Would you believe me if I told you that there is a free way to get the best marketing ideas that are working right now at no cost?

Yes, it is possible and as you have already guesses this is the so called “junk mail” that you get on a daily basis.

Because of the “recession” companies have scaled back on sending mail but there are still enough of them that do it.

To learn you just need to observe what they do – how they make there offers, present them and price the products/services they sell.

I live in a big apartment building and every night I go through the trash bin next to the mail boxes and pick up the interesting pieces of mail that have been discarded.

It is amazing how much one can learn just by looking at what companies mail. What’s more – you can see what works and what doesn’t.

Here are a few examples.

Every month or so I get the same letter from Statefarm from 3 local insurance agents. Is it stupid or what? They are wasting there money sending me the SAME letter 3 times in one day on behalf of three different agents.

What I like about the mail piece is the attached card that has a dedicated number that I need to call and a code (for tracking purposes) to get special rates (that makes me feel important) – these are the two things that I can use when marketing to people.

Last night I found in the trash can a mail piece from Southwest Airlines. On the envelope (in the companies colors) there is an offer for 2 free tickets. I am to open it yet and see what the catch is but the take away is that if you are about to send unsolicited mail – make sure that it will get open by picking the curiosity of the receiver.

This morning I found a megalog about …bowel movement improvement pills. It is made to look like a magazine – with articles that give free but valuable information and at the same time gently pitch the product.

The takeaway – using this format you can lower the resistance of consumers because they think they get  a magazine not a direct mail piece.

I guess you are thinking – I don’t get any junk mail what can I do. The obvious answer is – get on the mailing lists of companies.

The second best thing is to ask friends/colleagues to bring you their junk mail.

Over time you will start to see patterns in the way offers are make, guarantees are worded and so on.

That’s how you will now that this is something that works because if it didn’t it won’t be used.

Fast forward to nowadays when single person can reach hundreds of thousands of people with a blog post or a website.

The only downside of that is that we don’t know anything about these people. We don’t know their gender, age what brought them to our site, so we can tailor our sales message to them as the old time salespeople used to do.

For example – if we sold a weight loss product we usually have one sales page that tries to cater to all people. A visitor found the website by typing into the search engines “how to loose weigh” but we don’t know what he/she is interested in – loosing weight after giving a birth, or someone who needs to drop a few pounds before a wedding.

It would have been great if we knew that so we can show them a sales page that describes a solution to their problem, wouldn’t it?

Well, it is now possible. I can’t tell you how happy I am about that. I just found a plugin for WordPressthat does that – pre-qualifies  the visitors to your site so they can get the messages that are best suited for them (see the video below for further information):

Survey Funnel Demo Video

However this morning I got an email from him that has nothing to do with the big yellow book.

According to him, about 71%? of all internet searches are the business owner’s name. Can you imagine that. If you are a small business (doctor, chiropractor, massage therapist) a big portion of your potential customers will look up your name online.

The bad news is that if your competitors know that they can destroy you by posting fake reviews about you and your business.

The good news is that if you know search engine optimization you can occupy the first page in Google for your name and control what potential customers see.

It is very easy to accomplish it, believe me (just type in in Google Kalin Marinov and you will see that www.kalinmarinov.com is the first website to show up).

To get it started – visit www.getlocalcustomersforfree.com and enter your name and phone number and I will get in touch with you to register your business or your name with Google…for free.

Don’t get me wrong, he is a great guy and I am subscribed to his Digital Marketer e-newsletter (it is packed with great content, so get a subscription, it is less than $60 for a year.

On the other side one of his mentors – Dan Kennedy says that the death of Yellow Pages is exaggerated. So the question is -who do you trust?

My answer is both. See, the 20 something kids probably don’t know what YP  is. They have all the information in  the world in their pocket – I am talking about their internet enabled smart-phones.

On the other side – the other day I got the Chicago edition of Yellow Pages and get that – it has 740 pages. But that’s not all. On the front cover one of the featured advertisers is mySimon.com.

