I live within shouting distance of the grocery store. It’s so close, I get to watch deliveries from my window. And hear the trucks at 5 a.m., but that’s another topic. The store is quite convenient, considering I can walk over, grab milk and be back in less than ten minutes. But I hate that store. I will do as much shopping as I can at the one about 3-4 miles away whenever I can. You see, this store is horribly organized. Items are scattered all over the store and even though I’ve lived near this store for over ten years, I can rarely find what I want with the first try. It’s not designed well. In fact, it is designed to make customers go to several aisles to get things that should be placed together logically. Yet due... [Read more]

Here we are once again, headed into a new week. What’s on your agenda for the next several days? I hope you’ve had a chance to read about the newly updated FTC guidelines for advertising. If you give away free products or services in return for reviews or endorsements (or pay for such services), the new rules will affect you. While it doesn’t go into affect until December 1st, it can impact you — so check it out before the holiday craziness makes you forget about it. This past week I’ve seen a lot of posts about the new guidelines and we’ve already linked quite a few of them. So instead of linking more of them here, I’ve tried to find a few other topics to discuss. But if you find a really great synopsis... [Read more]

If bloggers are a part of your marketing plan, you need to know about the recently released FTC guidelines for endorsements and testimonial ads. You could be liable for false claims and get hit with unspecified fines if you are found violating the guidelines. So what do you need to know? If you offer free products to bloggers in return for reviews, or if you pay for reviews, you should review the revised guidelines (PDF). Any positive reviews could be influenced by a free product or payment — and the FTC wants that disclosed to the consumer. While it has been noted that the guidelines are mostly educational, you’re not off the hook. You need to make sure that any reviewers you use are honest, that they don’t make outlandish... [Read more]

By offering affiliate programs, you can increase your sales. Because by sharing some of the profits with your affiliates, you spread the word further than with typical marketing. You get other people to do your selling for you. By offering a small – or large – percentage of a sale (especially on high margin items), you get people excited about making money off of your product. And if they’re excited about your product, they’ll tell people. Of course, you’ll want to set up some rules about how your affiliates can market your product. But once you set things up, you can get the word out to a much larger audience than you could by yourself. And you make efficient use of the money it takes to get set up with an affiliate program, and should... [Read more]

In our Recommended Reads earlier today, I mentioned a brouhaha. I had read the post from Seth Godin about Brands in Public and I originally didn’t think a lot about his announcement that the development team had created 200 sample pages to show what the site could do. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it basically aggregates all types of conversations about a brand onto one page. Ostensibly, a company could “take over” the page and control a large portion of the page, giving them a place to host conversations or respond to things elsewhere. But if a company wants to take over the page, they’ll need to pay Squidoo/ Brands in Public $400 a month for that “privilege.” You can look at it a couple of ways. It’s a lot cheaper than... [Read more]