Pitching an idea isn’t an art any more, its a learned skill. Oren Klaff is the Pitchman, and he is giving his knowledge to you.

Pitch is a book designed to explain just how you can succeed on your next idea. You can visit his site ypitch.com to learn more about the book and Oren Klaff.

Everyone has heard of the elevator pitch and how important your pitch is, but nobody has been able to equip you with the techniques needed to effectively deliver a good pitch time and time again. No more guesswork. Pitch is about proven techniques.

Oren has successfully pitched and raised $400 million for investment and venture capital groups. He spent 10,000 hours of his time figuring how to deliver amazing pitches over and over again and is going to share this with you in his new book.

We now live in a world where just about everyone is reachable, but just because you can contact anyone doesn’t mean you’ll be any better sharing your ideas with them.

When it comes to getting an idea across, we are notoriously bad at doing so. The right pitch to the right group of people can change the outcome of your life. Higher pay, more clients, more publicity and just about anything you can imagine.

Use the form below to receive the first chapter of his book set to come out on October 15th. I along with the rest of the Echelon Media crew will be promoting the book and will notify you to receive an advanced copy of his book.

If you are interested in learning much more about Pitch or Oren visit intersectioncapital.com. If you have any questions for Oren please email josh@joshwhitford.com. Visit the post here to get your free copy of Pitch.

There is a myth that only the marketing department controls the brand outside your business’s four walls. Even if you are the programmer who never talks to a single client, your marketing is how the program works, feels and functions. If you are the front desk worker, your presence is marketing how you reach out to people both in person and over the phone. If you’re the boss, every policy you make markets how you feel about your employees and your company.

Knowing that marketing isn’t just one aspect handled by one small group within a company makes you examine how you can get greater returns on your marketing efforts. If you hire the best coder in the world yet the design and troubleshooting are highly lacking, how does that reflect on the company?

What about the HR person who is told to hire someone for the lowest cost? Someone can be excellent on paper, yet move the company in the wrong direction with her marketing. It’s no fault of the HR person if he was told to find the best person for the lowest cost.

If you have a customer support person who hammers out calls but lacks in personality or compassion, how does that make the customer feel? Look at zappos.com. They built an entire company around talking with people on a personal level.

When you want to focus your efforts on marketing, don’t forget to look at the other people in the company doing the marketing. Cheers.

When I fist started blogging just about two years ago on www.joshwhitford.com I had no real idea on what I was going to talk about. I love business and I love marketing and eventually that became the theme of the posts I continued to write.

In the beginning I figured I would learn how to rank for keywords and then continue to do so. One of the first keywords I targeted was the term Unconventional Marketing. I thought the term was just what I was looking for as my starting point and target audience.

I eventually ranked for the term after trying for a couple of months and now I continue to hold the first spot in Google roughly two years later. For the record, I got most of my link love by changing the title on my site to the Unconventional Marketing Blog and then people continually linking to my site with that description. Pretty easy huh?

I recall when I showed up #1 for the first time. I wrote a post talking about being #1 for the term and how proud I was. Then a thoughtful commenter showed up and told me how my term sucked because according to all major sites, the term gets little or no traffic to speak of. Way to rain on my parade, right?

So I shuck it off and continued without much thought.

A few months later someone emailed through my site asking for me to develop a marketing plan and help them execute it for them. The deal turned out being a solid 5 figures and low and behold they found me through the term Unconventional Marketing. Crazy.

Not only was that one deal a success, but I have had 3 deals in the 5 figures result from that one search term… So much for no search traffic, huh?

What is the point of all of this rambling? Simple. Just because someone comes and rains on your parade about something you worked hard to get doesn’t mean that you should take what they say as fact or the law.

It also means keywords and search terms that get “little” or “no” traffic to speak of can result in large deals.

So many people get hung up on the numbers, how many people visit, how many page views, how many this, how many that and so on. Really the numbers are deceiving and can be manipulated pretty easily to give people what they want… more numbers. Instead, focus on what will help you reach your goal. Will 5 buyers get you closer to your goal? You bet. Can you find 5 buyers out of 10 visitors? You bet.

Before you think about keywords and how “little” traffic they get according to whatever source, realize that until you actually rank for the term, you’ll never know. I can tell you that people search and click on Unconventional Marketing about 3-4 times a day or 1,200 times a year. But out of those 1,200 visitors I’ve made a fair chunk of change. Get the point?

Try whatever you can and see the results for yourself. What if I had given up on the idea of unconventional marketing because some naysayers analyzed and determined I was wrong? What have you given up on because of others’ opinions? What do you think would be fun to try just for the sake of trying?

What is Unconventional Marketing?

Doing what the majority doesn’t and getting results…