If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or you can leave me a message HERE. Don't forget to leave a comment. I allow Do Follow so you get a link back. Thanks for visiting!

This is the third day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

I find it amazing how well cutting prices works to lure people into a store. The problem with the price cut war is eventually everyone gets in on it and those that don’t cut prices get cut out by the customers. This year retailers have cut prices quick and early to attract customers into their stores. I think overall this is a good thing because I don’t like paying $80 for shoes when I know they were made for about $5 somewhere outside of the USA. The next problem to the price cut war is convincing people they will still be getting a deal if they buy today and not tomorrow when the prices are even lower. I wonder what the door buster prizes will be this year at the major retail stores on Black Friday. This could potentially be a great year for deals. Here is what the Baltimore Sun has to say:

To lure shoppers, retailers are pushing holiday promotions earlier than ever; they’re already offering extended store hours and steep cuts on items such as toys. In recent years, holiday advertisements began to appear before the Halloween candy is sold out, but the big shopping season has crept even earlier this year as retailers grapple with the economic downturn.

Wal-Mart led the way for holiday bargains by slashing the price on toys well before Halloween. The world’s largest retailer also announced it will alert shoppers about holiday deals through text-messaging.

Other retailers have also launched sales and discounts traditionally pegged to the day after Thanksgiving, the typical start of the holiday season. Kmart began hosting “Black Friday Weekends” two weeks ago. Stores such as Kohl’s and JCPenney have extended hours to midnight on some days, another shopping tradition once reserved for after Thanksgiving.

Retailers also are appealing to consumers with marketing campaigns and other programs that promote ways to stretch a budget or save a few dollars.

That’s all we have to do! Convince the consumers that they can save money while spending it at our store and not the competitiors. Genius.

This is the second day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

Guest posts are a great way to introduce yourself or your product to a new audience. I believe any time someone asks if you are willing to do a guest post, you should jump at the chance. Yesterday, I did a guest post for Eric on Marketing.fm. If you would like to hear me talk about Social Network management you can head on over and check it out. Here is an excerpt:

The folks over at Ping.fm designed a site where you have the ability to update your status on dozens of different social networking sites. I use Gmail for just about everything and Ping.fm allows you to add its updater to your Google Chat list. So anytime I want to update my status, I click on the chat and type is my update. A second later I get a response that my status have been updated. If I were to log in to all the different accounts I have and manually update my status it would probably take 10-15 minutes (given I don’t get sidetracked being on those sites)…

This is the second day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

One realm I have never ventured into is that of a telephone conference series or packaging a product on mp3 or DVD. I have seen the effectiveness of marketing via these methods and the ability to upsale people on bigger and better versions of the same series later on consultant fees. Setting up and distributing an audio or DVD series takes a lot of front-end work to being with, but I have to believe it is definitely worthwhile since so many people do it. Here’s a quick outline:

Create a 3-part telephone conference series, scheduled for the week after Thanksgiving and the first two weeks of December. Rent an inexpensive bridge line (under $25 for each seminar or some providers offer free, bare bones services if you want to do your own recordings).

Send out an e-mail invitation to your list of customers and newsletter subscribers through a provider such as VerticalResponse.com (send a thousand email invites for under $10).  Spell out exactly what they’ll learn using intriguing bullet points.

Charge $25 for each segment, or $59 for all three.  Offer to include Cd’s or MP3’s, and/or transcripts of the courses if customers pay an extra $10.

Determined to send out holiday gifts like you always do, but this year you want to cut costs?  Create a low-cost promotional magnet that you design yourself. For more info check out Ambition is not a dirty word.

This is the first day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

As black Friday and the mad shopping spree from Thanksgiving to Christmas approaches, stores are getting desperate. The more desperate they get, the better deals you will find. Already, I have seen sites posting stores like Best Buy and JC Penny’s with Black Friday sales coupons. You can always visit BlackFriday.info to find the best collection of coupons. Here is what Mercury News had to say:

“Consumers may need some encouragement to get into the holiday spirit this year,” said Scott Marden, director of market research for Vertis Communication, which offers marketing services to retailers. “No interest, no payments, layaway offers, door-busters, one-stop shopping, and rebate incentives will all be welcomed by most consumers” along with gift-with-purchase deals and buy-one-get-one-free offers.

The Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy, which are owned by the Gap, are pushing hard to get consumers in the door this weekend. The company e-mailed coupons for 30 percent off to 5 million customers with an additional bonus: The Gap will give 5 percent of what you spend to a favorite nonprofit. The coupon is good through Sunday.

There’s also the soft sell: The Gap’s holiday campaign features current hot television stars such as “Cam Gigandet of “Twilight,” Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” and Mary-Louise Parker of “Weeds” in cozy pictorials.

In a departure from its traditional print and TV ads, the San Francisco-based company has also created humor-infused Webisodes featuring such unlikely pairings as Selma Blair with Rainn Wilson and the Dixie Chicks with Sandra Bernhard singing traditional Christmas songs. The videos launched Thursday and are designed to be shared through social-networking pages like Facebook and downloaded to iPhones. The six videos reside on gap.com/MerryMixIt and will be shown in movie theaters before features, too.

Josh here: I just have to say that I would love to kill the person who invented ads shown before movies. You used to be able to pay $10 for a movie and $15 on concessions, but now… You have to sit through 15 minutes of ads and previews. Don’t get me wrong, I love the previews of upcoming movies, but all the ads can disappear for all I care. I don’t want to be advertised to after paying an exorbitant amount to sit and eat junk food.

“They’re designed to bring a smile to someone’s face, given all the bad news lately,” said Olivia Doye, director of public relations and marketing for the Gap.

This is the third and final in a series about Nido Qubein and his book, Stairway to Success.

Developing a plan for success involves three things:

1. Setting Goals
2. Setting Priorities
3. Developing Strategies

“Good personal planning involves no more than determining how you will get from your present circumstances to the future you have created through your vision.” - Nido Qubein

I tend to set pretty ambitious goals for myself, and I do so by writing or printing them out and hanging them around my office. Up until last week I listed goals on my blog for page views and other meaningless stats. I have since pulled those off because I personally think those are the wrong goals to have because of their small measurable impact. I am instead working on a new set of goals that I might not publicly post for this blog and its growth. Goals are a must and should be taken vary seriously.

“Wisdom ofttimes consists of knowing what to do next.” - Herbert Hoover

Setting priorities gives you a place of reference when you come to a situation in which you are unsure of where to go. Knowing your goals and making them your priority makes day to day decisions easier. Suppose your goal is to save $2,000 and you are buying Christmas gifts for your family and extended family. It is easy to want to splurge on the people you love even if it goes against your goal of saving money. Is there a way to save money and still buy / create gifts for your family? Of course there is. It might take a little more imagination than cruising the isles of Best Buy, but it can be done.

More important, the issue of saving money vs. buying Christmas presents for your family shouldn’t even be an issue. Nido talks about the different levels of planning and problems. Most problems like the one above can be addressed early and then shouldn’t ever be an issue down the road at Christmas time. If you plan ahead with your goals and set priorities you should be able to navigate your way through most problems fairly easily.

“There usually are half a dozen right answers to “What needs to be done?” Yet unless a [person] makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.” - Peter F. Drucker

Developing your strategies for success in any area of your life is like having a playbook in sports. Could you imagine if a professional sports team just said: “Aw…this week, let’s just wing it and see what happens”? My guess and I am sure yours as well would say they are guaranteed to lose.

Your strategies should meet these criteria:

• They must specify actions to be taken.
• They must specify the person or persons who is to take the actions.
• They must establish a time for beginning the actions.
• They must establish a deadline for completing the actions.
• They must establish criteria for determining when the actions have been satisfactorily completed.

This can be addressed pretty easily by stating what the problem or goal is that you are trying to achieve or overcome. Then developing a plan of action to tackle that issues in a systematic and bit sized way. You need to set an “end game” for that issue when you get to your defined goal or conclusion.

I have brought you through roughly half of the book Stairway to Success by Nido Qubein. If you would like to learn more, I would highly suggest buying it or checking it out of your local library. Although I did not read this book before I started out on my own quest for success in business and life, I have been using many of the same techniques learned by other teachers and writings. I think this book has the plan well laid out and is a solid package of advice for building upon your success in any facet of your life.

Here are the first two parts, Nido Qubein Part 1 and Nido Qubein Part 2