Poway, CA, May 5, 2008 — Michael Stelzner, CEO of Writing White Papers.com, released a shocking “tell-all” video today.

“I was desperate,” says the California father of three. “The dotcom boom had just bombed. I needed to find a way to generate business in a recession. That’s when I had a really crazy idea.”

In the video, “How to Generate Mass Interest in Your Business During Tough Economic Times,” Stelzner talks frankly about how he generated over 60,000 leads for his business using this “crazy idea.”

The shocker? What he reveals does NOT involve email, blogs, social networking or any of the new Internet marketing fads.

According to Stelzner, the lead generation strategy resulted in prospects “lining up” to purchase and by following the strategy, businesses are “becoming the thought leaders of their industries.”

Interested parties can view the video by clicking this link. No registration is required. Clicking on the link will open a new browser window.

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The Boston Globe ran an article this morning about Xobni, an Outlook plug-in that helps organize the email inbox.

(For the record, I *hate* Outlook but it syncs with a couple of programs I use, so I tolerate it.)

Based on the article alone, I downloaded Xobni — glitch-free installation took all of 10 seconds.

While waiting for the program to index my email inbox, I started poking around on the company’s blog.

It’s an *excellent* example of a company using a blog to communicate with customers — as in communications that goes this way:

Xobni <–-> customers

Not this way:

Xobni –> customers

Check out the posts about why the company deleted a piece of functionality from the program and its sincere apology for accidently sending out too many emails.

I’m hooked — and I haven’t even used the program yet!

Xobni indexed my email inbox while I wrote this post. And now, I’m ready to rock!

Check it out: Xobni at www.xobni.com

The following article appeared in the May 2 issue of my newsletter. I’ve received responses from people who agree and disagree with my argument, so I’m posting the article — and responses — here.

You would think finding roofing contractors would be pretty easy. I thought so, until I typed “Roofing Contractors, Plaistow NH” into Google and came up with less than stellar results.

“Hmmmmm,” I thought. I tried a few more search phrases and still couldn’t find listings for roofing companies that did work in or near my town.

(Almost every single listing went to the online yellow pages.)

I’m one of those crazy people that actually keeps a telephone directory on hand, so I flipped open the pages to “roofing contractors” and hit the jackpot in terms of finding companies who do business in my area.

But, I’m also a firm believer in the effectiveness of online marketing and new media, so I was surprised to see the plethora of ads in the phone directory.

Why? Many of my neighbors ignore their directories or throw them away.

Days after they are delivered, I see them languishing, water logged and dirty, by the roadside mailboxes where they were dropped by the delivery person or residing in recycling bins on trash day.

You can find a fair number of books that will tell you how to find new business — books on marketing, promoting yourself, networking, generating sales leads, etc.

However, few books actually address the very real pain of being so booked solid you have no time to even think about growing your business — or making changes to your business model so that you’re not working so many hours and can actually enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Sure, you can get books such as the E-Myth Revisited and Getting Things Done. Both are great books, but neither one really addresses how taking your business to the next level involves a great deal of soul searching . . . and fretting . . . and taking one step forward for every two or three steps back.

Michael Port, in his latest book, Beyond Booked Solid, takes you on this journey.

In Beyond Booked Solid, Port discusses how to address our own self-created business problems that we encounter once we’ve stepped up to a higher level of play.

According to Port, we need to “solve these new problems with a more sophisticated level of thinking than that which created the problems in the first place.”

It’s this “sophisticated thinking” that Port covers in his book. In succeeding chapters he talks about how making changes to your business and yourself is a continual process — indeed, if we’re serious about being successful, then we’re never quite done making continual improvements.

What I like about this book, and what makes it different from other “how to” business books, is that Port explains the process but leaves it up to you to decide what is best for you.

In other words, he  doesn’t say, “Do it this way and you’ll be successful like me.”

Instead, he has you delve deep into yourself to determine what you want from business and from your life, and then explains the various ways of getting there based on your priorities and business model.

What I also like about this book is that Port pulls in a great many ideas from many different sources. Indeed, he names this very process: cross-appropriation.

Due to his ability to see and adopt new ideas from outside his “disclosive space,” Port is able to use seemingly unrelated ideas in connection with taking a business to the next level.

For example, he repeatedly talks about Toyota and its mission to continually improve its automobiles and how business owners can apply this idea to their own office proccesses — including answering email! (It works, too.)

If you’re looking for a book that will tell you how to get more clients, read Port’s first book, Book Yourself Solid.

