Last week’s workshop was on advertising. For those of you unable to attend, and as a review for those who did, we talked a great deal about headlines. The headline is the most important element of your ad. Don’t take my word for it. In the words of some legends of advertising:

“A good headline can pull up to
19 times better results for the same ad.”
- John Caples

“Five times more people will read your headline than will read your entire ad.”
- David Olgilvy

“We pick out what we wish to read by the headline.”
- Claude Hopkins

We did an exercise in which I

It means that someone is interested in you and what you offer. You’ve made a connection, and maybe the beginning of a relationship Perhaps they’ll even buy from you.

Here’s mine. Thanks for asking!

If you clicked the link and are looking at my card, what are you doing? You’re reading. You’re thinking about it. You smiled. You’re giving it some attention. More than others you are handed?

So what happens when you hand someone YOUR card?

Your business card is likely the first experience the recipient has visually with your brand, (outside of your good looks!). Most people glance at it then put it in their pocket. That’s what you usually do, right?

Is it the same quick glance people are giving to your advertising and your web site?

Look at my card. An approach I took to getting attention was to make fun of myself, and to do it in a way that draws attention visually. A red handwriting font is hard to miss. Humor is also a great way to get

The highest score my 8 year old has ever gotten was just under 100, and his 5 year old brother has never gotten above 30 or so. Oh, and the record is held by their 10 year-old cousin who got 109 recently.

But all that changed at a local pizza parlor a few days ago.

Dad tried his hand at it while waiting for our large mushroom pie to come out of the oven. Within about 2 minutes, I quickly racked up 177 points to my boy’s amazement. It’s nice to be a God!

My eight year old grabbed the iPod and

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Have you given up on advertising? Do you find yourself thinking that it’s too expensive to put an ad out there only to get very little or no response? Have you concluded that maybe advertising just doesn’t work for your type of company or prospects?

Well, the real answer is probably that your ads were just poor ads. Without knowing some fundamental principles of advertising, it really is a game of chance as to whether or not your advertising will work. Most small businesses fill a space on a page or time on radio or TV with features they find compelling about their product or service, then sit back and hope for the calls to come in. At least a trip to Vegas would be more entertaining. Hey, go see a show!

Christine Regan here. I was thinking this morning about ‘my ideal life’ and started asking – what would I want to experience every single day for me to feel that I was living my IDEAL life. I decided that it might be fun to do a 30 day challenge and see if I experience my IDEAL life for 30 straight days and see how that felt. So what does that mean…see the description below and if you’d like to be a part of this 30 day challenge email me back and we’ll put you on the list…There is no cost of any kind to do this challenge. It just takes a desire to identify what you want and then proactively experience that every day.

The Ideal Life 30 Day Challenge is an exercise to help one identify and articulate the experiences that they would like to feel day in and day out for 30 days in a row. I chose 30 days because I want to sew the seeds of success and help people transform their lives.

Step 1. Identify Your IDEAL Work Day
Identify in detail the 3-5 (or whatever number it is for you) things that you would like to

Sounds serious, doesn’t it? Well, the affliction I am writing about is what I’ll call the Wealth Scarcity Mentality. It also goes by the other name: Starving Artist Syndrom. It affects 1 out of every 3 small business people (I made that up). Exactly how many people it affects, I have no idea, but as you read this think about yourself.

There’s one group of people–a profession–that I see as consistently plagued by the wealth scarcity mentality. And to help address this, my wife, Christine is leading a provocative workshop at 7PM on November 5 at The Nurtured Spirit in Warwick to speak to these professionals on this very topic. Specifically, the group to which I am referring is

There’s a wonderful talk given by Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point) on this very subject given at the 2004 TED conference. Within it is a important lesson for all of us making and selling a product or service. That lesson is that most of us are convinced that we’ve crafted the perfect Spaghetti sauce that will appeal to the largest possible group of consumers. Well, Prego, with the help of a brilliant psychophysicist named Howard Moskowitz, changed that popular convention, and therefore, changed forever the choices we all now have for jarred pasta toppings.

Imagine the following focus group exercise that occurred

What could they possible use as a compelling headline to an ad or for the banner of their web site? A company like this would probably rely on the old, “20% off this weekend only.” Now they’re a commodity that no one remembers except for a minute or two while they read the ad. But nothing sticks to the mind of their audience, and nothing differentiates them from every other store with a discount message.

Take a look at your web site, or better yet, have someone outside your business look at your web site. Ask them what stands out as your specialty. If they say something like “You sell cars.” or “You sell hot tubs.”, you’re too broad. Ask them to review your latest ad.

You can sell a wide variety of things or offer a wide variety of services. We’re talking about a focus on your message. Consider Zappos.com. They started out

I plan to create written transcriptions of videos and audio interviews as additional products, so I was searching the web a couple days ago for a transcription service. I found a few and settled on one that looked credible and… well, it looked like my style. So after a conversation with the salesperson, I thanked him and said I’m still reviewing my options. He tried to close me a couple times, which I respect, but I successfully resisted.

Then it happened. Just before the call was finished, he asked me in a manner I could tell was routine for him, “Can you please tell me exactly the words you typed into Google to find us?” I told him, “video translation into text”. He then replied, “Wow. I’ve never heard of anyone using that phrase.”

Now, if you don’t know what keyphrases are, please review video part 2 of our series on search engine optimization. But, what is the lesson here? It’s that you can guess all day long what you THINK people are typing into the search engines to find your product or service, but until you ask, you’ll never really know.

The next time someone calls you cold asking about your company’s offering, pop the question: “Can I ask you exactly what you typed into the search engine to find us?”

He had signed up for a free trial to one of those services that, for a fee, will get you up high on the paid search results of Google (the sponsored links – search results that cost money for their appearance.

In the above screen shot example, the paid results (sponsored links) for the term “arthritis cure” are the yellow highlighted sections.

True to their commitment, my subscriber friend was the first ad on the right hand side for a very broad keyword (not “arthritis cure”, by the way). “Broad” means that his