Archive for The Business of Membership Websites
Sometimes your internet marketing needs a half-yearly sale
Posted by: | CommentsIn the world of internet marketing there is a growing tendency to make every day a discount day. This is a grave mistake. The power of marketing is about its ability to create a dynamic sales pattern, building and ebbing the marketing pressure to form elastic curves of customer response that capitalise on the customer’s natural propensity to respond to the marketing message.
All too often internet marketers have been sucked into the idea that social media channels like Twitter are a channel down which you blast an endless series of special offers, with no thought or regard to any consideration other than sell, sell, sell. Yet this is an extraordinarily ineffective sales technique. Sure, a few suckers might respond – I always talk about the ‘donkey vote’, at the end of the day, no matter how terrible your product and poorly constructed your marketing message, there’s someone out there who will buy your product. Read More→
Steve Sammartino’s Startup School transcription
Posted by: | CommentsEarlier this month, Steve Sammartino entrepreneur and founder of Rentoid conducted a two-day intensive StartUp School in Melbourne and we’ve received rave reviews at NCM from several attendees. The Sydney StartUp School takes place this weekend, the 21st and 22nd November.
This post is a transcription of an interview Fiona Boyd did with Steve in the lead-up to the Melbourne StartUp School, called StartUp School with Steve Sammartino.
Fiona: Steve Sammartino writes the Startup blog and is the founder of the internet business Rentoid.com, and he’s talking with me today. Welcome Steve.
Steve: Hey Fiona, how are you?
Fiona: I’m good. You have a new thing that you’re doing next month and it’s called the Startup school…
Steve: Yeah.
Fiona: And look, I know you teach marketing already at Melbourne uni so I’m not surprised that you’re doing something like start up school but I’m wondering, what is it about teaching this way that made you want to do your own, you know, intensive weekend?
Steve: Yeah. It’s funny because it’s going to be pretty much the opposite of all the stuff that I teach at university and I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition because in startup land everything is so much different to what we think business is all about, because pretty much everything we learn in business and in business books, even a lot of the startup and entrepreneurial books out there, they all assume that there’s some revenue, that things already exist. They assume that we’ve got funding. So Startup School came about as an idea, well, I’m obviously involved in teaching, but it came about because I kept getting a lot of questions on my blog about deep items which just couldn’t be treated in that format so I thought why don’t I just run an intensive course for two days where I really condense all of the stuff that I’ve been writing about for three years into a two-day, you know, really hardcore bootstrapping course, these are the tactics that win when you’ve got zero revenue to get your business started. Read More→
Next era internet…maybe
Posted by: | CommentsI was interested to read a report from Brian Clark from Copyblogger yesterday who has a new business interest called Teaching Sells. Now I don’t know Brian, have missed the blogging universe bandwagon and consider myself old-fashioned enough to check things out independently and talk about them only if something piques my interest.
Brian Clark’s report, is called “Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online…And Start Making Some”. To get it you do need to sign up for priority notification for a new course Brian is selling, but hey, everyone needs an economic model and I was interested to find out Brian’s thoughts.
If you’re reading this you probably know that my partner, David Eedle and I did actually make really good money online from a niche content business for the arts worker market, called Arts Hub. But unlike lots of the processes and systems that are making the rounds as I write, this was a bona fide real business, with real ongoing processes and real people and as it grew, real staff. So, I get quite upset when I read posts that say you can make money without doing any real work, just by following someone else’s system. My gut tells me that by the time someone is willing to tell you how it works, it’s no longer working for them. They’re just using their results to sell the sizzle of a process that is now spent and has no real value for anyone. Read More→
Transcript: The Art and Science of Getting Rich Part 2
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a transcript of the video post ‘The Art and Science of Getting Rich Part 2‘.
Five Tried and Tested Tools to Improve Your Online Customer Service
Posted by: | CommentsI suspect it’s not unreasonable to suggest that everyone in the world has a story about poor customer service. And thankfully today’s technologies are improving the opportunities for both sides of the equation to take action.
I was standing in the queue at our local bank yesterday. Let’s relive my Tweets (sent from my iPhone using the Tweetie app), I’d been there around for about five or six minutes, then finally boredom ensued and I hauled my phone out:
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Transcript: The Art and Science of Getting Rich Part 1
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a transcript of the video post ‘The Art and Science of Getting Rich Part 1‘.
Video Post: The Art and Science of Getting Rich Part 2
Posted by: | CommentsIn part two of Fiona’s interview with Phillip Grant, Partner at Nexia ASR, Phil, not unlike Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad’s advisors, tells Fiona that getting rich is about much more than money. And that when online businesses get their fundamentals right, the success and the money follows. Read More→
12 weeks to 2 mins – the music distribution revolution
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I was an adolescent growing up in the outer suburbs of Perth I had a serious social disconnect with those around me. Most of the local kids my age were into Australian pub bands and a very local style of music. I was, what we called, an alternative. Since about the age of twelve I had purchased with my pocket money, copies of the great English music magazines – Melody Maker and New Musical Express (NME). Hours were spent scouring the articles and trying to understand from a distance, what punk rock and mod culture was really like. It was always a guessing game, but what made the guesswork a little easier was the music. Read More→
Video Post: Lessons from the Coffeeshop
Posted by: | CommentsRunning our coffeeshop serves as a constant reminder of the importance of customer service (a topic I wrote about the other day in the post ‘Customer Service – It’s the People Stupid‘), as well as some important business lessons which are equally applicable in our internet ventures.
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