In the last month or so I’ve written a few blog posts for other blogs — original content that you won’t find on this blog. I’ve included links to this content below.

Content Marketing Institute
One question I’m asked frequently is how to to generate ideas for Web content. I’ve written frequently about this topic, see here and here. One tactic I haven’t talked about, but use all the time when dealing with clients, is trolling through Web analytics keyword reports.

You can learn more about the nuggets of gold you can find in your own reports by reading, “How to Find Content Ideas in Your Web Analytics Reports.”

Be sure to check out the rest of the blog — you’ll find some really great content and ideas!

NetLine’s Blog Notions Marketers Blog
Do you think small businesses can still effectively do their own marketing? I don’t — and I explain why in my article, “DIY Marketing No Longer Cuts the Mustard.”

I also wrote “Is Your Website Short on Content and Long on ‘Blah’?” where I discuss how to answer the unspoken questions posed by site visitors.

The Wealthy Freelancer Blog
For this blog I’ve written two parts of a three-part article on Web marketing for freelancers and consultants. Check out “Three Penny-Wise, Pound Foolish Marketing Mistakes” and “Three Tips for Developing a Kick-Butt Website on a Budget.”

The Wealthy Freelancer is a fabulous site full of great content on how to create a thriving freelance business AND have a life, too.

Also be sure to check out my other blog — The Profitable Consultant. During the month of June I challenged myself to work on my own marketing one hour a day. Obviously it paid off!

Want to watch four kids launch a start-up and market a product they’re currently developing?

Check out the Kickstarter project Diaspora (full disclosure: I’m a financial backer — to the tune of $36.). Once it’s developed, Diaspora will be an open-source alternative to Facebook.

Started by four college kids (who have yet to graduate), the new social networking site will allow you to manage your own content and privacy settings.

What I like about this project, however, is how the founders are marketing it. They have a blog and have posted a wonderful video about why they’re developing Diaspora. It’s raw, it’s unedited, and it suits their “12-hour days, coffee, pizza, and passion galore” ethos.

They also have posts available only to backers — one of which apologizes for the founders not quite understanding how the Kickstarter survey function works. (People have to fill out all the fields, even though the survey questions say you don’t.)

The responses to this post show a real marketing lesson: no matter how easy you make things, people will continue to ask lots of questions (sorta like school), so you had better be sure you have the bandwidth to answer them.

I also agree with one of the posters: the Diaspora founders need to hire someone to help them post interesting content on their progress as well as answer people’s questions versus making t-shirts available to financial backers.

And, they need to answer one really big question: Just how easy will it be to use this thing? Nodes? What is a node? Sounds complicated.

I get lots of email from people asking if they can write guest blog posts for me. If the request fits my audience, I do reply to people — but they never respond back.

Marc Gordon, who does a video blog, is one of the people who emailed me about doing a video blog post, which I found intriguing.

Instead of writing about marketing, Marc talks about it at his blog,
marctv.net. He’s getting about 50,000 views per video these days, so I’m thrilled to feature him here on my blog.

I love how he took my blog post about Intuit and made it into a pretty cool marketing lesson. Now you can see the power of video — and now I see I need to go buy a Flip.

Marc, thanks for the great video and guest blog post — I love it!

A Quiet Mistake Everyone Heard from marc gordon on Vimeo.

Intuit and all of its Websites, including Quickbooks Online and Quicken, went down Tuesday night at approximately 7:00 PM Pacific time.

The sites were still down as of yesterday afternoon 3:00 PM Eastern.

When I logged on to QB Online early Wednesday morning and saw the message about the site being down, I didn’t think much of it. I know software-as-service companies do routine maintenance or encounter minor glitches.

However, when I logged on later that afternoon and saw that it was still down, my heart gave a thump.

So I did what has now become my habit for breaking news: I checked Twitter. Running a search for “Quickbooks Online down,” I quickly learned that all Intuit sites were down.

I also learned that Intuit hadn’t given any explanation for this outage that was obviously impacting a lot of businesses.

qbguy @diannahuff Intuit really has their hands full with a massive service outage since late yesterday. So far, very poor response and updates.

If we as marketers and corporate communicators have learned anything since the rise of social media and the mistakes of BP, Toyota, etc. it’s that when a crisis occurs, you have to communicate immediately. Period.

