Well implemented on-line marketing offers a more cost-effective strategy, with greater flexibility, than anything you could implement purely offline.

Don’t build your marketing strategy without considering your product.

Don’t build your product strategy without considering your customer.

Don’t build your customer base without considering your marketing.

Good marketing cannot happen without a good audience.

You don’t claim to love good hamburgers and eat at McDonald’s.

Yet people who claim to love coffee drink Starbucks.

It is not love of the individual product that makes them eat and drink. It is love of the consistent experience. The uniformity of consumption. They love the lack of surprise. They revel in the safety of the mediocre and consistent.

Levis. Starbucks. Nike. McDonald’s. CocaCola. This isn’t quality that people are buying. It’s consistency.

Once you have convinced your audience that your product is unsurprising, you no longer have the ability to surprise your audience AND keep the audience you have.

It is easier to shrug helplessly than it is to care.

Make your work count for someone, not everyone.

Marketing is not a cost center.

If marketing isn’t boosting your bottom-line, you’re doing it wrong.

My wife refuses to let me take on more pro-bono start-up clients than the number of non-profits she works with.

At every decision point in your marketing, you shouldn’t think “What’s the ROI if I do this?” but instead focus on “What’s the loss if I don’t?”

Think of your marketing like a water hose.

You turn the tap on here, and eventually, after a little while, water flows out of the end of the hose over there.

You want to keep the hose full of flowing water all the time, which means you want to be marketing, all the time.

Marketing is like dining at a fancy restaurant where they serve many courses.

No one course will ever fill you up, but at the end of the evening, thinking about a wafer thin mint will make you explode.

The hardest part about getting your viral content noticed is distribution.

Sticking it on your ghost town of a blog that only gets a visitor when your cat walks across the keyboard and unintentionally hits the refresh button is not going to cut it.

You want to meet a pretty girl?

You don’t go hang out at the rugby club full of manly men.

Sausage fest.

You go where the pretty girls are.

Same trick applies when you want to distribute your viral content, you go where the people interested in your content are.

Something I’ve noticed about “network marketing” books is that it is a lot of people who don’t know their arse from their elbow trying to educate people who cannot sell either one.

There’s two types of viral content.

Throwaway (which most of it is) and sticky (which most of it isn’t).

Throwaway content is “I liked that, I shared it” and the person moves on and forgets about it.

Sticky content is stuff that people keep coming back too, again and again.

Throwaway content is “amusing” or “odd” but it doesn’t speak to *ME* and my niche.

Sticky content addresses me, my wants, my desires, and indirectly encourages me to want to share it with my particular niche interests.

Throwaway is yesterday’s news.

Sticky is tomorrow’s story.

There’s so much hype and bullshit in the world of network marketing I am surprised someone hasn’t written a book about it already.

The more communications channels you have access too, and make use of, the greater the opportunity you have to sell, to market, to make others aware of your product or service. You can use the same message, usually modified slightly to meet the requirements of the communications channel, to make your audience, potential and otherwise, aware of an opportunity. If you aren’t making use of at least 80% of your open and accessible communications channels to reach your audience, you are severely limiting your growth.

Demand does not necessarily rise to meet supply. Your skill, product, service or location is not dictated by you but by the market. You can influence the market (to a degree), you can even corner the market (for a while), but you cannot ever demand that the market want what you have in stock.

Publishing and putting our name on something lets us measure how good that something is. Though we want to make sure we use the right measurement. Measuring social media popularity either means you had something worthwhile to say or you’re an exhibitionist. Not a good measurement. How well something sells in the marketplace can sometimes be a good measurement as long as the measurement isn’t being artificially manipulated by paid voices telling us what to like. Good measurements are ones that let us determine where we are going right that isn’t measured solely by popularity. Great measurements are ones that let us determine where we are going right because we figured out which of the ones available that other people came up with that we can apply to our startup. Really great measurements are ones that let us determine where we are going right because we figured out the measurements. And fantastic measurements are ones that let us determine not only where we are going right but where we are going wrong too.

Be like a politician, have a different piece of viral content for each audience segment you address.

A message on aging healthcare is of interest to people 65 and over.

Not so much to the jaded hipster living on coffee and hope.

Create multiple messages that lead each segment to your product or service.

Viral content resonates.

Not with everyone.

Viral content resonates with a micro-audience that garners “That’s so me!” as a response in your intended audience followed by “I need to share this with other people that are just like me.”

But the best viral content?

“I know something just like this, I need to share it with them.”