Tough love: are you making these marketing communication mistakes?
I LIKE MARKETING. Done correctly, I strongly believe that it can be helpful, useful information. Done poorly, it’s irritating. Done really poorly? It’s a form of assault.
My Empire work makes me a target for a lot of marketing campaigns from both small businesses and large corporations alike. Both make marketing mistakes. Here are a few that you can learn from…
This crushing silence: shit I do to recover from a Big Meaty Project
A colleague posted recently about dealing with “the period of quiet after the (lovely) storm.” As entrepreneurs and small business folk, we work ourselves into a lather reaching big goals we set out for ourselves and … then what?
Rather than hijack Meg’s comments with a longwinded response, I thought I’d collect my thoughts here. And so I present to you: Shit I do when I’m recovering from a major project!
Small business mercy killing: When to euthanize a project
Fall of 2010, I launched the Offbeat Bride Vendor Directory, which was immediately one of the biggest business successes I’ve ever had, grossing over $20,000 the month it launched. Listing vendors reported great results (some getting inquiries within hours of their listings being published), and readers loved that they could finally easily view vendors in their area via a big clickable map.
Excited by the success of Offbeat Bride’s Vendor Directory, last year I propagated the directory concepts to both Offbeat Mama and Offbeat Home.
They didn’t work, SO I KILLED THEM.
Vendor mistakes when submitting to blogs: when is it worth my time to say “no”?
As you might imagine, we get a lot of submissions for Offbeat Bride. The site’s editors (Megan, Catherine, and Chris Wolfgang), deal with a steady flow of beauty submitted via all the submission channels described on this page: wedding profile submission forms, our Flickr pool, Two Bright Lights, etc. There are a LOT of ways to submit content to Offbeat Bride, all of which have been set up to keep the at-times-overwhelming flow of content organized, and help to save everyone time — “everyone” including the submitter themselves!