Sales

Darren Hardy’s Blog

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Darren Hardy is the publisher of Success magazine.  I strongly suggest you subscribe to it.  Even if you don't actually read the magazine, each issue comes with some awesome audio for you to listen to – great interviews with successful people.  If you get the print version, there's a CD bound into each issue.  The digital version allows you to download the MP3 files.  I listen to these in my car, and find them very inspirational, very motivating.

Visit Darren's blog here and read some of the wise advice he's passing along.

Magic Numbers

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Today's post is brought to you by the magic numbers 3 and 1.

The number three is given importance in a number of places.  In Christianity's Holy Trinity, for instance.  The Three Jewels of Buddhism.  3 is a lucky number in China, and in Vietnam it is considered unlucky to take a picture with exactly three people in it.  Three on a match?  Don't do it!  But. . . third time's a charm.

We have 3 strikes in baseball, a 3-point shot in basketball, the three-success hat trick in hockey.  And when a team wins a championship three times in a row, it's a threepeat.

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Considering The Last Thing

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We have a client who runs a tiny, local restaurant review site.  As you may know, we advise our clients that advertising – paying to put yourself in front of others – should be the last thing they consider when putting together their marketing plans.  Not because "it's a rip-off" or some other negative reason, but because there are a ton – hell, two tons of things you can do for free or at minimal cost that will put you in front of your audience before finding a medium and paying them for some space.

But in examining or client's options, we had to agree that is was time to begin to advertise.  We wanted to put their web site in front of people in their area who were looking for "restaurant reviews" right now, but we didn't want it to cost an arm and a leg.  This is a tiny site, and is still not breaking even.  So we went with Google AdWords, and set a daily budget that would barely get you a cup of hot stuff at your favorite coffee house.

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Motivational Pix – UPDATE

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We've now completed 23 inspirational quotes "mini posters" which will be posted every Monday (except Labor Day, September 1st) at 10 AM Eastern time.  We hope you find them both visually interesting and mentally stimulating.  Please feel free to share them, even print them out as pictures and tack them on your wall for inspiration.

We're working on even more of them, and may release the whole pack in one ZIP file at some point.  We encourage you to post any comments you may have.  Thanks for keeping up with them, and with Agile'.

Motivational Pix

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We currently have the next 9 weeks of motivational quote pix in the bag.  We'll be putting more of them together soon.  We've got enough to last at least through the summer.

Watch for the newest pic with quote to be posted at 10 AM Eastern every Monday.  We hope you find them motivational and inspirational, and that they help you on your road to success!

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Use High Quality Gimmees

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I'm against the use of gimmees (freebies, give-aways, junk, etc) in trade show booths.  If you don't start doing it, you'll never have to stop.  Just like smoking cigarettes.  Both can be bad for your health.

I've had a dozen conversations like this one, but it serves as a good example.  I'd had a booth at several B2B trade shows where I was near the same printing company.  During this one, they were giving away pads that looked like melon slices.  At the top was printed "Honeydew List."  They had stacks of other pads out on display, but this was the most popular by far.  People were coming by and literally taking away half a dozen at a time, without asking or even being talked to by the booth staff.  Word was getting around, apparently, as I heard people coming up the aisle saying, "Those honeydew lists are around here someplace."  By the middle of the afternoon, those pads were all gone.

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JPEG Mini – Put Your Pix On a Diet

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When I shoot stills either for my clients of for myself, I shoot in RAW format.  That way, I can manipulate the base image and have it look any way I want it.

But once I finalize the picture(s), I usually output them in JPG format.  Most of the printers I deal with require that format, and if the pics are for web display, the best format is either JPG or PNG.  And though JPGs are a lot smaller than RAW images, if you shoot and store enough of them, they can take up a significant amount of space.

Which is where JPEG Mini comes in.  It basically strips away all non-essential information from the file, and just leaves the image behind.  How good is it?  How about routinely reducing your pictures to one quarter of their size?  Or maybe even smaller!

I'm not getting anything out of this.  I just think the program is an excellent product, and if you shoot a lot of pix, you'll probably wind up seeing the benefits of using it.

There are two (really, 3) versions of the software.  There's the personal version, which handles smaller files as a stand-alone program.  A free version of this software does up to 20 pix in one day.  If you pay for it, it's only $20.  The professional version of the software crunches pix up to 8 times faster (which can be a help if you've got hundreds – maybe even thousands – of pix to squash), and works in stand-alone mode and also works as a plug-in for Adobe Lightroom 5 and above. That version is just under $150.   JPEG Mini is available in both Windows and Mac flavors.

Advice For Authors

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You’ve written your book.  It’s published – print, ebook, audio, maybe all three.  You wrote a first draft, then a second, third and forth.  Then there was the editing.  Sometimes you changed a line, or a paragraph.  Sometimes it was a word, or just a punctuation mark.  But you’re tired of the damned thing, and it doesn’t matter anymore because it’s published.  You can forget about it.

Well. . . no.  You can’t.  Novel or non-fiction, in order for people to stumble on it by chance, loving every word and telling all their friends to buy a copy, the book must be promoted.

Here’s a sad (perhaps) fact for you: all that effort to write your book is just the tip of the iceberg.  In order for you to become the next shining literary beacon, the bottom 90% of your iceberg needs to be completed.  You need to be interviewed, to be quoted, to do readings for rooms small and even smaller.  You need to remain completely upbeat when getting up early and staying up late for phone interviews, saying the same things over and over again.  Blogs and magazines won’t go out and find your book on a store shelf, rushing home to read it and gush over it to their myriad readers.  It needs to be put into their hands.

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