Does your marketing message make your customers give you the shirts off their backs? If so, is this a positive relationship building activity or something else?

Here’s a fun blog post from ImprovEveryWhere.com that features 100 men who all take off their shirts at the same time and shop in an Abercrombie and Fitch store on 5th Avenue in New York City.

Apparently Abercrombie and Fitch is willing to display men on every wall of their stores, but they aren’t willing to let their customers take off their shirts while shopping.

Here are ten things you can do to make sure you’re building a positive relationship with your customers, both online and off.

• Stay in close contact with your customers.
• Reward your customers for providing feedback.
• Have a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page website and explain anything that might confuse your customers or visitors.
• Resolve customer complaints quickly and completely.
• Make it easy for your customers to contact you.
• Treat your employees right and they will treat your customer the same way.
• Give your customers more than they expect.
• Admit and apologize for mistakes quickly.
• Reward customers often.
• Invite customers to your office for lunches, parties, barbecues, dances, seminars or other special events. Even if they can’t make it they will feel more welcomed.

Now you might not have 100 shirtless customers show up at your website looking for answers, but you get the idea.

Gone shopping,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketing.com

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Do you own a business or a job? According to Robert Kiyosaki, if your “business” doesn’t function when you’re not around, then you don’t have a business, you’ve created a job.

Creating a real business involves setting up systems with replaceable parts. As an example, if a software developer leaves your company, then you need to have a method for hiring a new one to replace them. As part of the system that’s in place to run your business, you won’t be the person to do the hiring. Your hiring manage will take care of hiring a replacement.

As Internet Entrepreneurs, we should be looking remove ourselves from every part of our business that does not add value to our bottom line. We shouldn’t be spending hours setting up a server when we can pay a professional to do it for us. We shouldn’t be setting up databases, configuring software, laying out graphics, writing copy, and on and on. We should be doing the high level stuff that we can’t outsource to others. I know this is hard to accept, but deep down you know it’s true.


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Have you ever considered running an offline business? If you have, then you’ve probably been overwhelmed at some point with a list of things that you need to consider like legal, accounting, advertising, marketing, production, employee training, payroll, client relations, and the list goes on and on.

To avoid this list, you may have turned your attention to doing business online where the promise of a new way of doing business is continually promoted. The only problem is, at some point, you’ve found yourself applying an offline business mentality to online business ideals.

Why is it that when we think of running an online business we continue to try and apply the same mental process to a new methodology?

Maybe you decided to get involved with online business because you saw all those commercials in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s that portrayed the Internet as a place where all the old rules didn’t apply. But as soon as you got online you naturally started applying all the old ways of thinking to your online activities.

The problem is, we haven’t retrained our brains to leverage the new and let go of the old.

In 1998 my wife and I were going back to college as “non-traditional” students. Basically that means we were actually studying instead of going to the campus parties. And during that time she and I listened to an audio version of Robert Kiyosaki’s, “Rich Dad Poor Dad.” We absolutely loved the material and for a time I believe we actually understood a portion of what he was trying to teach everyone in that book.

But, when the time came to graduate college and go back into the work force neither of us applied what we had learned to the way we thought about our jobs. We continued to do what we knew was not going to relieve us of a 9 to 5 job.

That is what happens with most everyone who goes online to make their fortune. They think they understand the vision, but when it comes time for execution, for whatever reason, they miss the mark.

Do you feel like your missing the mark?

To drive home what I am talking about, and to give you an idea of how you can avoid it, I am posting this 90 minute video by Rich Schefren on the “Internet Business Process.” In the video, Rich lays out the reason people don’t make the money they want online and how they can change their thinking to begin earning what they have only been dreaming about. It is an eye opener for certain.

Rich recently released part 2 of his Attention Age Doctrine Report where he talks about the importance of understanding the value of people’s attention and how to get the right kind of attention in a market place that is tired of being sold too. If you haven’t read the report then I recommend you download it now, print it off, and read everything he has to say on the subject.