If you’re at the stage of the game where you’re completely overwhelmed with too much work, don’t remember the last time you took a day off, and can’t seem to find the time to work on your business because you’re too busy working in your business, read Beyond Booked Solid.

As soon as I finished reading it, I immediately knew what my next step was: signing up for Basecamp, an online project management application. I’ve been using it for two days now and don’t know how I went this long without it. 

I admit it — I’m a 40-something woman with a leg in two worlds: I still read and crave “dead tree” media including newspapers, books, and magazines.

(My friend and I joke that walking into a Borders is like walking to the corner crack house — we walk out $100 or more poorer.)

Yet, I appreciate and even depend on all things digital.

My client, Dr. Helaine Smith, had maybe half a leg in the digital space. “Dianna,” she said, “My business is dentistry, not forming relationships on Facebook.”

However, she appreciates how the Internet has changed everything and has been educating herself about what she refers to as “punk marketing.”

As usual, I’ve read a number of blog posts and newsletter articles in the last week — many of which are blog-worthy. However, I’m also neck-deep in client work and don’t have the time to thoughtfully analyze and then write about everything I read. Herewith, my quick list of blog posts and articles you may have missed.

When I don’t want to wait for a book, I buy it at my local brick and mortar Borders store. I have a Borders rewards card but have always been perplexed about their reward policy. I get reward points, but they’re good only for certain days and only in the store. So I never use them because it’s too much of a hassle. Michelle Miller at FutureNow has an excellent analysis about why Borders is selling its online bookstore — and one reason has to do with how you can’t use your points when ordering online.

The last issue of BtoB Magazine had an article, “5 Trends Worth Watching” about how B2B will begin to use widgets, mashups, and social feeds. I read that article and thought, “Hmm, none of my customers are using those things.” Great minds think alike, as they say. The Wellesley Hills Group posted an article to their blog that discusses this very issue. Titled, “Taking Advantage of Marketing and Web Technologies,” marketer Mike Shultz talks about how professional B2B service companies really need to focus on the basics, such as demonstrating value.

The other day I dropped some things off at the dry cleaners and was confronted by two signs: “We don’t accept pre-payment.” “We accept cash only.” After reading the post, “Can a restaurant hostess cause bankruptcy?” on the Simplenomics blog, I saw my dry cleaner through new eyes. They seriously need to get with the program and accept debit/credit cards. I know I use my debit card for almost all purchases now. Perhaps the next sign I’ll see is, “Going out of business.”

My colleague, Michael Brown, a B2B Business by Phone Expert, and I have been exchanging emails about the value of blogging and social media. (Check to see if I used “social media” in the right context by reading David Meerman Scott’s post.) He sent me a link to a rather excellent post, Customer Acquisition in Social Media Marketing by Emerson Direct, that talks about how to determine the success of a social media / viral campaign.

Over at Search Engine Land, Galen De Young wrote a terrific article, “Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue to Make with Organic Search.” This article sums up my SEO philosophy to a “T.” In fact, I could have written this article myself.

And finally, my favorite post of the week comes from Matt Cutts about “hipster PDAs.” Titled, “How to Use a Notebook: 7 Quick Tips,” Matt talks about the value of using (dare I say it?) pencil and paper to keep track of quick notes and things. Of course, some smart aleck had to post that he just records his notes to himself using his mobile phone and Jott;  Jott then sends him an SMS message, eliminating the need to carry a notebook (as if it’s a burden).

I’ll stick with the notebook and pencil, thanks.  Plus, Jott doesn’t let you draw amusing little doodles and pictures, underline or star important items, nor indulge your other old media habits.

Every day last week in the Wall Street Journal I would see a small ad which pictured a classic Volkswagen Beetle with a microphone aimed at its trunk lid (the trunk being in the front).

Each ad had two lines of copy but nothing else — no company name, no URL, nada.

I kept seeing those ads and thinking, “Is it an ad for VW? An ad using a VW to communicate a message? What? Obviously they’re going to tell me the punch line at some point.”

The punch line arrived today in Section B1, Marketplace, page 3.

It’s a full page ad with copy that repeats the two lines of copy from the smaller ads run previously.

The final two lines read:

The people want a company willing to shake up the industry. Again.

It’s what the people want.

URL simply reads: vw.com

Logo copy reads: Das Auto.

Ok — are they releasing a new car? A new technology? What?

