I am a news junkie. Reading the daily newspaper-the printed version that’s delivered to my home-borders on an addiction for me.

But two months ago, I did the unthinkable (at least, in my mind). I canceled my subscription.

Bottom line:
I opted out because of the newspaper’s shoddy marketing. The product continues to shrink while the price continues to expand. And the quality of the “news” in these slimmed-down newspapers is mediocre, at best.

Now that I’ve survived newspaper withdrawal, I must confess: my life is better now that I’m newspaper-free. Here are six reasons why:

1.  Reporters no longer have undue influence in shaping my opinions.
In the seven days following the November election, my daily newspaper published two editorials and an editorial column on a hot-button social issue. They accused anyone who disagreed with their opinion of being stupid. The three columns in question ignored the facts and made no attempt to present the opposing viewpoint (something reporters are supposed to do, even in editorial columns).

I am fed up with irresponsible journalists who claim objectivity and slant stories according to their personal worldview. Journalists wield an inordinate amount of power in shaping public opinion; some of them abuse that power.

The only way to put a stop to the abuse is to stand firm against it. I wrote a letter to the editor explaining exactly why I was unsubscribing. Then I hit ‘em where it hurts most by refusing to continue to pay for irresponsible reporting.

2.  I get the same news online-for free.
Because I spend all day in front of a computer, I assumed I needed tangible newsprint to leaf through during my coffee break. I didn’t. I now read news from a variety of media outlets, via e-mail digests, RSS feeds-even Twitter. And I don’t pay a penny.

3.  My news intake is more well-rounded.
Our large-circulation daily paper is increasingly filled with mostly bad news: violent crime, tragedy, disaster. While I feel compelled to keep up with what’s happening in the world, the constant inundation of bad news is truly depressing. Receiving my news online gives me the option to skim the headlines without feeling obligated to read every article.

4.  I have more time.
I used to spend upwards of an hour per day reading the paper. Now I spend 10 minutes. As a result, my workday has become more productive.

5.  I feel greener.
My hubby and I have recycled our newspapers for over 20 years, and unfortunately, the daily newspaper takes up the bulk of the room in our recycling bin. I’ve noticed that the bin has been 1/3 less full lately.

6.  I’m less swayed by advertising.
Until I stopped reading the paper, I didn’t realize just how many ads it contains for non-essential, spendy stuff- close to 80 percent of the paper is advertising. Sure, online newspapers contain ads, but they’re easy to ignore. Eliminating the daily bombardment of advertising has eliminated the temptation to buy, buy, buy.

What about you? Have you abandoned the daily rag? What are your fave alternative news outlets?

Tags: irresponsible journalism, Marketing, newspapers, online news

If I asked you to name the five best books on selling, Green Eggs and Ham probably wouldn’t leap into your mind.

But it should.

Immortal Sam I Am is one of the greatest salesmen ever. Here’s two reasons why:

1. He tries to close the sale sixteen times before he gets a yes.

Sixteen! The average salesperson asks twice.

Sam knew the average sale is made when the customer is asked five times.

Sam knew that 67% of all shoppers expect to return home with the item they went out to look for, but only 24% actually do.

2. Sam knew that simply asking again and again wasn’t enough.

That’s not closing, that’s being a pain in the backside.

This is key:
Sam came up with sixteen options, ideas, new ways of thinking about green eggs and ham.

Would you like them in a box? With a fox? In a house? With a mouse? In a train? In the rain? Here or there?

Cheesy sales trainers love to spout, “Ya gotta remember ABC! Always Be Closing!” But what does that mean? Hammer on people till they give in? Let us hope not. Let’s hope your sales people think ABC-UWI-TWHP. Always be coming up with innovative ideas that will help people.

Oh, you’re not a sales person? But of course you are. If you’re alive you’re selling. Your ideas, your  writing, your blog, your Web site, a product, your business … everything.

Stick with it. Get creative. Be like Sam.

(Did you know a Random House editor bet ol’ Ted Geisel $50 he couldn’t write a book using only fifty words? Green Eggs and Ham was the result.)

Tags: greatest sales training book, He Blogs She Blogs, Marketing, sales

Warning: rant coming up.

I tried to resist writing this post. Really. I’m a not a “the-glass-is-half-full” kinda guy. I’m a “someone-will-be-by-any-second-to-fill-up-my-glass-the-rest-of-the-way” kind of guy. (There’s a reason I have a Tigger baseball hat.)

But I have to comment on some customer service I’ve, uh, been subjected to recently.

Office Max: I go in to order biz cards. After waiting two or three minutes the gal behind the printing counter looks at me and says, “What?”

