Automated Voice Answering Services - They Suck

Seth Godin made a post yesterday about his frustrations dealing with Verizon's voice routing system and one point really hit home with me. Why do these voice answering services ask you to punch in your phone number, only to ask you for it again once you get through to a live person?

What a waste of time. The idea of voice routing is to save time and save money by automating some of the steps. If you don't use that information, you're wasting your time as well as your customer's time.

Just another example of how things fall through the cracks.

Bacon Salt - The Product Is The Marketing

My favourite business author and blogger Seth Godin is always talking about the relationship between products and marketing. His stance is that the product should be the marketing. It's something that's built in.

So my ears couldn't help but perk up when listening to NewsTalk 980's John Gormley Live this morning. His guest was Dave (or was it Justin?) - the co-creator of Bacon Salt.

Yes. Bacon Salt.

The tag line you ask? Everything should taste like bacon. The header of their blog includes the title "The never ending quest to make everything taste like bacon."

This is the perfect example of a purple cow, and to go along with it they have a story worth telling (straight out of All Marketers Are Liars).

The two Bacon Salt founders were sitting around one night and someone said "Everything should taste like bacon". The next day when they sobered up they still figured it was a great idea so they started registering domain names and going through the paper work involved in starting a business and creating a product.

When it got to the point when they needed to pay for production, they needed to come up with $5000 and weren't sure how they were going to come up with the money. Well, fate was on their side because the next day they received a call from America's Funniest Home Videos saying that the video they entered had just won them $5000 and the cheque was in the mail. (The video is below).

Bacon Salt seems to be getting a ton of media exposure, and so they should. They've created something worth talking about. If you have the right story, a market will create itself because people will tell their friends.

If only we could all take a page out of Dave and Justin's book.

Seth Godin on Curiosity

Nic from mondaymorning9am.tv put together this video of Seth Godin talking about Curiosity. You can subscribe to Nic's videos on his website, I did.

As usual, I found this post at Seth's blog. If you aren't reading it yet, you should.

Is Search Engine Optimization Dead?

No, search engine optimization is not dead. But we do need to evaluate its role in Internet marketing.

Doing the right things to make sure the search engines notice your website, your blog, your videos, etc. is still important. This involves using your keywords in the right spots such as tags and descriptions. Having said that, the most important part of SEO is the content itself.

You should go to Seth Godin's blog and download his free e-book right now called Money for Nothing (And your clicks for free).

The biggest takeaways from this e-book are the three U's: Useful, Updated, and Unique.

All the search traffic in the world is worthless if you don't have useful, updated, and unique content. If you concentrate on making your content useful, updated, and unique the traffic will eventually come your way. I'm banking on it.

The Purple Cow Christmas

I'm back from Christmas holidays and ready to get back at it. My wonderful wife got me a couple books from my business hero Seth Godin to read. I read his book "All Marketers Are Liars" a while back and wanted to read the rest of his stuff but never got around to it. Katlyn made me get around to it and I'm glad she did.

The first book I read was Seth Godin's Purple Cow. He talks about how most businesses make the mistake of trying (consciously or subconsciously) to be normal to attract the masses. But in the process, those businesses become so vanilla that they aren't attractive to anyone. This book pushes you to be remarkable for a sliver of your target market. If you're truly remarkable for these people, your ideas will spread.

I don't do this book justice. The ideas are so simple, but so incredible at the same time - you need to pick up a copy.

I'm about halfway through Small is the New Big also by Seth Godin. This book is not your typical business book. It contains excerpts from Seth's blog and books, with each one ranging from as short as one paragraph to as long as a few pages. Each entry contains valuable information that makes you think differently about marketing and business in general. It's worth a read.

The thing I love about Seth's ideas are that he never just accepts things the way they are. He always asks why something is the way it is and uses common(?) sense to challenge the status quo. If you don't subscribe to his blog, you should. If you haven't read any of his books, I suggest you do. His blog is currently listed as the 15th most popular blog on Technorati. The numbers don't lie, he has some good ideas.

Squidoo - A great way to spread ideas for your business

One of my marketing mentors is Seth Godin, a business author that writes about the spread of ideas and the fair treatment of customers and employees. He does a great job of writing in plain speak and making his ideas interesting. He is also the creator of a great little internet tool called Squidoo.

Squidoo is a site that allows you to create a free "lens" for any topic you choose, for as many topics as you wish. It is an opportunity to promote a website, blog, product, or idea through an easy to create web page or lens. I've just got into the Squidoo thing, but it is a great way to promote anything you need to promote. It also does wonders for your search engine optimization strategy by providing highly relevant one way links to your sites (my apologies to the non-computer nerds out there that don't quite grasp this concept).

Squidoo makes money for authors and charities through ads and referral partners integrated into each and every lens. But instead of telling you about it, why don't you check it out?

I've started a few lenses. One about this blog, one about our online services at LRS Consulting, one for a client of ours (SaskHomeBuyer.com), and one about the only football team worth cheering for, the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

Have a look. I'll be putting together a bunch more I'm sure. Maybe you'll be able to think of something to promote or come up with an idea to spread.