So I dutifully go to the Website and find an interactive poll that plays on social media and user-generated content – site visitors can write their own poll questions and others can vote on them. (Ok, that’s fun.)

The theme of the campaign obviously is, “It’s what the people want.”

But what exactly has VW done to “shake up the industry”?

And with Toyota now the number one car maker, what has VW done that makes people clamor for its cars?

You don’t really know until you look at the bottom of the page where it says, “VW Buzz” where you can click on scrolling news items about VW’s achievements. Click on one and you get taken to a press release (yawn).

I like the idea of the user generated poll questions, but I don’t get how the campaign components fit together — nor the campaign’s objective.

Also, this campaign would have been perfect online. I clicked around on the WSJ site but didn’t see any ads for VW. Hiding small ads in the print newspaper really doesn’t work — especially since VW’s target demographic (Gen Y?) is online and not reading print newspapers.

What do you think?

I’ve received a fair number of calls over the years from people who say, “Our site sucks. We need a new one.” Usually these people are dissatisifed with the site design, for whatever reason.

But I’ve learned, through analyzing many sites, that often the site doesn’t “suck” at all — or if it does, it’s not due to design, it’s due to poor content that doesn’t generate leads or conversions.

You can easily tell if your site “sucks” or not by using a number of free tools:

Hubspot’s Website Grader — This is a fabulous tool. Simply enter in your URL and the Website Grader will spit back a nifty report grading you on things such as your meta data and whether or not you have an RSS feed. You can run similar reports on your competitors as well.

Yahoo’s Site Explorer — Another great tool that tells you how many inbound links you have. The more *high quality* links you have, the more favorably Google views your site (sucky design or not). You can also run your competitors’ sites through the tool to see how many links they have and who is linking to them.

Google PageRank — I use PageRank to give me a quick and dirty assessment of a site. A PR of “3″ or less tells me the site might have some problems. You can learn your site’s PR by downloading the Google Toolbar and turning the PageRank feature on.

Google Analytics — Google Analytics recently introduced a new “benchmarking” feature. Now you can see how your site stacks up against sites that are similar in nature. Find out how many pages people typically download, if your site is “sticky” or not, and how much traffic sites get in aggregate.

Alexa — Another tool that tells you how your site compares to other sites.

Customer feedback — This is one that’s often overlooked. If you’re a small business, keep track of how people found you by asking when they call, “How did you hear about us?” I even go so far as to ask, “Which search term did you use?”

Also add a “how did you find us?” field to your newsletter subscription form. This is how I learn which online articles generate the most number of subscribers.

If you have an online form people can fill out, keep track of how many of those come in each month.

Listen to customers and prospects when they call. For a long time people would ask me, “What does ‘MarCom’ mean?” I finally spelled it out in my Web copy.

Bottom line — Get some real data on your site and you may just be pleasantly surprised: your site doesn’t suck at all.

The more I learn about Google Analytics (GA), the happier I become.

For weeks now I’ve been wracking my brains trying to figure out how to track where my newsletter subscribers come from (i.e. my blog or my Website).

The problem is, I can track visitors to both my blog and my Website, and I know the number of newsletter subscribers, but I don’t know which generates more subscribers — the blog or the Website. That’s because the Constant Contact subscription form is an outbound link — something you can’t track in GA.

Thank goodness for Google. You have a question about *anything,* just type it into Google and you’ll find the answer.

Rich Brooks, of flyte new media, posts how to set up the CC / GA tracking code in his blog post, “Track Email Newsletter Subscribers Via Google Analytics.” (Small world: I interviewed Rich last year for a Constant Contact Business Partner case study.)

You can also use GA’s special tracking code to track PDF downloads – something important to know if you’re offering a free e-book or white paper.

If you haven’t already, be sure to purchase the fabulous book, Google Analytics 2.0 by Jerri L. Ledford and Mary E. Tyler. I reviewed it in the latest issue of my last MarCom Strategist newsletter.

BtoB Magazine has a weekly roundup of the top B2B marketing blog posts.

My post about finding time to read when you’re a time-deprived professional was selected this week! Wow!

Other posts include:

Mac McIntosh’s “When it Comes to Generating Sales Leads, Do Virtual Events Make Sense for B-to-B Marketers?”

Bill Gadless’ ”Is Your B2B Website Educating? …or Simply Boasting?”

Michael Stelzner’s ”4 Ways to Make PDFs Search Engine Friendly”

Paul Dunay’s “Is Social Media More Difficult in B2B than B2C?”

All excellent posts — be sure to check them out!