I say, “I’d like to have some cards printed.” Her response? Big sigh, then, “I’m pretty busy, you’re going to have to wait awhile.” Then she walks off. So did I.

Jet City Pizza: My wife and park in front of their Redmond store to run an errand. When we return a Jet City employee happens to be standing outside. I wave and say hello. He says, “Didja have to park right there?! Jesh!” We’ve ordered many pizzas from JCP over the years. Their phone won’t be ringing from ours anytime soon.

AT&T: My son’s phone wound up in the washing machine. Bye-bye cell phone. Saturday night we shop for a new phone at the Woodinville AT&T store. A sales associate explains if I sign up for a corporate account through my business I can get a discount. “Great! What do I do?”

“E-mail me your tax ID number when you get home, I’ll get it set up tonight, you can pick up your phone tomorrow.” (Sunday.)

I call on Sunday to make sure she’s done what she said she would. She’s off. I explain to the man on the phone what we did the night before. But they can’t access their data base to see if the account has been set up. “Call back tomorrow.” There was no “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, sorry we can’t get into the file,” just, “Call back tomorrow.”

So my son does so. Leaves a message. He waits. No response. Ah, must be ’cause he’s a kid. I call. Our gal is with a customer but she’ll call us right back, we’re assured. We wait. And wait some more.

As of Monday night at 8p, still no call. Still no response to my Saturday night e-mail.

I’m confused. I was ready to hand her money and a two-year commitment with her name on the account. And these sales people work on commission! (We ended up going to another AT&T store where Scott did a great job taking care of us.)

The happy Apple story: My son buys himself a MacBook. A day later they come out with a slightly better deal. We call Apple to see if we can get the better deal. “No problem!” Taken care of by the guy on the phone in three minutes.

Two days later we have to call Apple on another issue. Solved in seven minutes and the gal apologizes for taking so long! No, I’m not kidding.  (Are you saying, as I did, “It usually takes 10 minutes just to get a live body on the phone at most companies.”?)

So let me end this rant with a rave for Apple. I’ve teased my son about going to the dark side by buying a Mac (we live in Microsoft territory) but I’m not sure what I can needle him about. The product has lived up to the hype, and Apple has the best customer service I’ve experienced in a long time. Friendly. Fast. Knowledgeable.

Is it really that hard to get decent customer service? (The brutal answer is yes; getting and training great employees is hard work. But when you’re tossing significant amounts of your yearly budget into the advertising arena, trying to drive people into your stores, don’t you think teaching your employees to treat customers with common courtesy is important?)

Share a rant or even better, a rave about customer service  you’ve experienced lately.

Tags: great customer service, Marketing, poor customer service, sales training

These ads–from the February issue of Writer’s Digest magazine–bother me.

First burr in my backside? The line, “Where all authors are published.” Really? Wouldn’t it be more honest to say “We’ll take $$$ from absolutely anyone.”?

The line is tantalizing to beginning authors. They read it with emotion, not logic and don’t consider that not everyone is ready to have their writing on bookstore shelves.

It’s like saying, “Everyone who tries out for American Idol will make the top 12!”

Next are the numerous grammatical mistakes like: “Are you a writer? Then Get Published!” (To be fair, maybe they couldn’t decide whether to use capital letters or lower case, so they used a combo of both.)

How ’bout “Publish your work in our list of Genres.”

In addition to capitalizing “genres” the sentence is incorrect.

Where’s the hyphen in “non-fiction.”?

The ad became a game. How many mistakes could I find? (And I didn’t even touch on the basic design flaws.)

I understand mistakes. I make ‘em.  But more than five? In a national magazine? When you’re trying to promote yourself as an expert at publishing books? Huh uh. Unforgivable.

If I did ads like that for my clients they would, and should, fire me.

When you post to your blog, change your Web site or design an ad, quadruple checking will always save your face from getting a nice shade of crimson.

Want to play? Tell us what isn’t working in the second ad.

Tags: ad design, copy writing, Marketing, publishing on demand

Blogs. Web sites. Social Networking.

When you ponder the plethora of the online venues from which you can promote your products and services, it’s hard to know where to start.

Prospective customers need 8-to-10 “touches” from you before they remember you or your brand. Cyberspace is a great place to reach out and touch someone. NOW is the time to begin making those touches.

Here are a few tips for building your online presence:

Build your hub.
Think about the International Space Station. Construction began in 1998 with the Control Module. Gradually, additional modules have been added.

Your online hub should be a Web site and/or a blog.
A Web site generally contains static content that changes infrequently. A blog is an interactive Web site-its content is updated on a regular basis (at least weekly).

