World of Warcraft mirrors real life in astonishing ways, none more so than in economics. One of the easiest ways to make gold in World of Warcraft is through in-game professions, and these professions have a powerful lesson to teach us: boring but valuable pays well because no one wants to do it, but everyone…
Here’s a very simple experiment you should try if you’re promoting something via social media or other digital marketing channels. Go to your Google Analytics. Go to Traffic Sources > Referring Sites. Look at the top 10. How many of the referring sites in the top 10 are platforms you are actively promoting on? Now…
If you’re unfamiliar with the word arbitrage, it means this: In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. If you extend the idea…
Two months ago I set out to try an experiment, using the concept of premium content in my personal newsletter. I announced on March 4, 2011 that I’d be offering premium content to newsletter subscribers who completed their profiles with all required fields. I wanted to see what would happen in terms of newsletter subscribership…
Chris Brogan posted an interesting commentary on offering recipes to your buyers, on the premise that people would be happier to buy from you if you offered serving suggestions rather than just a pile of ingredients. Go read it. It’s a good start, but imagine this was the menu being served for dinner: Strawberry shortcake…
In yesterday’s post, we discussed the process of mergers and acquisitions (very roughly) and its implications for employees. Today, let’s talk about the career prospects for those employees. Stay or go? When companies merge, culture changes. Sometimes the change is slow and gradual, sometimes it’s immediate. In cases where a large company acquires a small…
People are funny. In the absence of any map or plan, they’ll tend to follow the first person who appears to have even a marginally reliable plan of action or map, even if that map and plan is totally wrong. In order to be a successful marketer, you not only need to have a map…
If there’s a more time-honored concept in marketing than the funnel, I don’t know what it is. There are more variations on the marketing funnel than virtually any other model as well. The marketing funnel is elegantly simple: illustrate the different stages that people go through to become customers. Most marketing funnels are based off…