That’s right – a website advertises in Yellow pages (and they are not alone in their attempt to market offline, Google itself has done direct mail to promote their Google AdWords program).

YP still has its audience – people over certain age prefer it to search engines when looking for plumbers, carpet cleaners or Chicago cosmetic surgeons.

For that reason every smart marketer needs to take advantage of both – to promote their business online with seo and search engine marketing and generate leads offline with ads in Yellow Pages.

These days it is so easy to track what works and what doesn’t (with Google Analytics you can track offline campaigns – imagine that!!!).

However, there are certain principles of online and direct marketing that every business owner should be aware of before start spending money.

My recommendation is to start at www.DanKennedy.com (that’s what I did a few years ago and I can confidently say that’s one of the best decisions I have ever made to become a better marketer – both online and offline).

Today I read an article about them trying to recruit a promising young football player – Alvin Kamara.

To impress him they sent him not one, not two and not even three but 105 letters in the mail AT ONCE.

Needles to sat he paid attention: “I counted! And I took pictures. I was shocked. I didn’t expect there to be that many in the mailbox. When I opened it, it was overflowing and some of them fell out.”

and here is some more: “Right now, I don’t have any leaders, but I’ll say a few schools stand out a little bit,” Kamara said. “Alabama, Georgia and Syracuse. Recruiting wise, they stay in touch with me the most.”. Well done Alabama. (see the image of the 105 letter below:

Pay attention that the university is not trying to impress the 50+ crowd but a young guy who probably is on Twitter, Facebook e.t.c.

So isn’t it time for us, the online marketers to embrace the fact that direct marketing and direct mail in particular are here to stay?

Unlike them my career started doing seo for small businesses … for free, to hone my skills. I though that online marketing is be all end all and the offline marketing will day if not today tomorrow for sure.

It turned out that I was wrong – offline marketing/direct marketing is still going strong (even Google uses direct mail to promote its Adwords program).

What happened was that I started to realize that in order to be a successful marketer I needed to learn the principles of direct marketing. And here I am again starting from square 1.

A few days ago I built a website for a chiropractor in Park Ridge IL. This time instead of setting up a website with multiple pages I have only one, so called squeeze page.

Upon lending on the site visitors have only two choices – to enter their name and email address to get the free report “How to Find the Best Chiropractor in Park Ridge IL” or leave the page.

The website has been live for a few days but I can’t get Google to index it (is it just me or Google has been lazy lately when it comes to indexing new websites?).

I expect it to happen in the next 24 hours or so. I am curious to whether it will hit the front page of Google for Park Ridge Chiropractor and Park Ridge IL Chiropractor or not.

If you want to keep an eye on this live case study as it develops – visit www.parkridgechiropractor.net and bookmark it (so you can see when it will be indexed and ranked on page one in Google).

Update 02/17/12 – The website was indexed by Google about 15 hours after I wrote the post (just as I thought). However it took a week for it to be indexed from the moment I put it up online.

As far as the search ranking goes – it is on page 2 (position 6). I am curious what the rankings would be in the days to come.

We all have to play by their rules or else… You probably know what happens else or you can ask BMW Germany that got spanked for creating doorway pages, or JP Penney for buying links or Overstock.com for trying to get .edu links to their site.

The moral is – you have to play nice or you will be given the booth. It means that you have to follow Google guidelines when creating a website.

Titles, meta tags, good and original content. You know what I am talking about if you have been doing SEO for a while.

However, it turned out that these Google rules apply to anyone and everyone but Google (see the evidence below).

This is what the first listing looks like for the term “google keyword tool.

As you can see – the first result is Google itself. Now, just look at the Title – it says Untitled.

Now, think about your website and if you had titles like this. Do you think you would get top positions in the major search engines.

I don’t think so.

What’s the moral? I guess – unless you are Google you have to play by their rules.

My personal moral is – rely less and less on seo and more on Google Adwords and other ways to get predictable traffic and monetize it (using the tested and true direct marketing approaches).

What do you think?

Google has been trying to kill Yellow pages for quite some time now. They want people to find online what they are looking for.

