Sometimes I have nothing to say

April 22, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 12 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Marketing, email marketing

In the last couple of days, I’ve gotten a couple of emails from friends asking if I’m okay. They said I hadn’t posted to this blog in awhile and wondered if anything was wrong.

The truth is that I have not been feeling very well, but that wasn’t why I didn’t write anything lately.

Sometimes I just don’t have anything to say, so I don’t post anything.

I know some people think that is the kiss of death for a blog, but I’d rather read something substantive rather than just filler, any time.

The truth is, however, that I’ve been working on my offline marketing and planning a new site for joint venture co-marketing between brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC.

I’ve been meeting with a number of business owners and talking to them about their marketing and what they want to do with their businesses this year.

Each business owner is different and I’m surprised at the number of different things they want to accomplish.

So, I’ve spent a lot of time talking, listening, and then going back home and doing a lot of thinking and planning.

It has taken a lot of work, but now I have a design for a new business model that I think will work for all of the business owners who choose to participate.

One of the beauties of the new model is that it requires cooperation among the owners in cross promoting each other, both online and offline. I think that will help all of us to do better, even in the tough economy we’re currently facing.

All of this behind the scenes work will result in much more online work over the coming months, but you won’t necessarily see much of it on this blog.

Affiliate marketing will play little part in the new site I’m developing, because it will be devoted mainly to sending new customers to existing offline businesses and reminding their current customers and clients why they like the business and why there are good reasons for going back and buying more.

Still, I’ll be using a lot of the techniques that I’ve learned through affiliate marketing.

I’ll be working with all my new clients to build individual email marketing lists for their businesses as well as building an inclusive mailing list for the benefit of all the business owners who choose to join us. Of course, I’ll be using Aweber to manage these individual lists and the new site will be powered by Site Build It!, where the new list will be powered by SBI’s ezine/newsletter module.

So, there has been a lot of thinking, scratching my head, drinking coffee, and scribbling on hundreds of sheets of paper. I’m sure you didn’t want to hear about that and I know you didn’t want to see any of it.

Eventually, hopefully in a month or so, I’ll be able to introduce the new site and do much more local marketing than I’ve been able to do over the last few years.

It’s been strange getting out of the house and actually talking to real business owners, but I’ve been enjoying it immensely.

With affiliate marketing, I rarely know who my customers are, how they found me, or why they decided to purchase.

With this local marketing consulting and new business system, I think it’s going to be fun getting to know our customers and helping the business owners effectively spread the news about why they are the best source for what they’re offering in our tiny little town in the mountains of western NC.

One of the difficult decisions I had to make was to limit my clients to non-competing business categories, which has turned out to be a good idea. Rather than trying to promote all the real estate agents in town, for example, I can concentrate on working with just one. That will make it much easier to write quality content for the new site and will help me focus on what I’m trying to accomplish.

I also decided that each client I accept has to be actively involved in their own marketing and must agree to recommend at least two other non-competing businesses for whom they will write testimonials that will be used on several other sites.

I’m finding it refreshing to work with people who want to work together in real life, and still build their own individual businesses.

It’s going to take some time to pull all of this together, but I expect it to be off and running by late summer.

We’ll see if this is a good prediction or not.

So, if all you are interested in is affiliate marketing, you’ll see that I really had nothing to say about that topic.

I’m alive and working and I’ll be writing more about affiliate marketing soon.

Act on your dream!

Tags: Murphy NC

Squidoo makes major change in their home page

April 8, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Squidoo Lenses

Have you been to the Squidoo home page lately?

Instead of just showing random avatars of their lensmasters, now they show the top lenses in each category, and you can click a “More” button to see the top 100 lenses in each category.

They’ve also made it easier to create new lenses using their various popular Squid Projects (see the bottom of the page).

I like this much better than what they used to have.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

Tags: Squidoo