Keep in mind that the concept of an “Attention Economy” is not a new idea. In fact, Thomas Davenport wrote about it back in 2002 in his book, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business.

Once you combine what Rich says in his 93 page report with this video you will have a crystal clear vision of what it is that you need to do to be a success in your online business. Everything else you may have read up to this point is technique and technical knowledge. What Rich is talking about is fundamental stuff that goes deep.

Personally I am still able to identify with the concepts in both the written report and the video. Hopefully you will too. In fact, I would love to hear what you have to say about both of these items. So, be sure to leave a comment on this post and let me hear your feedback. Or if you prefer a more private means of communication, then you can contact me using the OpenSourceMarketer Contact Form on this blog.

Be honest with yourself and see if what he is saying frightens you or excites you.

Assessing reality,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Recently I acquired a great personal assistant. She posts to my blog when I ask her too and she reminds me about important things I need to remember. The best part is she hasn’t cost me a dime, she’s available 24 hours a day, and she’s available to you too.

What I’m talking about, of course, is posting to twitter using Jott.com.

Jott is a speech to text method of getting posts on your blog using a telephone and Twitter.

Basically you sign up for a free Jott account and then connect the service to your Twitter account. Then you can call a Jott phone number, tell the system where you want your comments to go, and then you leave a voice message that gets converted to text and posted to your Twitter.

There is a verbal confirmation process that you complete to verify that the system understood your comments. But, once you approve the message it is converted and posted.

The service is extremely accurate and easy to use and since twitter can be connected up in lots of places you could effectively generate new content in hundreds of places just by making one phone call and essentially leaving a voice message.

The Jott service also offers the ability to connect to Tumblr, WordPress, Yahoo Groups, LiveJournal, Amazon, and lots of other sites which is great because it puts blogging and written social communications in your pocket.

In fact, that is how I use the service. I use my cell phone to post to Twitter and I use Jott to remind me about important events that I don’t have time to write down (like if I’m in traffic).

To use the reminder feature, I call the Jott service, tell the system I want to Jott myself, and then set a reminder date for my voice comments. The system will then send me a text message on the future reminder date. This has worked great for capturing ideas and setting reminders that I would have otherwise lost if I had waited to write them down when I had an opportunity.

There is one interesting twist to Jott that I have noticed, but not confirmed. They recently added the ability to Jott Amazon. Which means you can search amazon using their voice service and they will text message you the results. As I say, I have not confirmed this thought, but I would imagine that the returned result has their affiliate link built in so that if you do buy something from Amazon based on the returned results, they will get a commission. If they are not doing this, then they should be.

So, there you go, something to play with over the weekend. Be sure to leave me a comment and let me know how you use the Jott service.

Breaking free,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

PS. You can follow my Twitter to keep up on more great tips like this one.

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Well if you haven’t heard, Rich Schefren has finally released part 2 of his special Attention Age Doctrine report that offers recommended solutions for getting attention in an age of information noise.

What’s the main take away?
Of course you will need to read the whole Attention Age Doctrine report to fully get all the recommendations that Rich provides, but the the main take away is that traditional pushy sales tactics aren’t going to cut it online anymore.

People are tired of being sold to and they are tuning out anything that feels like a sales pitch.

So What’s The Solution?
The solution is to make selling online a conversation. As marketers and online business owners, the solution is simply not to present ourselves like used car salesmen (sorry guys).

People (you and I) still want to buy things. Truthfully, in a lot of cases we all still enjoy the act of buying things. But, if given a choice, we want to buy from people we trust and not from people who push things on us. In fact, we want to make buying decisions based on information from sources we trust. Rich’s report will help you understand how to make this happen.

So, download the report. Give it a read. And, learn from someone who is leading the way for the next stage of marketing on the Internet. Things are changing rapidly and not everyone is paying attention. That’s why now is your time to get ahead of everyone else.

Looking to the future,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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