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Archive for the ‘Adversity’ Category

No Magician Has a Greater Power Than Yours

By: Dan Kennedy on: November 12th, 2009 6 Comments

When you get your wake-up call at some Disney hotels, you hear something like: “It’s 7:00 A.M., have a magical day in the Magic Kingdom.”

No need to rely on Disney or anybody else to give you a magical day. You can create them for yourself at will, in your small business marketing or your own personal life – although, truth be told, in the imaginary Magic Kingdom or your own, the very best of days only has some magical moments or hours, some mundane ones and usually, some not so good ones.

Several years ago, in horse-racing, we had a magical night. Carla, my step-daughter Jennifer, and her three sons, Joe, Luke, Zach, all here to see one of our young horses run an amazing race, come from behind and win in dramatic fashion.

Then get their photo taken in the winners’ circle. Also that night, our 3-year-old trotter and priciest pacer (he a $75,000.00 critter) both finished 2nd in special stakes races, picking up about $45,000.00 in winnings combined, racing as good as they could possibly have raced.
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Unique Selling Proposition vs Dumb Slogans

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 6th, 2009 26 Comments

I was reading an extensive survey to measure the impact of advertising slogans. Among the slogans and advertising tag lines for 22 of the biggest U.S. advertisers, only 6 were recognized by more than 10% of the consumers surveyed.

In other words, not even 1 out of 10 consumers could correctly identify 90% of the slogans. 16 of the 22 advertisers had slogans no one knew – each spending more than 100-million dollars a year advertising them!

Three of these much advertised slogans scored 0% recognition. 0%!

Take the test, see if you can name any of the big, dumb companies that match these slogans:

  1. We’re With You
  2. That Was Easy
  3. The Stuff Of Life

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The Renegade Millionaires’ Simple Litmus Test 

By: Dan Kennedy on: September 30th, 2009 36 Comments

The job site CareerBuilder.com reports that 1 in 5 employees admits to giving bogus reasons for coming to work late. Some of the best are:

  • I dreamed I was fired,so I slept in. When I woke up I realized I was dreaming so I hurried in.
  • I went all the way to the office before realizing I was still in my pajamas and had to go home to change. That took a while.
  • I saw you weren’t there, so I went out looking for you.

Well, this sort of thing is to be expected from employees. Bogus or not. But not from entrepreneurs. And never from Renegade Millionaire entrepreneurs.
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The Top Secret to Success They Don’t Want You To Know

By: Dan Kennedy on: September 29th, 2009 34 Comments

There is a tendency amongst authors writing about “success” as well as entrepreneurs, small business owners and CEO’s telling their success stories to be warm ‘n fuzzy and present classically popular ideas palatable to the largest number of people. To say that nice guys win. That having a positive attitude and drawing little smiley faces above the i’s you dot will not only endear you to people but actually attract prosperity.

In truth, there is little evidence of this. None of it is harmful in moderation, but it conceals fundamental truth about ultra-high achievers: they tend to be tough, intolerant, hard-driving, demanding, competitive people often viewed as difficult, mean and ruthless by others. And they tend to have a profound sense of superiority usually viewed as arrogance. It sometimes gets them in trouble, but it is also an essential factor in their success.
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What’s Your #1 Job?

By: Bill Glazer on: September 24th, 2009 20 Comments

I had a recent consulting call with a client. I asked him about his progress on what we talked about during our past call and he reported that hardly anything got done because he had a lot of other things to do in running his business and was constantly being interrupted by employees with questions or who required advice.

That’s when I went into my rant that…

“What we talk about and agree to get accomplished should NEVER take a backseat to anything else he needs to get done. I reminded him that his #1 job as the owner and President of the company was the MARKETING!”

After all, it’s the marketing that’s driving sales and withOUT sales there is no need for anyone else to work in the company. No need for an accountant, customer service representatives, buyers … no one.
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Pity the Foolish Small Business Owner

By: Dan Kennedy on: September 22nd, 2009 10 Comments

Any moron can make money with new media where only little folks play.

But when the big, dumb, brand advertisers arrive – as they have in PPC advertising – the media cost skyrockets and that’s that. This should never be a sudden surprise – or a gradual one, either – to anybody with even small quantities of small business marketing knowledge, historical perspective and common sense.

The Big Lesson is what immature, under-priced media giveth, mature, over-priced media taketh away.

For a while, independent specialty retailers in jewelry, handbags, shoes, spicy foods, even electronics had this space to themselves, so search ads that popped up when someone typed “diamond necklace” or “DVD player” worked.

Now that BestBuy, Zales’ Jewelers, etc. have arrived in those categories, buying with little regard to direct ROI, the price per click on such ads has risen to unprofiable numbers. And that will continue to worsen as even bigger, dumber companies cheerfully pay more.
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When Things Don’t Go As Planned

By: Dan Kennedy on: August 26th, 2009 11 Comments

The moral of Earl Nightingale’s greener pastures story is, nobody’s business or life is perfect, and the most perfect of another’s situations is rarely as good as it seems from afar.

It would be dangerous to trade, even with the person you might envy most, based only on observations from a distance. It’s usually better to work at making your own “house” better and more to your liking than to envy or swap for another.

Lately, most of my clients, coaching members and I have had most things going our way. We’re all pretty fat ‘n happy. Some of us are deluged with business, using shovel and wheelbarrow to handle the money.
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