More and more often, businesses are creating sites that seamlessly integrate blog content with static content. For example, here at HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, our blog is on our Home page. Navigation buttons on the Home page lead to inside pages that function more like a traditional Web site.

Gradually add spokes or “modules” to your hub. I consider social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace) and social bookmarking sites (Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon) as spokes. You’ll create a profile at each site (registration is free) and link to and from your hub. Millions of people subscribe to social networking sites, substantially increasing your chances of being found and “touched.”

• Don’t feel compelled to instantly sign up for each of them. Spend time looking around, visiting others’ profiles, and studying how members market themselves.
• After you’ve visited a site several times, ask yourself whether you feel comfortable joining the community, and whether it’ll be worth your time investment to become an active member.

Here are some sites to explore:

General Networking:

• Facebook - http://www.facebook.com
• LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/
• Ziggs - http://www.ziggs.com/ (for business professionals)

Targeted Networking:

• MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/
• Shoutlife - http://www.shoutlife.com/ - Christian social networking for authors, music artists, comics, organizations, and regular folks.

Video Sharing

• YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/
• GodTube - http://www.godtube.com/ - Christian version of YouTube

Book Sharing

• Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/
• Shelfari - www.shelfari.com
• BookTour - http://www.booktour.com
• Book Marketing Network http://bookmarket.ning.com/ - You can set up your own customized social network at ning.com

Micro Blogging

• Twitter - https://twitter.com
• Plurk - http://www.plurk.com/

Social Bookmarking

• Digg - http://digg.com/
• Delicious - http://delicious.com
• StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com/

What sites do you use/recommend? Leave us a comment!

This article was originally published on the WinePress Publishing Company blog, Oct. 20, 2008. WinePress is the leading company in the Christian custom publishing industry.

Tags: blogs, book sharing, internet marketing, Marketing, micro-blogging, promoting, social bookmarking, Social Networking, video sharing, Web sites

People like to buy from people.

Is this too obvious to state? If it is, then why don’t more companies apply it to their marketing?

Quick quiz: Think ice cream for a moment.

Whose image do you like better? Haagen-Dazs’ or Ben & Jerry’s? Ninety-nine percent of the time people will say, “Gimmie Ben & Jerry!”

Why? We can put a face to the B&J boys. Or maybe it’s their story of them scraping together $12k and launching an ice cream company from an abandoned gas station in Vermont.

But H.D. has a great story too:

Eight-year-old boy comes to America in 1921. He works in his mom’s ice cream business selling fruit ice and ice cream pops from a horse-drawn wagon in the bustling streets of the Bronx, New York. In 1961, Reuben Mattus, forms a new company dedicated to his ice cream vision and calls it Haagen-Dazs, to convey an aura of the old-world traditions and craftsmanship. There’s a story there … but it’s buried on their home page.

We’re relational creatures. We want to know what people look like, we want to know who we’re buying from, we like knowing the story behind it. (Even with my bland telling of the H.D. story above you probably feel a bit warmer toward them, don’t you?)

Do you think Iaccoa appearing in all those old Chrysler ads helped turn the company around back in the 80s? Uh, yeah.

How this applies to individuals:

It surprises me the number of personal Web sites and blogs that don’t show a picture of the owner. It’s the first thing I look for. I want to know who I’m dealing with.

On my personal Web site, Jim Rubart.com, you have to click once to see what I look like. On He Blogs, She Blogs you can peek at Laura and me along the right hand column almost instantly.

Make sure we can see you, and find out what you’re about. I think we’ll like you.

Tags: Advertising, Ben & Jerry's, Haagen-Dazs, Marketing

By Erica Graf
Guest columnist

Yesterday, while leaving the mall, we decided it would be a good idea for everyone to make a bathroom stop. While drying my hands, I noticed a sign on the wall that read:

“If you see a problem with our restroom, please notify one of our friendly sales associates.” (emphasis mine)

Okay…but how do I know which ones are the friendly ones? It’s not as if they wear a special badge making them stand out from the other sales associates. So, I’m left to guessing which is which. (I’m also now wondering if a friendly associate who gets delegated to “bathroom duty” too many times ends up demoted to a surly associate!?)

Come to think of it, I have had some experience in knowing which were the friendly sales associates. They are the ones like Michael, at my local grocery store.

• Always pleasant with every customer, he seems genuinely glad to see each person who comes through his line.
• He makes each shopper feel as if he honestly cares about them, even in a small way, often remembering little details in the lives of his regular customers.

