Mike Schultz , a principal at the Wellesley Hills Group , and his team of professional services marketing experts at RainToday.com have released a follow-up report to The Business Impact of Writing a Book , published earlier this year. Their new report, The Ultimate Guide to Publishing and Marketing a Business Book , lives up its name. The new report not only revisits the research findings presented in their earlier report -- how writing a successful business book positively impacts both business volume and fees -- but provides step-by-step instructions on how to publish and market your book. Topics covered include: - How to research and approach literary agents - How to write a proposal and pitch your book - Tips to make the writing process easier - How to market your book (through PR, book tours, speaking opportunities, and the Internet) - Interviews with a number of publishing professionals At $180, the report is a bargain if you are serious about writing a business book to promot...

Voting is open until midnight tomorrow, Friday June 23rd, for Marketing Sherpa's 2006 Reader's Choice Blog and Podcasting awards . Of the more than 1,000 blogs nominated, the WebMarketCentral blog was among the hundred or so across 11 different categories that made it onto the ballot. I'm not sure whether to be honored by this inclusion, or disturbed that Marketing Sherpa's standards have declined so low. :-) ***UPDATE FROM MARKETING SHERPA: An Apology from MarketingSherpa: Many of you who've been trying to cast your Vote for Best Blog & Podcast have been bounced off our server. Here's a new link for folks who could not get in: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=803032287919 We're *extending* the deadline to Monday, June 26th, at midnight ET because so many of you could not get in when you wanted to. ***END OF UPDATE So go vote for your favorite blogs and podcasts! You know what my favorites are. ( Just for reference purposes , the WebMarketCentral bl...

Ralph Wilson at Web Marketing Today recently released his updated Web Marketing Checklist: 32 Ways to Promote Your Website . It's a relatively quick read and may spark some new ideas about site promotion, although most of the search optimization information presented is covered in Search Engine Optimization Basics . One idea I grabbed from there was improving search engine positioning by exchanging links through the SiteSell Value Exchange . This is a free service that allows you to contact the Webmasters at other sites with content similar to yours and exchange links. It avoids the problems of automated linking solutions that don't generated links from relevant sites and (mostly) avoids spam by providing your site information only to those with related content. Granted, some of the sites included there are somewhat spammy themselves, but you have ultimate control over which links to accept and which to reject. Another service to consider is MegaWeb Promotion (the site is mor...

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Kirsten Chapman, principal of Twin Cities-based virtual marketing and PR agency KC Associates. As KCA's web site notes, this isn't a typical agency; her group works only with b2b technology companies, and is comprised exclusively of senior IT marketing and PR professionals. The result, as Kirsten (front row, checked coat) points out, is that KCA clients pay for talent — not overhead. WebMarketCentral (WMC): How, when and why did KC Associates get started? Kirsten Chapman (KC): KCA got started by accident. Back in the late ‘80s, there were 3-4 of us making a decent living doing contract work and one day the team said “We have a business here and we should really treat it like one.” So, in 1993, we collectively developed a plan to focus exclusively on IT companies (since all of us had good experience in that industry) and now, nearly 15 years later, we have a SWAT team of very talented, super-experienced people who can deliver on near...

From its beginnings, Salesforce.com has emphasized its online delivery model with its "No Software" positioning, even snagging 1-800-NO SOFTWARE as its toll-free line. While the application service provider (ASP) or software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in general has never lived up to its initial hype, among consumers or business users, Salesforce.com has enjoyed impressive success with it. While the company's success with sales and marketing users is hardly news at this point, I was surprised in doing some research recently at how successful the No Software campaign has been among another group: enterprise software developers. Salesforce.com has apparently succeeded at making "software" a nasty word for many of these firms, almost like a racial slur or a misogynistic anachronism not to be uttered in polite company. For example, Synopsys , a developer of electronic design automation software, doesn't produce software at all according to either its home page o...

This is still a marketing blog, not a political one, but topics where the two areas intersect are fair game. So it is with the recent flap over the NSA searching for suspicious patterns in the phone records of Americans, which is even less shocking than the revelation that professional athletes sometimes chemically enhance their performance. The fact is, we have very little privacy left, from either the public or private sector. Ever checked your credit report ? (You may not want to .) What's in there may surprise you. And it isn't just the big three credit reporting agencies who have this information; almost anyone with a checkbook and a lick of creativity can get the information, including your insurance company . Got any vices? Alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate almond fudge ice cream? Unless you exclusively pay with cash, your favorite retailer knows exactly what you buy and how often you buy it, and RFID technology will soon provide them with even more information . Once a...

Marketing Sherpa recently published Marketing Wisdom for 2006: 110 Marketers and Agencies Share Real-Life Tips , its annual compendium of practical marketing knowledge. As always, the report features a mix of the off-beat and on-target, but provides enough creative and useful ideas to keep marketing practicians busy until next year's report is published. One item that immediately caught my eye was a paragraph in the introduction by editor Anne Holland : "The more broad the copy was, in a misguided effort to appeal to more people, the less it appealed to anyone...to write great targeted copy, you need a pile of market research to base wording and focus on. And, in trying to get campaigns off the ground quickly, we all sometimes skip that essential step." I shared that lesson in a company I was doing some work for a while back. They brought me in at the 11th hour on an email campaign for a new product launch. The copy was watered-down mush designed to appeal to the broad a...