You have to tell your customers what’s going on, why it happened, and what you’re doing to resolve it.

I was able to log on to Quickbooks Online this morning where I found this message:

Update June 16 2010 at 8:00pm PST:

We’re beginning to restore all affected Intuit websites and services. Customers already have access to some sites and we’re continuing to work toward full restoration.

Our preliminary investigation indicates the outage occurred during a routine maintenance procedure Tuesday night. An accidental power failure during that procedure affected both our primary and backup systems, taking a number of Intuit websites and services offline. While power was quickly restored, we’re working diligently to validate our systems and bring them back into full operation.

We apologize for disruptions we’ve caused and understand the importance of our services to our customers. We will continue working nonstop until all affected websites and services are fully restored.

If I had seen this message on the Quickbooks home page — versus the one they had yesterday about the site being down — I would have felt relief. I also wouldn’t have gone to Twitter to see what in the hell was going on or posted my own frustrated Tweets.

Intuit may “understand the importance of its services,” but I’m not quite sure the company understands the gist of how its outage impacted people — companies couldn’t run payroll or process credit cards. For some, that was quite painful.

Plus, the outage created a real sense of fear. I know that I debated for a long time about using Quickbooks Online. It was scary to put, what is essentially the core of my business, in the cloud.

Intuit’s outage and lack of communication about it only added to my fear.

Think about how people would have responded if Intuit had communicated truthfully and authentically with all of us. I really don’t mind when companies make mistakes or run into technological glitches. God knows I have enough of my own.

But when you’re holding access to people’s financial data, you need to do more than simply post a “Our site is down and we’re working on it” message.

I’m no crisis communications consultant by any stretch of the imagination, but if I had been in charge, here’s what I would have done:

>> Had a plan in place for just this type of crisis.

>> Posted an honest message on the home screens of all affected sites in order to ease people’s fears.

>> Posted regular updates to the original message to let people know what was going on and when service was expected to be restored.

>> Responded to people on Twitter and other social media sites.

I’m sure this is an overly simplified plan, but it would have gone far in helping all of us know what was happening.

Plus, it would have improved my trust and confidence in using Intuit and its financial software-as-service option.

What do you think?

A few weeks ago my client and I were bouncing ideas back and forth on how to get her message out and as you do when you brainstorm, I said, rather off the cuff, “Why not start a TV show a la HubSpot?”

She thought this a great idea and after a few emails, we were suddenly the invited guests of Karen Rubin and Rebecca Corliss of HubSpot, who showed us the ropes with regard to how HubSpot publishes its weekly TV show.

While my client and I learned quite a bit, what struck me was how *generous* Karen and Rebecca were with their information, ideas and encouragement. These are two very busy women yet they sat down with us before and after the show to explain how everything worked — and even gave us ideas on how to promote my client’s new video idea.

A few days later I attended Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University — an event they hold in various locations across the US.

While listening to the presenters talk about marketing automation and content, it dawned on me that while marketing has definitely changed, how we treat people has not.

I realized that while all this new technology is a marketer’s dream, it’s the “old-fashioned” courtesy and good manners that help cement the new and repeat business.

What do I mean by old-fashioned courtesy and good manners?

1. Be generous — Share your expertise with others. Like Silverpop, you can hold free events. If you have a lower budget, you can invite your customers and fans to free Webinars. If you’re a one-person company, offer to answer people’s questions via your blog or a free teleclass.

2. Send hand-written notes — My son had his bar mitzvah recently and the best part of the whole thing was getting the response cards back in the mail. I don’t know about you, but my mailbox is empty these days and getting reply cards back from people and seeing their personal notes made me feel closer to them.

Invest in note cards and send hand-written notes to people. Tell them you saw them mentioned in an article (you can even send the article), that you enjoyed meeting them at a networking function, or just say hi and that you were thinking of them. Your recipients will appreciate your gesture — and will remember you.

3. Don’t talk about yourself (or your products) — When you meet with people face-to-face, ask them questions. What books are they reading? What projects are they working on? How are the kids and the pets? Going on vacation? Taken any good trips lately?

By asking lots of questions, you’ll build relationships with people and these people will in turn either hire you or refer you to others.

4. Introduce people to other people — As soon as I sat down at my table at the B2B Marketing University event, Mac McIntosh introduced me to others at the table — making me feel instantly welcome.

