2 weeks ago we were in L.A. meeting with the Fox Audience Network folks formally MySpace MyAds and during the course of the night we got into this discussion about how all of these people are entering the world of “making money online” or “making money from home” but have no clue about the basics of salesmanship or marketing. Offline or Online.

I am talking about the “weapons of marketing” if you will. Things like scarcity, fear, authority, association, trust, perception, social proof, and call to action. Course there are quite a few I am leaving out off the top of my head.

Its amazing to me how many people just make a website, landing page, ad, email – not incorporate any of these – fail… and then give up “cause it doesn’t work”.

via How To Sell Shit.

Chicago companies are weighing how useful Apple’s iPad, coming April 3 and available for pre-order starting at $499, will be for business.

“We are definitely looking at budgeting for some and having them for a lot of different reasons,” says Carol McCarthy, president and CEO of Remedy Inc., a marketing company specializing in health care. “I think it can revolutionize the way we work.”

Remedy relies on Mac computers and programs for design, so Ms. McCarthy envisions using the lightweight devices like pads of paper for brainstorming ideas and showing work to clients.

via Chicago companies weigh business use for iPad | Crain’s Chicago Business.

E-mail Marketing Providers

Helpful Metrics

• Who has opened the message.
• Who has “clicked” and what they’ve looked at.
• Who has opted out (and legally shouldn’t receive further e-mails).
• E-mail addresses which are no longer valid or “bounced back.”
• Messages that have been trapped in spam filters.

One question that confronts most people is if they should use an e-mail marketing provider. If your business just sends out e-mails via Microsoft Outlook or another e-mail program you may be missing out on certain statistics and tools that help you manage your e-mail campaign.

There are several advantages of using an e-mail marketing provider. The first of which are metrics and analytics reports.

These tools give campaign managers the information they need to determine performance and where improvements need to be made. Additionally, built in tools help you craft your e-mails to comply with existing spam regulations.

E-mail Marketing 101 – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Female Factor will help you identify the aspects of your brand, product, retail, sales or customer-service environment that can be magnified to increase your appeal to the most powerful consumers on earth. CEO Bridget Brennan wrote the book on it.

Bridget spoke last night at the Chicago Booth Entrepreneurial Roundtable. She was very informative and presented allot of interesting information about marketing to women.

Female Factor Corporation – Consulting on Marketing to Women and Selling to Women. Bridget Brennan

The business model works beautifully for this 50-person company, which brought in close to $30 million in revenue in 2009. Threadless, with 1.5 million followers on Twitter and 100,000 fans on Facebook, is also masterful at using social media to promote its designs and designers–and to keep its community engaged.

Cam Balzer, the vice president of marketing at Threadless, shares more on the company’s community-building strategy.

Need To Build A Community? Learn From Threadless – Forbes.com.

Experts say that search engine optimization (SEO) concerns should be integrated in web design.

Rob Garner, strategy director of digital marketing for iCrossing, wrote a column at MediaPost about how web designers are hesitant on integrating SEO expertise in to their web lay outs. Garner says that doing so will provide many long-term benefits for websites.

In integrating SEO and web design, many details must be observed in the design process. Garner pointed out that most web designers tend to overlook details, like traffic source and conversion when it comes to SEO concerns.

Most experts agree with Garner. Integrating SEO with web design has many benefits. However, the partnership needs to be studied properly before it works.

Should web design come with SEO? | Last Click News

In an extremely audacious move Squidoo has launched a new service called Brands in Public which could cause quite a few headaches for marketing departments.  Squidoo plans to create hub pages about lots of brands and then populate those pages with scraped content such as blog posts, tweets, Google News, Yahoo News, Google Trends, forum posts and a whole host of other content (see example here).

Once these pages have been created Squidoo is going to allow brands to pay $400 per month for the right to add comments on them.

Here is what Seth Godin Squidoo founder has to say about the product:

Squidoo launches a reputation management timebomb

SEO is an art and a craft. It takes skill, knowledge, understanding and learning. Training is sparse once beyond the beginning stages, only available at conferences and through testing. Reading, reading and more reading combined with testing and a skilled, sharp mind is needed for SEO. With this discipline, both the art of marketing and the skill of technical knowledge and expertise combine together.

If Your SEO Is Not Moonlighting, Fire Them » SEO Chicks.

Two of the dominant trends of the Internet over the past decade, social media and e-commerce, have overlapped very little and without much success. Retailers have tried to cultivate communities of shoppers with similar interests on their sites, without much uptake. Plenty of brands set up Twitter and Facebook pages, only to find that marketing to consumers in a social venue does not necessarily spur conversations about those brands.

Online stores shouldn’t give up on social just yet, according to the results from a recent survey of over 45,000 users of the social network myYearbook. While collecting data to explain why more teenagers don’t use Twitter, myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook graciously agreed to put my questions about social media and shopping to his panel of respondents.

Here are the results:

Does social media sway online shopping? – BusinessWeek

the rules for search engine optimization listings and search engine marketing were not only defined but were completely controlled at the whim of this single company.

Of course, we all realize that word-of-mouth marketing and viral marketing also contribute to traffic to individual websites. That said, the primary methodology for all users to reach any individual website destination is still search, of either paid or organic listings.

The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO.