Rack cards make effective, low cost leave-behind marketing materials for sales reps

By Merrill Clark:
Web and Direct Response Copywriter

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Are you a sales rep, or maybe a small franchise owner, selling insurance, power, payroll processing, credit card processing, or any other product or service?

Do you regularly pounding the pavement scrounging for your own leads, hoping to talk with the “right” person?

And more often than not, do you hear: “Sorry… the person you Continue reading

Surprising customer service tales: The good, bad, and ugly

By Merrill Clark:

As a business owner or manager, I’m sure you know just how important it is to WOW your clients with excellent customer service.

Learn from my shockingly good (and bad) customer service from companies I would never have expected it from…

Customer service is what separates the men from the boys.

It’s often the difference between keeping a valuable customer happy…or handing Continue reading

Persuading your target market is just like convincing your spouse

Gotta quick analogy for you today…

Your company’s marketing message should work the same way as trying to convince your husband to let you go on a “girls out” weekend.

(Guys… the same principle holds true for you, too)

Let’s say your 3 closest girlfriends in the whole wide world are planning a “girls only” weekend away for fun, pampering, and pedicures, and want you to go, too.

Will your husband Continue reading

My wife knows this effective marketing tactic – sadly, most business owners don’t

Recently, my wife and I are talking, and out of the blue she says to me:

“I bet Billy Bob Biz owner could make more money by sending me a postcard to remind me that it’s been more than a year since I got those expensive new hearing aids and they recommend getting a free hearing checkup every year.”

She goes on to say: “Wonder how many of their customers defect to the competition because Continue reading

Successful people… and the power of words

Smart, successful people
benefit from the power of words
when they want to get great results

Why do we use words, anyway?

Simply put… Because the right words quickly and effectively communicate your thoughts, emotions, and feelings to other people.

For my purposes here, I’ll break down writing styles into 3 main groups: Literary (novels or fiction books), editorial writing, and persuasive writing.

Today’s topic is what I call persuasive writing, and why successful people use Continue reading

Why you should be in love with SEO

Ignore website optimization
at your own risk

First…  SEO is inherently complicated, but I want you to understand why it’s important for you to grasp the basics. So here’s my simple definition without going into all the techie details.

SEO is crucial to web success

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website’s pages to attract various search engine’s attention.

You’ll notice I said “process” – because good SEO isn’t a one-time thing, it’s ongoing.

Properly optimized web pages help search engines determine what the page is all about, so it can give each page a “rank” in their search results pages (SERP).

 And the big benefit to you?

Simple… Continue reading