EARNEST WORDS
from Ernest Nicastro
Opinions, musings, thoughts, ideas and the occasional rant…on life, language, marketing, advertising and what's going on in the world.
from Ernest Nicastro
No CommentMine the mother lode of content from your company’s subject matter experts to “feed the Panda” (Google’s new rules for SEO) with a steady diet of useful original content. The phrase has become so common it’s trite, a cliché. And yet, like most clichés it abounds with truth. Content is king. This verity has been confirmed by none other than the kingmaker itself, Google, as it continues to refine and rejigger its powerful search engine to penalize sites with low quality content and reward sites with unique and insightful content. …
Like it or not, looks matter. And particularly in sales, appearance is important. For example, in a competitive situation, all else being equal, the appearance of the salesperson may very well be the deciding factor in who gets the business. And that may come down to the smallest of details, such as who had the better shine on his or her shoes.
Appearance is also an important factor in the success of your sales letter or marketing email. For example, the marketer with a good mailing list, a compelling offer, effective …
“Eighty-seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation….The Gettysburg Address
Thankfully, Abraham Lincoln was not only a great leader, he was a great writer. So instead of beginning his Gettysburg Address with a cold, lifeless number, he opens on a prayerful note with a turn of phrase adapted from the 90th Psalm of the King James Bible: “Four score and seven.”
Clearly, Lincoln knew the difference between the almost right word – and, the RIGHT word. A distinction defined by Mark Twain some 25 years later as…”the …
Recently, and strictly for research purposes mind you, I googled the word “sex.”
My search returned 3,900,000,000 results. Next, I searched the word “quality” and got 5,800,000,000 hits. Based on these results one might make a case that we have a greater interest in quality than sex. While I believe this would be a seriously flawed hypothesis, it’s well established that quality is an important consideration in the buying decisions we make. That’s why every year businesses spend billions playing the “Q-Card.”
A generation ago Ford Motor spent huge advertising dollars …
A number of years ago I sent out a Happy Thanksgiving/Happy Holidays Letter to clients. I received more than a few favorable comments on it. One client liked the letter so much he insisted on paying me for it so that he could use it for his company. Maybe you, dear reader, will want to do the same. That is, use it for your company.
Reproduced below is a copy of the letter. One big advantage to sending a Thanksgiving letter is that your greetings will likely be the very first …
So I’m at the gym the other morning putting in an hour on my favorite elliptical, the one that’s smack dab in front of the TV. The Today Show is on and they’re doing a segment on retirement planning. The reporter is interviewing a financial expert.
“So,” she asks, “what are the things people need to be honing in on as they approach retirement?”
I grimace and think, “No, that’s not right.”
Then I recalled a conversation from a couple of years ago. I’d emailed my client a draft of the direct mail …