5. Be helpful — Just this morning someone emailed me to ask if I knew one of the people I was following on Twitter. I did not know the person, and instead sent along the name of someone I did know who offered the same service. It took me a bit to find her contact info, but I was happy to do it.

6. Answer your telephone — I know the phone is a distraction and I know all the productivity gurus tell you not to answer your phone except at certain times.

Ignore this advice.

I don’t know about you, but the majority of my communication is via email, so answering the phone when it does ring isn’t a hardship. When you answer the phone, say “Good morning,” or “Good afternoon” and then state your full name. Smile when you talk and add some enthusiasm to your voice.

7. Talk to customers — When I went to pick up food for a party from the caterers a while ago, I had to wait a little while while they finished assembling the platters.

The owner of the establishment came out, looked at the order in progress, and then walked right on by me — even though I was the only person sitting there! “Wow!” I thought. “How rude!” A simple hello would have been nice.

If you’re the CEO or owner of a company and see people sitting in your lobby, stop and introduce yourself. Or, do what Grasshopper’s CEO does — have dinner with your customers. People will love for you it.

What “old-fashioned” marketing tips do you have? Please share them.

I’m one of those people who reads books cover-to-cover, including the acknowledgments, the prologues, the introductions and the testimonials.

You can learn quite a bit about the author/s by reading this information: who is in his/her network, how the book idea came about, who edited the book, and sometimes how long it took to write or the obstacles encountered.

So I was tickled to read Jason Fried’s and David Heinemeier Hansson’s list of people who inspired them on the Acknowledgments page of their new book, Rework. (Fabulous reading, by the way. Five stars.)

The 37Signals founders included the typical names you see in books of this type, i.e. Seth Godin and Jeff Bezos.

But they also included lots of other “big” thinkers who have changed our world, including Julia Child, Thomas Jefferson, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Love it!

While walking the dogs this morning, I pondered my own list of people who have inspired me in some way in the last 25 years, both personally and professionally. Herewith my list, in no particular order:

Jane Austen
Virginia Woolf
Sharon Teitelbaum
David Meerman Scott
Mark Victor Hansen
W. Clement Stone
Brian Halligan
Anne Holland
Mac McIntosh
Steve Jobs
Barbara Stanny
Bob Bly
The Founding Fathers and Mothers
Doyle Dane Bernbach
Jim Fannin
Leo Babauta

Who inspires you?

Back in my salad days, I managed the office of a small manufacturing business for seven years, and during that time I discovered the secret to tracking which marketing methods worked.

Are you sitting down? It’s pretty revolutionary.

I simply asked, “How did you hear about us?”

Because I answered the telephone (in those days we didn’t have voice mail or email), I got to speak one-on-one with everyone who called inquiring about the company’s technical sewing services.

I kept a piece of paper by the telephone and each time someone new called, I always made sure to ask how he/she found us. Because these were pre-Internet days, the answers were usually, “The Thomas Register,” “the Yellow Pages,” or “You were referred to us.”

I’d then put a tick mark next to the appropriate answer on the piece of paper.

At the end of each quarter, I added up the tick marks — and that’s how we knew to keep advertising in the Yellow Pages (including which cities and categories) and the Thomas Register.

Low-tech I know, but it worked.

It still works today, too. I know, because with all the high-tech tools available for tracking marketing ROI, I still use this same exact method. (I also recommend it to the small business owners who work with me.)

When someone new calls or emails me, I immediately pull out my Prospect Questionnaire, a form I use to help me remember to ask important questions, including “How did you hear about me?”

Every six months or so, I go back through these forms, check off how people found me using a piece of paper and a pencil, and then analyze the results. The process takes about an hour, and I get a really good overview of what’s working and what’s not.

(Internet search and referrals are huge for me. Everything else — meh.)

Granted, this method won’t work for all companies. But for those small B2B companies with one to 10 people, it’s a great back-of-the-napkin method for quickly determining your marketing ROI.

Best of all, it’s free, easy, and fast.

To help you get started, feel free to download my Prospect Questionnaire as well as the quick and dirty “call tracking form” I’ve given to clients to use. Like I said, neither is sexy, but they work.

If you’re a small company or one-person business, do you have other low-cost, low-tech methods for tracking marketing ROI? Please share them!