Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

The trap of the small business owner is, that in many cases, to grow a business to some level of success means putting your head down and working real hard doing the making it, fixing it, shipping it of the business.
Problem is, that also eventually stops you from growing. Delegation is an art, but a [...]

Nobody innovates any more – they just emulate, acquire and manage processes.
Doug Rushkoff, author of Get Back in the Box – How Being Great at What You Do is Great for Business, stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and shared his thoughts on what he terms a coming renaissance in business.
His ten best-selling books [...]

Book shipping in full swing and already the reader comments have been very humbling. I love all the big name testimonials and media coverage that can come with a project like this, but when a small business owner, one I’ve never met, takes the time to send a note saying something I’ve shared is changing [...]

The New York Times carried an article today with the headline – Gap Is in Need of a Niche.
If one of the largest retailers in the world is facing its demise from a failure to differentiate what chance do you think your small business stands doing the same.
Attempting, intentionally or accidentally, to appeal to all [...]

Okay, like many of my readers I get an invitation to join someone’s network on LinkedIn often.
On the surface it looks like a great place for the business person to hang out, but like so many networks, chambers, associations, it’s also easy to get nothing from it.
I want to start a discussion on this post [...]

I did an interview with the Sloan Brothers on StartUpNation Radio this last week and you can catch it on their podcast archive.
If you are thinking about growing a business or starting a business, StartUpNation is site you should know about.

Most marketers know they can benefit from customer testimonials, but the work involving acquiring these glowing marketing messages can get in the way. I’ve been using a handy tool to generate and play audio messages on web sites for some time now, but I’ve recently started using this same service to automatically generate testimonials.
Here’s how [...]

In an article published in the January issue of Investment Advisor magazine several points in an article called Stepping Up – How the best advisors take their firms to the next level jumped off the page.

Compared to the market as a whole, firms that dominated their market:
Are 60% more likely to have annual sales goals
Are [...]