We all love to play games. It’s probably our mind’s way to stay connected with the inner child we keep nurturing. But we like playing, most of us love challenges and when it comes to prizes, we’re all in!

I’ve recently had my eye caught by a contest and a nice little game that I’ve become addicted to. And I am referring to the SecondBrain contest and the Stay.com trivia game. Both had an interesting idea, different approaches and cool prizes. Read the rest »

I’ve read numerous articles on Twitter, some saying it’s a complete waste of time, some saying it’s extremely useful and others, more temperate, saying it’s useful and a time waster as well, depending on what you do with this tool.

I believe saying Twitter or any other Social Media channel for that matter wastes your time is simply stating the obvious. Anything consuming time has potential to waste everything it spends with no real results. Social media, other media, everything you do can have no results, some results or excellent results. It all depends on how much you invest in your actions, what you aim to obtain and there’s also the little yet important part luck plays in the equation. Read the rest »

I will start this week’s roundup with a Blogging Bits guest post by Matt Harzevski who has an interesting piece of advice for bloggers: Skip the middleman when it comes to ads. Matt encourages bloggers to maximize advertising income by selling their own ad space instead of joining ad networks.

Karen D. Swim of Words for Hire shows us the power of little things. Doing something apparently insignificant can have a tremendous impact on a situation or end result.

If you’re a social media marketer and need advice on networking in the social media world, head over to Traffikd for a complete bonding guide.

Ivana Taylor of Small Business Trends admits planning, including marketing planning, sucks for most of us. So she shares her solution to this hassle: examples of one page marketing plans that actually work.

Alex Cristache of Blogsessive notices a very important trait of the successful blogger: being a good listener.

I am sure most of you out there need a quick fix for the photos you want to include in your posts. Blogging Sublimely reviews a few free online photo editing tools for you.

Chris Brogan’s entries really caught my eye last week. So I am recommending you two posts in one roundup: a piece describing 100 personal branding tactics that make use of social media and one presenting a goals and measurements aligning take on social media strategy.

One of my favorite bloggers, Joanna Young, has decided to dedicate her business to helping others create powerful content. One of the services she offers is blog coaching to help you jump start your blog. Read her entry on how she plans to achieve her goal and contact her if you’re interested.

Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communication has put up a sales guide using tricks she picked up from toddlers. Funny, but highly effective.

Eric Brantner of  SEONoobs points out an overlooked aspect of guest blogging. Apart from building relationships, generating content for blogs, exposing the author to a new audience, it is also an essential SEO strategy.

SEOMoz is also in the business of pointing out the obvious tools we have and tend to forget: asking our customers to link to our product or service.

In the end, I think we should all stop to remember that the tools we take for granted, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr are not that easily accessed in all countries. Social Media Trader has put up a list of what services are prohibited where.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s roundup! See you next time and in the mean time, if you have an interesting article to add to my list, do so in the comment box!

Enjoy the new week!

I remember hearing a lot of people say that getting stuck in features is a bad marketing idea. You can pimp features as much as you like, you can make them sound cooler or fancier than ever before, people will still not care. Why? Because unless it is translated into a benefit, a feature is worthless.

It is true that there are features that we instantly associate a certain value and benefit to, but those cases are rare and they only do half of the job in the end. For example, we all know that many Gigabytes on your hardware means lots of docs, software, movies and mp3s can be stored on it. So the more they are, the better.  We’re used to it and after the presentation of a computer catches our eye, we hunt down features like this one.

Gold and silver are instantly associated with a significant price. More than fake bling blings anyway. That might sell a jewelry, not as well as saying the X silver necklace will make you look classy or something similar.

Now, let’s take an air conditioning systems vendor. A high-end one, not a cheap brand with no marketing budget or the right people to handle their communication strategy. And the nice, cool differentiator and stand out bling for their product: a silver-containing filter!

How does the silver help? If they don’t explain, most people will automatically think they’ll pay more for useless, expensive metals Which would be cool for some, if the case of the AC machine would be made of silver! But who cares there is silver in the filter? Except some chemists or AC specialists, no one will know what the benefit is. Some might simply imagine there must be a benefit added, but will it be a strong enough hunch to make them buy?

So the basic idea when presenting your product is simple: to get maximum results, emphasize some quality of the product or service that makes buyers’ lives easier, funnier, more relaxed, simply said what can you do to make their lives better?

Current and potential customers bring in money for a company in many ways. They buy products, they buy additional services, upgrades, maintenance and if hey like your service they’ll spread the word and have more money pouring your way.

But what you might overlook is that those people, if they come in high numbers, are also something to be sold. As an audience, they’ll generate a new found stream of revenue. You’ll position yourself as a high authority conference organizer and not spend much in the end. Why? Simply because others will pay to sell something to your audience.

Read the rest »