Author Archives: smeade

Authoring white-papers, newsletters, and blog entries can certainly be effective marketing tools. To know just how effective you need to measure costs and resulting leads. But too often business owners forget to account for their own time. White Papers, E-Mail, and Webinars This month’s (March 2007) issue of Inc. magazine has an article called “WooingContinue reading “Blogging and White Papers Are Not Free”

For you tech types – here’s a couple examples of technical interaction in place of integration. A user wanted to pull files from Basecamp, the 37Signals application, into their LeadsOnRails application as read-only background information for a salesperson talking with a client. 37Signals provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for just such interfaces. Yet retrievalContinue reading “Technical Note: Basecamp Interaction, Not Integration”

Here is how I added Digg voting buttons to a Rails powered Typo blog. Digg buttons come in several types. You can build out a full-size Digg button, a compact sized one, or use your own image. I’m adding compact buttons. See here for details on Digg button html code and all the different options.Continue reading “How to Add Digg-This Buttons to Your Typo Blog”

Activity from “Share this”, “tell a friend” and other social networking links is creating “vast quantities of complaints”, according to Tom Kulzer, CEO of AWeber, a provider of email newsletter delivery and auto-responder services. Tell-a-friend forms allow someone to send an email to another person via the web server of a third-party. For an example,Continue reading “Are Tell-a-Friend Forms Evil Spam or a Convenience for Readers?”

In his book Clear Blogging, Bob Walsh recommends making it easy for your blog readers to add your posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg. Why wouldn’t a blog have “Digg This” buttons? Here’s seven possible reasons along with recommendations to get past these objections and try it out. 1. I don’t even know whatContinue reading “7 Reasons Blogs Do Not Have Digg Buttons and Why Your Blog Should”

In an earlier post I talked about leveraging traditional marketing efforts, even when engaged in internet marketing activities. If you have an online company, traditional media can be used for awareness campaigns. Though many marketing principles are the same online as offline, traditional media (e.g. print, postcards, magazines) often has an added restriction of localContinue reading “Target Marketing with Google Trends”

LeadsOnRails.com users can now import contact and lead information from text files. We are finding that users are transitioning from other environments where they are either using Excel spreadsheets or using a tool that can export to Excel. This is a small enhancement that is a big help to users. More details are on theContinue reading “Import Leads (New Feature)”

LeadsOnRails has received a good number of positive comments from users. Yet we also received, within a few days of each other a couple of diametrically opposed comments. One person wrote on 37signals/svn that LeadsOnRails.com “is overkill for what we need” while another wrote in the Business Of Software forum that “LeadsOnrails.com is just tooContinue reading “You might think it is impossible to be two places at once, but I did it by occupying both the overkill and too basic segments of the market with exactly the same product.”

The next time you wish your competitors weren’t always chasing you down, the next time you wish you had the market to yourself, the next time you despise those that jumped into the marketplace you discovered, the next time you wish you could just stop improving and rake in the cash: take a visit toContinue reading “Competition is an Awesome Thing”