Internal Discovery: Needs Analysis First, discovery is both internal and external. Unfortunately, many businesses short-cut the internal work and open themselves up to vendors much too early. Two common reasons for this are – “we’re just fact finding” and “we just don’t know what questions to ask or even where to begin looking.” This direct contact with product vendors, however, means marketing packets, wordy emails, relentless phone calls, demos, and much more – they know who you are and have entered you into their database. Read more »

Every Business Owner needs to understand the power of Google. One of the most powerful Google tools right now is the Google Business Listing.Have you noticed that when you type in a search query for anything in Google, Yahoo or Bing, a Map with little push-pins pop’s up?In Google – that is the Google Map, or 7-Pack. It’s a pretty powerful place to be.The Google 7-Pack not only shows up above the “organic” or “natural” search results, but it has a higher click rate than the Google Adwords (Ad’s surrounding it). Read more »

My focus this week is on email marketing. I have a new blog posting about it:We all get tons of email newsletters in our inboxes these days, leading some business owners to think that email marketing is a nuisance and has no place in their own marketing campaign. Is that the best way to think about it? Or is that throwing out the baby with the bath water? To read the full blog, go to http://outres.net/blog/?p=21 Read more »

First things first…Happy New Year! I wish you ALL much prosperity in 2010. For my first blog post in 2010 I decided to lighten things up a bit. We software folks get so frustrated when things don’t work as they should. Read more »