You’ve heard the advice: “add a social component”, “build a community”, “make it interactive”. So would it surprise you to hear that a major player in social networking succeeded by moving to a single player model?

Yesterday, Gabe Zichermann posted this over at Mashable:

The first incarnation of the location-based networking field was littered with carnage, leading [...]

Once upon a time, there was a farmer with a plow horse. Every day, the farmer and the horse worked together to grow crops.

The work was hard, but they produced lots of food. Some they ate. Some they sold and made money to use to buy other things they needed. All in all, they had [...]

Yesterday, I wrote a little about how to sell in markets where there’s lots of free stuff available. This is a big challenge for sellers of downloadable products. Since the cost of making and distributing additional copies of “virtual goods” is nearly zero, it’s only a matter of time before somebody creates something similar to [...]

One of the challenges of selling info products is that there’s so much free information available online that many people aren’t willing to pay for information anymore. And those who are need to be convinced that your product gives them something they didn’t get from the 50 free blogs posts they just read on the [...]

Okay, this isn’t really about selling sandwiches to children, but it’s a useful metaphor.

It’s happened with all three of my kids — not long after they started eating sandwiches, they stopped eating the crust. One of them would pick the middle of the sandwich out with his fingers if I didn’t cut the crust off. [...]

Back in 1990, I got a job at a Japanese travel agency to pay my way through college. From the beginning, one of the ladies in the office seemed to think that picking on me was a great way to enhance her life.

Maybe she’d liked the guy I’d replaced, and subconsciously resented me for the [...]

I’ve got a revelation for you today: we’re in a recession. Oh, you’d already noticed?

A lot of people have watched their businesses shrivel over the last few years. No matter how they tweak their marketing, there’s just not as much money flowing around for them to dip into.

I’ve experience it myself. Within months of the [...]

A concept you’ll hear about periodically in internet marketing is “moving the free line”.

As a marketer, you’d like that to mean that you can push the line forward and charge for things you’ve been giving away for free. But alas, what it really means is that you need to pull the line back and give [...]

Yesterday, I posted a list of 12 blogs I follow and why I read and recommend them. The authors of 3 of them posted comments. If I were a “bootstrap guru” (someone who takes a small success, blows it out of proportion, sells it as a money-making system, and uses those sales as proof of [...]

When marketing teachers talk about your “Unique Selling Proposition” or “USP”, they nearly always assume that you have one, but just haven’t figured it out yet.

But what if you don’t have one? What if you really are just another “me too” marketer? Should you just give up and go back to your day job, or [...]