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Monday, December 17, 2012

Design For Your Real World

Let’s suppose you went to DickDavies.com and selected the third navigation link, Presentations.

Pretty cool, eh? Notice you went across two websites?

Let’s try that again. Go to Sales Lab Posts and then switch to Through The Browser.

It would be real easy to have a reader go between those blogs and never notice. We use that at Sales Lab Resources.

Members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) get branded email addresses, i.e., tom.edison@ieee.org, which is a handy way to get the word out. The very best forward thinking organizations are starting to use corporate email domains like IEEE, maybe yours does, too.

What if the people who use your email domain also had a spot to put their own tools? Perhaps could occasionally use your internet?

That solves the problem of, What do you get when you cross a mobster with a marketer? An offer you can’t understand.

Are you really trying to promote stock photos of people who don’t work for your organization and bafflegab from people who only talk among themselves?

Robert Collins, the savant who invented the drive-by demo, recently posted this. I figure that’ll get him users, readers, and new friends. I downloaded mine.

What might one of your people put on their own space that was linked to your brand?

A bake sale? A chess competition?

And then you’d probably be visited by some bakers, cake buyers, and chess aficionados.

But they aren’t our target markets! Target markets, profiles, hot prospects, and the chosen few are fictions we make up to try to impose order on a chaotic, sometimes frightening world.

I have it based on unimpeachable authority that bakers, cake buyers, and chess aficionados buy in exactly the same percentages as your low hanging fruits.

How do I know?

I counted.

What could you do to make your web fiction more useful to your real world? 


Kick off the New Year Right at Talk Your Business - How to make more and better sales right away! Wednesday Jan 30, 11:45 - 1:00 at the Arlington Chamber Small Business Roundtable

1 comment:

  1. Dick:

    We best serve our customers, supporters, prospects, and referrers by giving something of value.

    When we make it easy to follow a path or perform an instruction, are we offering value?

    Last night I went to ZooLights - a night-time event with decorative lights and activities after dark to celebrate the season. In the confirmation for tickets there an explanation of where to check-in and pick-up the tickets, at the gate there was a prominent sign on either side reminding us where to pick-up the tickets, and as we approached the two cited locations there was a big a-frame sign on the path to indicate this was the place to pick up the tickets. Overkill? Nope - value...we could enjoy the event without being distracted trying to find our tickets.

    The linked sites add value by seamlessly moving the reader from one point to another - remember being encouraged to click a link, presumably for more of the story and getting the home page of the other site - then bumbling around trying to find the referred article - or just giving up. Any value there?

    Good points!

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