But apparently only half of all British people even know they exist.

The French, however, “are far more savvy” about blogs, according to a Reuters story about an Ipsos MORI poll.

Germans? 55% “blog-aware.”

Italians? 58%.

French? 90%.

Spanish? 51%.

And bringing up the rear, Britain at 50%.

Meanwhile, check out this little tidbit buried in the story:

Ipsos MORI found a direct link between blogs, or user-generated content, and people’s intentions to buy goods or services.

Any company that fails to come up to standard should beware. The blog is replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service.

So if you’re not blogging in your industry, someone else is talking to your clients and customers. Wonder what they’re saying?

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Click below to use your fave social media tools:

Hide Sites

Posted in All About Content, Fun With Marketing | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 9:37 pm and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

At this very moment, Al and I are brainstorming Google AdWord ads for a client. The page we’re using to anchor us is an essential one - especially for online businesses that want the quickest, most straight-forward guidelines for writing their own online ads.

So, as Allen sits at his computer and stocks a research doc with sponsored links from competitors in top-performing keyword searches, I’m giving you this vital resource, just in case an AdWord experiment is something you’re thinking of doing:

Google AdWords Editorial Guidelines

Even if you’re not ready to start a pay-per-click campaign of your own, take a shot at writing a few for your own interests. It’s the modern-day Haiku form for businesses!

Headline: 25 characters (includes spaces)

Then three more lines, each no more than 35 characters:

• Two description lines
  One display URL

A challenge is brevity, to be sure. Those folks at Google know all the tricks, and they don’t let you get away with any of them - as you’ll see from the Guidelines page. No superfluous characters, no indulgent exclamation points, no hyperbole-rich phrases. Gotta keep it clean and honest. (Or as clean and honest as is still effective in a competitive advertising space.)

Google, we love you

Oh Great Sorter of Info

(Please, approve our ads!)

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Click below to use your fave social media tools:

Hide Sites

Posted in Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

It was possibly the craziest thing I’ve said all year.

Lani and I were out on a walk, discussing our first ebook The Rumsfeld Diaries, and Lani asked me what my ultimate goal was. And I said, “I’d really like to see Donald Rumsfeld out of there.”

Talk about your David-versus-Goliath idea. And to make that our first info-product?! I must have been out of my gourd. But there it was, the honest, rock-bottom truth.

That Lani backed me on it is a testament to her belief in the power of the “A-Ha!” and everything we’ve reinvented our business to celebrate.

And nearly everyone I talked to - many of whom are chronicled on the Rumsfeld blog - told me Rumsfeld could not, would not be forced to resign ever.

Today, the impossible happened. Rumsfeld actually resigned.

Now, is it logical to think that I had anything to do with this? Of course not.

But if everything is true about The Law of Attraction, and visualizing what you want for the most powerful effect, then considering what’s happened over the course of the last 100 days, I have no choice but to believe I’m involved. Somehow. And I can barely pick myself up off the floor because I’m so overwhelmed by that feeling. (In a good way.)

As little as five days ago, George Bush said he expected Rumsfeld to stay on through January 2009. 

A hundred days after we launched The Rumsfeld Diaries “Political Action Pak,” Rumsfeld resigned.

A-Ha!

If you want to get a copy of The Rumsfeld Diaries Political Action Pak in its original form, before we come out with a commemorative edition at five times its current price, get it here!

Click below to use your fave social media tools:

Hide Sites

Posted in A-Has in the Ether | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 2:18 am and is filed under A-Has in the Ether. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Back in my Mattel days, my cubicle was next to a good friend of mine, Ms. Lisa Steadman. (She’s such a good friend, she’s the one who recommended I get the Barbie.com lead writer position once it became available. God bless her!)

Lisa, naughty girl that she was, had herself a little interoffice romance with a guy in the QA department. The relationship was passionate, tumultuous, exciting, emotional, and had as many ups and downs as an industrial fork lift.

After their first breakup, Lisa was in pain. But being the resourceful, creative writer that she is, she found herself drawn to the universiality of her pain. Surely, other people go through breakups all the time. How do they get through it? What good comes from it? How can we all make sure we come out better because of our heartbreaks?

After their SECOND breakup, Lisa turned those questions into an idea:

The Breakup Chronicles.

The concept was Chicken Soup for the Soul meets Sex and the City - real life stories of people “wakin’ up, breakin’ up, and movin’ on.” Friends, colleagues, and family sent her their tales of woe-turned-wow, and she took ‘em in. As she read the flood of stories people sent to her, the idea evolved.

Originally, she was thinking a book - a compilation of breakups and the growth opportunities they created on the other side of the misery. But as the senior writer and assoc. producer of BarbieCollectibles.com, where thousands of women (and an unexpectedly large number of men!) flocked to dive into their interests and obsessions, Lisa couldn’t help but wonder…

What if this Breakup Chronicles thing was a website? A resource? A community???