And since most people need services in their area it makes sense for Google to show listings of local merchants that are relevant to visitors’ search.

In the past local businesses had to pay webmasters (I am one of them) to push their sites to the top of Google.

Not anymore. Now Google does that for you. You just need to create a listing of your business.

All one needs to do is go to Google Places for Business.

If you can’t do it – contact me and I will be happy to do it for you..for FREE.

However, if my memory serves me well there is a quote from the Holy Book, something like “Ask and you will be given”.

That’s what crossed my mine earlier on today when I was buying a coffee and a donut at Dunkin Donuts.

The sales associate asked me something along the lines of “Good morning. What can I get you today”? Not too shabby, right. It is much better than saying nothing.

A few days before that I was buying my black coffee at Starbucks at the drive thru and the sales associate said something like: “Good morning. Can I get you started with The-Name-of-a-New-Item”? That’s a great way in my opinion to push a new item, don’t you think.

I didn’t buy it, because I prefer black coffee, but I am confident that a certain percentage of people have bough it to taste it and some of these people will keep buying it. Of course the new drink was on the expensive side.
How can I be so sure that by just asking Starbuck in particular would sell more of these drinks? It’s very simple and it comes from my own experience.

A few years ago I used to work for Swiss Airlines in Chicago. Usually around Christmas business class travelers just stop travelling. I don’t know why but that’s a fact. As a result Swiss’ business class was almost empty.

To fill it up we wanted to upsell the passengers travelling economy. Under normal circumstances the upgrade from economy to business was $800 but for a limited time it was reduced to $400.

Even though the price was so low there were hardly any takers. At the same time economy was overbooked daily (in case you don’t know airlines overbook their flight because there is a certain percentage of people who don’t shop up for their flight).

One thing I forgot to mention is that there was a competition among all 8 Swiss stations in the US. The one that was about to sell most upgrades was supposed to get a prize.

Just because I wanted to win so bed I decided to do something about that. I made small signs saying something among the lines of “Ask Us for Our Upgrade Specials”.

From the moment we put the signs on the counters we had people on a waiting list willing to fly business. Needles to say we ended up first among all stations and won the competition.

That’s not important, though. What’s important is the rule that when you ask the right people and present them the right offer enough of them will take you up on it.

So what you might be wondering. Not so fast, cowboy. This principle can be applied to different situations and businesses. For example you can answer the phone the way the Starbucks barista greeted me. You might not ask for a sale but can notify the callers about a special offer that you have or something.

If you already have something like that in place in your business why don’t you share it in the comments section below? This way each one of us will walk out with 2 ideas.

Being the first energy drink on the market they have occupied the top spot in terms of selling.

Monster energy drinks decided to offer bigger size to capture the cheapskates in the market. What happened is that these 2 brands dominate the market.

There are a few other brands but they are small fries compared to Red Bull and Monster.

However, something interesting has been happening in the last few months, maybe an year. A new energy drink is making big strides and it’s name is 5 Hour Energy.

I personally don’t like their ads and have never bought it, but it is everywhere – gas stations, stores like Walgreen’s and it is usually next to the cash register.

It helps that 5 Hour Energy comes only in a small bottle which is a big advantage, because you can put it in your pocket or handbag and have one when you need it.

The benefit of the drink is the same as all the other ones – you get a kick when you are tired. However, what makes them different is the way they market it to distinguish themselves from the other energy drinks.

They don’t try to build brand or at least not in the beginning they were not trying, they were just making customers an irresistible offer – 5 hours energy.

Their ads looked like infomercials – guys falling asleep on their desks, unable to finish their presentations before the deadline and lately guys who can’t wake up in the morning.

Compare that to the cute and Vague – Red Bull Gives You Wings. It sound ok, but there is no promise compared to 5 Hour Energy. And their strategy seems to be working because according to 2009 article they have 75% of the market of small sized energy drinks.

My point is that being specific pays off, being clever and cute – might work but also might not. And the last evidence that what 5 Energy does is working is that all big boys in that business came up with small packages of their drinks as well.