Last week, the New York Times ran an article by Bill Keller about how technology saps our mental abilities when it replaces things we used to have to do for ourselves:

...the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation's math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our...
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One piece of advice I see repeated over and over is for new blogs to forgo displaying ads until they've become established. To be honest, it's never made any sense to me.

On Yaro Starak's blog today, Mark Riddix wrote:

5. Don't Make This Mistake

One of the first things that new bloggers do i...
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I just finished reading Dan Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational, the other day, and I thought I'd share some thoughts about it.

The full title of the book is "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions". As the title suggests, it's about how our decisions are often influenced by more than just a rational...
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A few days ago, I had an idea for a new way to pick ClickBank products to promote. The usual methods are to look for products that are making lots of sales and jump on the bandwagon, or to try to identify up-and-coming products to promote before everybody else does.

Both approaches have problems. With...
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I had one of those "marketing lessons from everyday life" moments this morning as I made cinnamon sugar toast for my daughter.

If you've never made cinnamon sugar toast, the process goes something like this: toast bread, spread butter onto it, and sprinkle a mixture of cinnamon and sugar on it. Pretty simple, but there...
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You've seen sales letters advertising "the laziest way ever" to make millions in internet marketing. Today, I'm not going to try to convince you that those sales letters are scams. I'm going to talk about why they'd stink even if they worked.

They'd stink because a lazy life stinks. A hard life is better. Or...
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ABC (the TV network) rolled the dice this morning. And lost.

The space shuttle Endeavour launched for the last time this morning. My wife paused to watch before heading out the door to take the kids to school.

As the countdown neared zero, water poured onto the launch pad, the solid fuel boosters fired up,...
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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...
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In the year 1770, Voltaire had a message for internet marketers: "The best is the enemy of good." In other words, stop worrying about whether you've crushed the last little flaw in your product or website, and just launch it. If you wait for perfection, you'll never launch.

Why is this such hard advice for...
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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...
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