My Top 10 Marketing New Year's Resolutions

Here are my marketing resolutions for 2006. Feel free to steal these, or leave a comment to share your marketing (or life) resolutions for the new year.

1. I resolve to understand my customers better. What drives them, what motivates them, and how to reach them in a way that is helpful -- never intrusive.

2. I resolve to try to blog more frequently and eloquently.

3. I resolve to put a real effort into making trackback work effectively.

4. I resolve to try to determine why dmoz.org has become so awful about adding new sites.

5. I resolve to try to get back to reading the Marketing Sherpa Best-of-Weekly newsletter on a regular basis. It is the best marketing newsletter on the planet.

6. I resolve to learn more than necessary, and teach as much as possible. Marketing Profs is a great resource for online marketing wisdom. You can find a great summary of life lessons here.

7. I resolve to be more strategic in my thinking and planning.

8. I resolve to write more clearly and effectively. And avoid using sentence fragments. Really.

9. I resolve to build more bridges than I burn.

10. I resolve to be a better dad and husband. Work is important, but it's not the most important part of life.

My bonus 11th resolution is to try to get back to communicating more regularly with my online friends, including Yvonne at Lip-Sticking, Jay at Smart Marketing, Albert at Marketing Edge, Skip at Marketing Genius, Kelly at Kelly Allan Associates, and Thad at Moreover.

Best wishes to you for a happy new year, whatever your resolutions may be.

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Terms: marketing resolutions, marketing wisdom, business blogging, Moreover Technologies

The portal for Web marketing strategy: WebMarketCentral.com

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentral.com

Email Newsletters vs. Blogs Part 2

My post several weeks ago about the emergence of blogs and the decline of the e-newsletter drew a thoughtful comment from Monty Loree of Express Marketing. Mr. Loree contended that "With direct email, you're in control of staying in touch with people and inviting them back to your site." While that's indusputable, my point was that you don't need a traditional email newsletter to accomplish that task.

As Suzanne Falter-Barns points out in her blog here, collecting email addresses from your blog visitors is both easy and a great supplement to RSS feeds. Then, rather than sending out a traditional e-newsletter -- with all of the planning and formatting that requires -- you can simply send a brief note to your email list each time you post (or weekly if you are posting more frequently than that) inviting your recipients to revisit your blog and check out your latest musings.

Your blog becomes the content container for the information you would have previously included in your e-newsletter, but with all the advantages of blogs -- timliness, informality and search engine-friendliness.

You can also feel free to copy my "build your own newsletter" concept. It may appear lazy, but I prefer to think of it as innovative.

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Terms: email newsletter, e-newsletter, business blogging, internet marketing

The Web marketing portal: WebMarketCentral.com

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentral.com