photo by mandj98 

There are a lot of techniques and approaches  you can use to market and sell your products and services – some of them are complex and not very obvious and some of them are fairly straightforward.

As an example, I ran across this blog post from Michael Fortin (well known copy writer) about using a ‘Gap Analysis’ technique to sell.  It’s a really well written article on a copy writing technique that I hadn’t seen explained (although I have seen it used…).

Here’s a quick description from the article on what he means by the Gap Analysis process:

As luck would have it, a large part of its power is in it’s simplicity. The process consists of only four steps:

1. Introduce the problem.
2. Introduce the “other side”.
3. Widen the gap.
4. Bridge the gap.

It’s a nice succinct formula that’s fairly easy to apply to a lot of situations.  Read the post to get a more detailed view of what those 4 steps really are.  See below for an example that I threw together for one of my clients.

Read More…

photo by laffy4k 

The weather here in Kansas City can run to extremes, and we’ve seen the rainy, stormy extreme here in the last couple of weeks.  As I’m sure many others have been doing, I ended up needing a plumber…quickly and we luckily found a quality business to help us.

Water can be a real mess

I’ve become a lot more informed about water disasters since I started working with Margaret Tyler of Puroclean as a client of mine.  Her company does a great job cleaning up and restoring after those kinds of disasters, but as much as I like to work with my clients, I would really prefer to avoid a water disaster if I can.

Which is why I was pretty concerned yesterday afternoon when I realized my sump pump had died while we had been out on vacation.  Luckily it must have died after keeping the earlier big rains out – but the forecast for last night was ominous and we were without pump. Read More…

I’ve had a few conversations recently about failure and it got me to thinking about the nature of failure and the small business owner.

The reality is that if you’re human, you are going to fail. 

Unfortunately failure has an undeserved bad reputation and most people either want to avoid it like the plague or fear it enough that it drives their behavior in irrational ways.

However an important point to remember is that avoiding failure doesn’t mean success, it more than likely means that you are average/ mediocre / unremarkable.

I generally hate to resort to sports cliches, but there are some great parallels between sports, life and business when it comes to success and failure.

And there’s not a better example of that situation than Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player to ever lace up the sneakers.

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