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Super-charge your referral engine

September 6, 2012 By Chad Lane

Remember when you were a kid and a parent or a school administrator exacted some form of justice? You’d nervously wonder aloud if you were going to get in trouble.

“If you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about!”

I don’t know – that advice never really worked for me. I figured that I’d get in trouble anyway – because I looked guilty, or because someone would pin the crime on me, or…

The ratings systems on sites such as Google+ Local, Yelp, Angie’s List and others are a bit like that.

We wonder – should we solicit reviews? What if the reviews are bad? Continue Reading

Referrals: Low Cost, High Reward

September 2, 2012 By Matt D'Rion

Measuring advertising success:

The reason to spend money on advertising is to get new clients or to make new sales from the old clients.

Why, then, do we allow ourselves to be sold “impressions?”

If 1,000 or 100,000 people see our offer yet no one buys, it makes no difference how many people saw it.

The only measure of success of advertising ought to be “sales,” “new clients,” or “income” – something that directly demonstrates effectiveness of ads.Continue Reading

The New Frontier

August 13, 2012 By Chad Lane

There is an economic theory that says this:

Our capitalist system relies on the ability to continue to expand. We no longer can expand without wars or unethical trade agreements with underprivileged societies. Therefore, we will fail.

Those who subscribe to this theory point out that we on planet earth live in a “closed system”, meaning that there are only so many resources, and that as our population grows, this necessitates that more and more people will have less and less.

This economic is close enough to true to be appealing. We do, indeed, live on a planet with limited resources. As a nation, we can no longer expand our borders across the continent – we ran out of continent a while back.Continue Reading

SEO Snake Oil

June 1, 2012 By Matt D'Rion

“Psst. Hey, kid. Wanna be at the top of the Google rankings? Gimme $1000. I’ll get ya there.”

The Snake Oil SEO “gurus” who sell this type of product intentionally keep one thing from their would-be customers…

If your website is at the top of the Google search pages, but doesn’t provide useful information to your potential customers, it is useless. If your potential clients click on your site and don’t get immediately drawn in by your knowledge about your products and the problems they solve, they’ll hit the “back” button quicker than you can say “SEO is dead.” Continue Reading

How to get people to unsubscribe from your email list

May 4, 2012 By Matt D'Rion

I’m a big fan of subscribing to other’s email lists. It gives me an opportunity to watch my own actions as a “consumer” of information. Which emails do I open? Which do I auto-delete? Worse, which cause me to unsubscribe?

At the top of the “unsubscribe” list are those most annoying “Fooled ya!” Re: lines. They go something like this:

re: Thank you for subscribing to our premium service! You can bet I open those fast, heart pounding. I quickly scroll through the email, sure that I’ve been the victim of identity theft Continue Reading

What does google maps say about you?

May 1, 2012 By Matt D'Rion

Google maps is an incredibly powerful tool. Only 25 years ago, the ability to walk the streets of Paris, block by block, and view the buildings as they exist nearly in present time while sitting on a computer several thousand miles away would have seemed impossible. Never has the human race had such an accurate idea of where we were in relationship to one another. Compare this ability with the maps available to explorers 200 years ago, and we can appreciate how far we’ve come.

Recently, a boy who had been lost for over 25 years rediscovered his family using only his childhood memories and google maps. He was five years old when he fell asleep on a train for 14 hours, arriving in Calcutta with no knowledge of where his home was located, no family and no money. After becoming a beggar Continue Reading