Give It Away!

If you don’t devote a small percentage of your time to working for free, you’re making a mistake. Whoa, wait, hold on a second. Sheathe your sword of value. Don’t go all cold-blooded capitalist on me. Hear me out. Most entrepreneurs don’t do pro bono work. (By pro bono I don’t mean for charity, I mean for [...]

Facebook Mobile Ads – to Use or Not to Use

Ahead of Facebook’s IPO, it’s only natural that the social network is looking around for new ways to monetize its usage — and please its new shareholders. Enter Facebook‘s latest revenue generator: Running ads on mobile versions of the site, which currently attract roughly 400 million monthly users. Earlier this month, Facebook struck a deal with Bango, a [...]

Cash Mobs and How to Get Them to Come to You.

You’ve probably heard of flash mobs – groups of people who use social media to plan to appear in person at a chosen location at a particular time to sing a song, hold mock lightsaber battles or take some other random action. Fun, but frivolous. Another iteration of this meet up is of much more interest to [...]

6 Email Marketing Tips

Email marketing can help businesses keep in touch with customers and prospects. But there’s a big difference between simply adding people to your contacts list and running a savvy campaign that drives traffic to your website and generates sales. Here are some tips to help you maximize the power of your email marketing: 1. Split test your [...]

More Creative Marketing Ideas

It’s a boggling year for marketing, isn’t it? New social-media platforms seem to be springing up like mushrooms, mobile is exploding. . . it’s hard to know where to focus your marketing time and dollars. Everywhere I turn lately, I’ve come across tips for how to do innovative marketing this year. So I’ve collected a short list of [...]

Four Questions to Ask Before Setting a Price

As a consultant helping businesses figure out pricing strategies, too often I see companies want to tinker with prices before understanding the overall strategies that should guide such decisions. Basically, they put the cart before the horse. Prices should always be based on how much customers actually value the products or services. But how can you [...]

Starting a business? You Need to Know These 6 Things.

How do you know if your company will succeed? Venture capitalists give their perspectives on traits that define the best start-ups. It’s every entrepreneur’s most pressing question: Is this company going to make it? All companies need to have the basics: a solid business model, a viable market, and a brilliant product or service. But [...]

Creative Marketing

It seems these days we are advertised to non-stop. We’re seeing 30 second ads before we can watch a 26 second YouTube video. Our kids soccer teams are sponsored, our roads are sponsored, half the point of watching the Super Bowl is to see the commercials. We are always being marketed to. Ads in our [...]

Web Designer vs. Marketing Firm

As we venture out into small businesses across northern Indiana, we often hear a similar story. It goes a little like this: ‘Hi, we’re from J2 Marketing and we want to sell you marketing…’  - J2 ‘No thanks, my sisters boyfriends brother-in-law took some web classes in college, so he’s going to do a website [...]

Make Your Facebook Fan Page Something to ‘Like’

As Facebook continues to enhance its fan page options, businesses are not only struggling to keep up with the changes, but they also are still trying to figure out how to brand and market their pages. Because of some of the changes, strategies you used just last month to increase your “likes” and interactions with [...]