will own your SEO work ... Read More

Today we have the great privilege of talking with Patrick Byers, CEO of Outsource Marketing, a marketing firm that provides research, planning, and creative services for organizations of all sizes. The Responsible Marketing blog is an excellent marketing blog that discusses issues of ethics in marketing. What was the inspiration of starting a blog about marketing responsibly? It was something that inspired me, but it was also a little self-serving. Even though my job is to help organizations sell more products and services, I ... Read More

Quality content is one of the important factors of getting your company website found in Google. “Search engines like fresh content with lots of links” -Mike Volpe VP Inbound Marketing at Hubspot You want to post new content to your site as frequently as possible. If you are serious about driving traffic to your site, you should post 3 new articles per week. This keeps your site fresh, so the Google spiders will visit your site more often. Each article is also an opportunity ... Read More

Just posted a pilot episode of the Cool Marketing Stuff video podcast. It was fun and I hope to turn it into a weekly marketing podcast that will cover what's going on in the marketing field and useful marketing resources. Read More

Leo Laporte, one of the leading podcasters, recently stated that his podcast network, TWiT, brings in a profit of over $1 million a year, but said that podcasting is dead. He states that podcasts are just too hard for users because of the numerous steps that it takes to listen to a podcast. You have to find the good ones, download iTunes, subscribe to them, and then sync them to your iPod or MP3 player. Well, here's my list of the best ... Read More

In Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith write about how to build trust at a time when trust is at an all time low. Fortunately we also live in a time when online tools can help us build relationships with far more people than ever before. Trust Agents discusses how large companies can regain the trust of their customers using the social web. Here are some of my favorite ideas from the book: Learn to hack the game of business Using the example ... Read More

by Tom Asacker Think about it: Brand value is all about distinction and scarcity. The brand appeals, in a particular way, to a particular group of people.  And that's why those people will: 1. Pay a premium for it (which results in increased margins); 2. Go out of their way for it (which results in increased margins; and/or 3. Talk about it and show it off to their family and friends (which results in increased margins). So this struck me as ill-informed (from Adweek, 8/31/2009): "Explaining that it ... Read More

Wesley Fryer's education blog The Speed of Creativity discusses why people hate advertising. I really don’t like to use the word “hate” at all, so I hesitate to say “I hate advertising.” It is definitely accurate to say I STRONGLY dislike advertising. I’m convinced we all should strive to live our lives with digital discipline, and part of disciplining ourselves digitally means taking assertive control of the images and messages we allow into our eyes, ears, and brains. I came to the defense of ... Read More