I hope all of you in the States had a good Independence Day yesterday. My family and I enjoyed doing some much needed yard work, and then a trip back through time to Railroad Town at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer.

Speaking of history, here are the headlines that got the most of...
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For my birthday last week, my wife gave me a cover for my Kindle and an iTunes gift card. So naturally, the time I've spent browsing around the iTunes Music Store deciding what to get is now worth more than the value of the card (apparently, I haven't learned my lesson yet).

What I want...
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What is it about an expert that makes them so successful, while an amateur who copies them as faithfully as they can gets no results at all?

I read a comic the other day that got me thinking about that. So today, let's try a Riff on a comic strip. First, to quote an excerpt:...
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Yesterday, I wrote about some research from the 1960's into the forces that drive word of mouth advertising. The article was focused primarily on what inspires people to talk about brands and products. Today, let's focus on how to make content go viral.

As I said yesterday:

...the #1 key for viral marketing success is...
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If you can get it, word of mouth advertising is the most powerful form of advertising. It's delivered by trusted advisors (a.k.a. friends), and costs you nothing.

But attempts to intentionally ignite viral marketing campaigns usually fall flat on their faces. Why? And what can you do to improve your odds of success?

A few...
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The conventional wisdom is that some subjects are dangerous to your business (like touching the electrified "third rail" of the subway): politics, religion, etc. But is that true, or might you use these to carve out a sub-niche that you can dominate?

If you've visited Ray Edwards' blog recently, you know that Christianity isn't just...
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Ah, the great dilemmas: cat vs. dog, steak vs. chicken, blonde vs. brunette...and the one I want to talk about today: automatic vs. manual.

Before you start thinking about cars, let me remind you that this is a marketing blog. The question is, should you automate your business, or run it manually?

Several factors come...
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A while back, I got an email from an unhappy subscriber. Among other things, he complained that the last email he'd gotten -- a "blog broadcast" message announcing my latest post -- was all about me, and thus not interesting to him.

I've been at this long enough to have developed a reasonably thick skin,...
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I learned a new word last week: gustnado. It's sort of like a tornado, but doesn't last as long, and doesn't reach up to the cloud base. We had a few blow through Grand Island, knocking down trees and trashing some mobile homes (uninhabited, thankfully) and storage units.

When a friend of mine first heard...
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Which would you rather do: convince someone to buy, or take orders from people who already want to buy? We'd all love to have the world beating a path to our doors to buy our mouse traps. But in the real world, they don't come just because you built it.

Once you've got a product...
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