Like all ambitious young professionals, Lisa was busy. She had a raging social life, workouts, bills, writing classes, work and family obligations. But as much as she tried, she couldn’t shake her idea. So Lisa did what she ultimately HAD to do:

She put her idea into ACTION.

She got a team together. Hammered out details. Outsourced. Interviewed. Hustled. She worked with a designer, wrote site copy, goal and vision statements, and TONS more stories.

And wouldn’t you know it, she launched that darn site, she did. BreakupChronicles.com was born. I think it was in 2003.

Within a year of the launch, she had forged herself as the one and only Relationship Journalist.

Since then? Check it out:

• She’s got articles all over the Web. (Including iVillage.com, Tango.com, WooFactor.com, and ItsJustCoffee.com.)
• She’s been interviewed and has conducted interviews with other high profile experts in the relationship niche.
• She’s had on-air shout-outs by some of LA’s favorite radio personalities. (Including Lisa Foxx, Jamie White, and Heidi, Frosty, & Frank.)
• She’s launched a “Celeb Splits” column AND a breakup advice column.
• She’s been an expert guest on the Tyra Banks Show. (Complete with limo escort to and from the studio!)
• She created a Message Board on her site, to give more to her growing community.
• She launched an online shop, where she sells original breakup-branded FUN like journals, T-shirts, buttons, bags, mugs, etc.
• She was the guest for a feature segment on KTLA’s morning show to give tips on finding the upside of a broken heart.

And to top it all off…

Just last month, she turned the final draft of her FIRST BOOK into her publisher!!! (Behold the preliminary jacket design to your right. Pretty keen, eh?)

This is all part of the “A-Ha-ing Yourself” process. Lisa is a world-class example.

1. She had an idea she simply couldn’t shake.
2. She finally surrendered to the idea and got it rolling.
3. She took chances, made mistakes, and overcame (or at least worked through) frustration, overwhelm, confusion, uncertainty, and FEAR.
4. She invented multiple channels to put herself out there to different audiences in a variety of ways (articles, interviews, blogging, networking events, workshops, etc).
5. She never stopped creating fresh angles for herself AND her content.
6. She nurtured relationships with other like-minded people and businesses.
7. SHE CLAIMED HER VISION, LISTENED TO HER OWN INSTINCTS (ignoring the doubters and naysayers!), AND KEPT HER VISION MOVING FORWARD…even in the face of all life’s challenges, distractions, and imperfections!!!

I have no doubt Lisa’s book is going to hit BIG. She’s already got her marketing strategy in place, and she’s got six months before its release.

And the best thing is, the book is now just one marketing element of a bigger picture. Dozens of other opportunities will take shape and reveal themselves between now and her release party. As her idea continues to gain momentum and crystalize into more than she ever imagined, the opportunities will breed and multiply like oyster-slurping rabbits.

In the meantime, Lisa will continue to work her mojo, feed her passion, hone her expertise, and become a living example of the “overnight success story.”

When this happens, some may refer to Lisa’s personal story as a product of the Law of Attraction.

Me? I say Ms. Lisa Steadman - writer, site creator, author, and the one and only Relationship Journalist - is a textbook example of how to “A-Ha Yourself!”

(Wouldn’t you?)

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Click below to use your fave social media tools:

Hide Sites

Posted in How do you "A-Ha Yourself"? | 2 Comments »

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 11:17 pm and is filed under How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Don’t you just love it when a marketing guru goes ballistic?

In one of his blog posts last week, the incomparable Mr. Seth Godin went off on “The Manipulators” - those bogus, deep-pocketed rascals who try to sell online wares under the pretense of being an accidental misfit, a desperate intern, or some other agenda-less malcontent. Godin’s view:

If you only need to influence 500 people (or 10 people pretending to be 50 different people each) in order to show up on the screens of tens of thousands people… that’s too tempting for most capitalists to ignore (politicians are next, for sure).

Now, it’s not like the notion of “truth in advertising” ever caught on, but the Web makes it ever easier to hide, cheat, misguide, disrespect, and even abuse good folks surfing online and connecting via email. (Even with my spam filter catching 30-70 spammies a day, I still get at least as much daily doodie in my inbox! GRRRRR!)

However, since he mentioned that “politicians are next,” I thought it only fitting to feature a politician who’s using You Tube to showcase GOOD, FUN, ORIGINAL content. It gets his point across, its gutsy, and it ENTERTAINS, man. No insincerity here:

Thanks, Christy Mihos! And good luck with your gubernatorial campaign!

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Click below to use your fave social media tools:

Hide Sites

Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 4:08 pm and is filed under All About Content, Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.