Not surprisingly, mostly due to customer compliments, Michael is his store’s employee of the year.

“Where are your kids today?” he commented recently when I was uncharacteristically shopping solo, “I hope everyone is okay.”

When I leave Michael’s line, I feel a bit brighter than when I entered it. I smile because someone noticed–someone seemed to care. No, it doesn’t suddenly make my life worry-free and take all my problems away. But for just a moment, I forget about them.

For a few minutes, I enjoy the warmth of common friendliness. I don’t even remember to tell him about the restroom.

Erica Graf is a freelance writer and popular women’s speaker in the Puget Sound area. Her work has appeared in MOMSense Magazine and The Northwest Christian Author. Visit her blog, Truthfully Speaking.

Tags: customer service, Erica Graf, Marketing

When e-mails with pictures land in Outlook on my laptop, the pictures are disabled. I click once to download them if I want to.

Which e-mail below attracts you more? Rhetorical question, I know.

The content is the same but the pictures make the e-mail come alive. Using pictures in the body of your posts make an impact.

I love words and believe pictures are often worth a 1,000 of them, but pictures have their own influence.

Make sure you’re tapping into their power.

Related post:

• Which type of e-newsletter do you prefer?

Tags: Blogging, He Blogs, Marketing, pictures, She Blogs, strong presentations

We subscribe to several e-newsletters and e-zines, and we often remark about the differences among them.

• Some are distributed weekly; others monthly.
• Some can be scanned in 9o seconds; others take 10 minutes to slog through.

But the biggest difference we’ve noted is that some are text-only and others are packed with snazzy, colorful graphics.

We asked our Twitter followers which style they prefer. Here are a couple of replies:

MaAnnaS - Text only newsletters. Most browsers auto-block graphics anyway.

tweetfans - I prefer ones with photos. A good photo or graphic will always increase conversions.

lisa_brazytis - Still like the graphics.

We realize that e-mails containing graphics take longer to load.  We also realize that some people’s systems recognize only text-based e-mails.

But most e-mail services give you the option to create text-only and templated e-newsletters. That way, everyone whose system can receive graphics-based e-newsletters, does.

So why do people choose to distribute text-only e-newsletters?

We’re curious. Which do you prefer reading? Take this one-click poll and enlighten us in the Comments area.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Tags: e-marketing, e-newsletter, e-zine, Marketing, text-only

Scintillating personalities make a great product exceptional.

Here’s one example:

Wednesday night, after we dropped my 13-year old off at youth group, my wife took me to a little wine bar she’d discovered that sits in the heart of Redmond, WA. Jerzy’s Wine Bar is a converted house bursting with a hip/relaxed/fun European ambiance.

Food? Wonderful. Wine? Excellent. But what will bring us back is the owner, Kasia Radka.

Some headlines about Kasia:

• Immigrated from Poland as a child due to communism and spent time on the streets of Itay, then a few years in a refugee camp there.
• Speaks Polish, Italian and English (all flawlessly).
• Passed her LSATS (which you must pass to get into law school) with colors flying but decided to follow her dream of opening a restaurant. (At a young age she figured out money ain’t gonna bring you happiness.)
• Has a B.A. in psychology and in a few years will get master’s degree.
• Genuinely interested in people. She chatted with us about writing, reading, and sleep deprivation; asked us questions about our likes, dislikes, my novel, and our kids.
• Is a self-taught chef.
• Is only 24! She carries herself with the maturity of a 40-year old.

(She didn’t volunteer this info, we asked her. There’s no ego going on there.)

But, being a marketing guy I can’t help but critique Kasia a bit. Are you intrigued? Do you think it would be interesting to meet Kasia? I’m guessing you’re nodding your cyber head at me. She is a captivating, warm, engaging person with a true heart.

But I see none of this on her Web site-which is the way most people will check out Jerzy’s Wine Bar. So because she hasn’t infused her site with some of her own persona, it appears to be just another quaint restaurant.

Now let’s shine the spotlight your direction.

• Can people discover some of the fascinating, quirky things about you on your Web site?
• Or do you sound like every other business, or person, or author, or speaker etc. on the Internet?

I understand you don’t want your business to be all about you. It shouldn’t be. You want it to be about the customer. Bravo. But there’s a reason People magazine and US magazine and Entertainment Tonight and Extra and Oprah have hordes of fans. People are always interested in intriguing people.

If you have personality to burn like Kasia (and if you look close enough, everyone has a fascinating story), strike a match.

Tags: customer service, Jerzy's Wine Bar, Marketing, personaity, promoting, using your uniqueness, Web site copy